Rereading My Childhood: The Baby-Sitters Club

Super Special #3: Baby-sitters' Winter Vacation

I never realized it growing up, but the schools I attended were poor. I had a grounded view of television because my father drilled into me that most things on television are fake. When I saw these elaborate vacation episodes on television, where an entire cast of schoolmates go to Disneyland or some other sponsored locale, I knew that didn't happen in real life. In real life, field trips were to the local library. Sometimes you piled into a school bus and visited the geology department at the University of Nevada, Reno, but that was only if the class was really good that month. Once in eighth grade, I went on a special field trip for a select few kids from each middle school in the area and we visited a ski resort for one day. The idea was to learn how a ski resort operates. At the end of the day, we left the ski resort. I won't say which ski resort it was, but it recently changed its name because it had a racial slur in it. It was called that racial slur when I visited, so I had a bumper sticker with the original name proudly displayed in my locker. The early aughts were wild.

All this is to say that I never thought any school had overnight trips. That was a plot device in the TGIF lineup. A few years ago, a friend of mine told me her son was going on a field trip to Disneyland, where they were going to see how the theme park operates. I said something about having to drive that much in one day to get the kids back. She said they were staying in a hotel. I realized I had been lied to. Overnight field trips do exist! Just not for the schools I attended.

The BSC is going on an overnight field trip to a ski lodge that does not contain a racial slur in it. I was jealous! How come these kids get to hang out overnight in a beautiful lodge just because they were born in a more affluent zip code? Then I remembered who I was in the seventh grade and how my classmates acted both toward me and everyone around them. It seems I lucked out.

So far, the Super Specials have shared two things: each chapter has a BSC member it focuses on and they all have a central conceit to facilitate the compiling of the stories. In Baby-sitters' on Board, Kristy is collecting the stories for a scrapbook. In Baby-sitters' Summer Vacation, Stacey wants to take some memories back with her to New York. This one is no different. This time, Mary Anne's boyfriend Logan is not on the school trip. Instead, he is in Aruba with his family. Mary Anne wants to collect stories so he knows what happened on the trip. It's a lot of work for such a disappointing boyfriend.

Anyway, this is an annual field trip for Stoneybrook Middle School and is mandatory unless you have a good excuse like your family wants to go to Aruba. For me, mandatory attendance usually meant that the school couldn't get kids to show up otherwise. You'd think kids would want to get away from their parents and have a fun trip to a ski lodge, so I wonder what happened in the past. Or Stoneybrook Middle School uses this trip as a way to price gouge the rich parents and exploit the poor parents. Or Stoneybrook's Stepfordian visage is breaking away and the seedy underground is showing again with money laundering.

While the school counts its money, the annual ski trip to Leicester Lodge in Hooksett Crossing, Vermont (that's a pretty great town name) comes with several activities for the kids. The most important is a contest wherein the kids are divided into two groups - Red and Blue. The school clearly didn't spend any money on name creation. Also, the kids can't just have a week at a resort to learn how it works or to expose them to winter sports or the history of Vermont. No. We need the kids to compete against each other. We need to train them so they can get used to arbitrary competition so they'll buy sports merchandise and have a strange attachment to a location (America) and think that other countries are shitholes (other places).

Mary Anne

Oh no! The trip might be canceled before it's even begun! There's a big storm coming in! Oh, wait. Don't worry about it. A paragraph later, the vice-principal confirms that the trip is still on.