This is going to be one long night!

The Baby-sitters Club #44: Dawn and the Big Sleepover

Oh, I used to love having pen pals. They were like the blogs of my youth. If I could go back and read all the tortured heartache I poured out to other girls in far off exotic places like, well, New Jersey... I'm sure I'd just be humiliated at what a loser I was back then. I must have run through at least 10 pen pals in my youth, acquired through school projects, summer camp bonding, and the back of this creepy Catholic kids magazine my grandma used to give us. None of them ever really stuck, but I still have most of their letters. I just wish I had mine too, because I have a feeling the back and forth would be pretty hysterical to read now.

Well, Stoneybrook Elementary has paired up with a school on a Zuni reservation in New Mexico, and I'm slightly embarassed to admit that I had to Google it, but yes, that is a real tribe. I wonder how they feel about being used as a fundraising object by a bunch of snotty East Coast kids? Anyway, SES and this Zuni elementary are sister schools, which mainly seems to involve having the kids write letters back and forth. All the SES kids love it, which, I totally understand because it is super-fun to get notes from other people, even when you are old and live far from all your friends and family and check your Facebook page 27 times a day for comments that never seem to come not that I know anyone who does that.

Ahem. Moving on...

Word soon reaches Stoneybrook that the Zuni school caught fire and burned down, along with some nearby houses. The Zuni kids write sad letters to Stoneybrook about how they can no longer go to school and they had to move in with other family members, and the Stoneybrookers want to help by raising money to rebuild the school. Honestly, I don't really get this. So the school burned down, I get that that's terrible, but aren't schools generally insured? And wouldn't the government have some sort of contingency plan for situations like this to ensure that the students were still being educated? I would understand if Stoneybrook were just trying to raise money to help the families who lost their homes, etc, but they mention very specifically a few times that they need money to rebuild the school. So until they do, all these Zuni kids are just SOL? Where are New Mexico's tax dollars going? Sigh. As ever, searching for logic in a BSC novel is as useless as searching for meaning in a Pauly Shore movie. (Big ups to the immortal Cher Horowitz. I've used that line many a time over the years.)

Dawn, in particular, is moved by the plight of the New Mexico kids, so despite her not having had any direct contact with them, she gets in touch with Jeff's (Jeff! I miss you, you crazy deadhead, you!) old teacher, Ms. Besser, to suggest some ideas for fundraising. Ms. Besser likes the ideas, and before you can say, "Take that, Kristy! This is Dawn's Great Idea!" Dawn is announcing her plan before the entire Stoneybrook Elementary School. They will take a three-pronged approach, collecting clothing, canned goods, and money to send to the pen pals. Any kids who contribute will get to attend a giant sleepover in the school gym. Eh, as a kid I thought this sounded like the funnest thing ever, but then I hit the high-school youth group, attended more than my fair share of "lock-ins," and gained a much deeper appreciation of my own bed.

The kids get really into it, competing to raise money in creative ways. The Pikes and some of their friends hold a carnival in their backyard. The Rodowsky's hold a yard sale. Haley Braddock dresses up like a gypsy and tells fortunes in her front yard. Unfortunately, some of the kids are just a little too into it, and the parents of Stoneybrook are not the brightest bulbs, so the Rodowsky's garage sale ends up with a lot of "donated" items that were not, in fact, donated, at least not with permission of the actual owners, such as Watson's rare book collection (Watson! You are such a dork. I totally adore you.) and Mrs. Delaney's lamp (Mrs. Delaney? You didn't notice a lamp was missing? I know you're rich and have a big house, but maybe you should at least do a pass-through once a week or so. If I were your maid, I'd be robbing you blind. Also, why are all these rich people shopping at the Rodowsky's yard sale?) Some kid I've never heard of named Rob Hines is kind of an ass and also donates his father's best suit and shoes, but luckily, Mary Anne and Dawn catch on to this and start making the kids bring permission slips when they drop off donations (which are being collected in Dawn's barn.)

Finally, the night of the sleepover comes and there are like a hundred kids there. It goes off without a hitch, despite the pizza guy trying to cancel because he didn't get a big shipment of flour. Um, pizza guy? They need 30 pizzas, not 30,000. Isn't 30 pizzas like, maybe an hour's worth of sales? How can you have so little flour on hand? Perhaps you should rethink your business model? Just a friendly suggestion. But it matters not, as Dawn is a rather clever master manipulator, who just thanks him for trying and asks for the number of his biggest competitor. Suddenly, pizza guy is all, "Oh, well, would you mind if some of the pizzas were whole wheat? Oh, well then, no worries, we gotcha taken care of." Which basically tells me that pizza guy was kind of an ass who decided he didn't want to donate 30 free pizzas to a bunch of kids after all and thought he could welch on his deal with no consequences. Think again, oh pizza guy! The BSC is nothing if not self-righteous dolers of justice!

So they have a nice sleepover and give out prizes for the kids who brought in the mos donations, and those who were most creative in their fundraising (Haley), and a couple other things. They play some games, they eat some pizza, and in the morning, a bunch of cafeteria workers show up to cook them a pancake breakfast, which seems like it would be some sort of a violation of union rules, but what do I know? I'm not a Stoneybrooker.

In the end, they get a letter from the principal of the Zuni school after they send the donations, telling them that the money they raised has helped "enable [them] to obtain financing for the construction of a new school...The government, perhaps partly as a reaction to the positive efforts we are displaying, agreed today to grant us substantial disaster funding. " Um, again I say, the hell? Why wasn't your school insured? Doesn't the government have an obligation to educate these children? Why am I still getting worked up over this?