Rereading My Childhood: The Baby-Sitters Club

#17: Mary Anne's Bad-Luck Mystery

It's easy to ascribe your troubles to an unseen force. Toss your problems to the wind - there's nothing you can do to change your luck, so you better just suck it up and ride it out!

It's even easier to say that it's because of bad luck brought on by something you did and it can be remedied through mystical means. It's not just a part of life! You did something! You need to rectify it! No need to just ride it out until it ends! Here's a convoluted placebo!

This week, Mary Anne and the BSC are having a run of bad luck. Guess which route they take? If they take the former, this will be a very short review. Let's get to it.

The BSC (well, the BSC minus Mallory, Jessi, and Shannon) are eating lunch. This group includes Logan who, if you forgot, is Mary Anne's boyfriend. They don't waste any time, and Mary Anne dives right into the long descriptions of each member. When she gets to Claudia, we get a great outfit description.

It was her vegetable blouse: an oversized white shirt with a green vegetable print all over it - cabbages and squashes and turnips and stuff. Under the blouse was a very short jean skirt, white stockings, green anklets over the stockings, and lavender sneakers, the kind boys usually wear, with a lot of rubber and big laces and the name of the manufacturer in huge letters on the sides. Wait, I'm not done. Claudia had pulled the hair on one side of her head with a yellow clip that looked like a poodle. The hair on the other side of her head was hanging in her face. Attached to the one ear you could see was a plastic earring about the size of a jar lid.

Oh please, Netflix, let Claudia continue to wear stuff like this. I'll do anything. Although, I don't know what kind of shoes Mary Anne is talking about. Vans don't say "Vans" on the side. Nike has the swoosh, but not the letters. Maybe DC. Was that around in the '80s?

Anyway, the girls (plus Logan) are talking about the Halloween Hop, which is the same dance from the second BSC book, . At another table, BSC adversaries Cokie Mason and Grace Blume, are snickering at the BSC. I'm sure they'll have no influence on the plot whatsoever.

Just before the BSC meeting, Mary Anne gets a letter, but there's no time to open it, so she just takes it with her to the meeting. Turns out, it's a chain letter that warns Mary Anne of bad luck if she breaks the chain.

It's weird. I got a chain letter in the mail once, but it promised me postcards from around the world - never bad luck. I didn't break the chain, but I didn't get any postcards. Any other chain letters I got were emails from the days when I had an AOL screen name and they granted wishes. I still had to go to P.E., so it clearly didn't work.

The bad luck starts the next morning when Mary Anne falls out of bed. Then she can't find her shoes. Then she spills juice on herself. Then she can't open her locker. Then she can't find her favorite book, Little Women, in the school library. She comes home to her own copy.

I opened the book to the scene where Beth dies. Maybe I would feel cheered up if I read about someone who was having a worse time than I was.

That's some serial killer shit, Mary Anne. If I need cheering up, I turn to the happiest song on earth that isn't saccharine, which is , thank you very much.

Anyway, Mary Anne is deep in that sweet sweet Beth death when Mrs. Newton calls. Turns out Mary Anne is late to her baby-sitting job! She forgot she had a job that day! Oh no, when will the bad luck end!

Not on page 30, I'll tell you that much. The bad luck continues and spreads to the rest of the BSC as Dawn sits for Jackie Radowsky, the kid who is referred to as "a happy-go-lucky klutz" and, frankly, one of my favorite Stoneybrook kids. Dawn and Jackie are trying to make him a costume and in the process, Jackie knocks over stuff on every page of the book. Even when he finishes the costume, it collapses. The BSC attributes this not to Jackie's accident-prone nature, but to the chain letter.