Showing posts with label Sea City. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sea City. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Two weeks of sun, fun--and boys galore!

The Baby-sitters Club #34: Mary Anne and Too Many Boys

Happy birthday, Ann M. Martin! If we were really friends, I would throw you a slumber party in my stepfather's mansion. We would order pizza and give each other makeovers and discuss our crushes on boys like Bruce Schermerhorn and Pete Black, and how immature Alan Gray is. We would gossip about Cokie Mason and Shawna Riverson and discuss our forthcoming trip to the mall where we would get our ears pierced and our hair permed (well, Stacey would.) We would spread our sleeping bags out in a circle with our heads in the middle and be wary in case any of our brothers tried to play tricks on us. We'd giggle at Dawn for preferring Tofutti to actual birthday cake (Sacrilege!) It would be super-fun! Someday, mmmkay? Call me!

So in one of those weird, don't think too hard about it or your brain will explode time warps so common in BSC-land, Mary Anne and Stacey have re-signed up to be mother's helpers for the annual Pike family Sea City summer vacation. Despite Mallory being a baby-sitter now, the Pikes still elect to pay for two extra sitters in an effort to let Mal "enjoy her vacation." Whatever. Are the Pikes made of money? I guess if they want to waste it on baby-sitters, that's their business. But it would it kill them to spend ten minutes of their alleged "family vacation" with their damn kids?

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Who needs baby-sitting when there are boys around?

The Baby-sitters Club #8: Boy-Crazy Stacey

So, when I first read this book (and don't ask why I remember this, but it was the summer after 2nd grade, I was 8 years old, and I thought I was the shiz-nit because I had gone by myself to visit my Aunt Jenni and Uncle John in Indiana) but anyway, when I first read this book, I couldn't understand the term boy-crazy, with the hyphen. I had never heard this term before, and I pondered for some time before deciding that the hyphen must work like a comma, leading the title to be something like, "Boy, Crazy Stacey" as in "Dude, Stacey is NUTS" said in a condescending tone while people shake their heads at her. Which, to be fair, could also be a fairly accurate description of the book.

Stacey and Mary Anne are mother's helpers (ahem. Excuse me, according to Stacey, they are parent's helpers, as they will be helping Mr. Pike as much as Mrs, although it doesn't really seem like either Pike parent wants to spend much time with their children on this vacation. But then, who could blame them?) for two weeks in Sea City, NJ. Mainly this involves taking the kids to the beach every day, where Stacey falls in LUV with a lifeguard named Scott, which basically means that she hangs out at the foot of the lifeguard stand all day while Scott (who is eighteen and going off to Princeton that fall, despite the fact that the Scott drawn on the book cover is clearly at least 35 years old) calls her "cutie" and "love" and asks her to fix him sandwiches and get him sodas, which she takes from the Pikes' refrigerator, which I'm sure Mr. and Mrs. Pike would LUV, if they were paying any attention to their children or their 13-year-old baby-sitters.