Rereading My Childhood: The Baby-Sitters Club

#18: Stacey's Mistake

I have never been to New York City. I would like to visit someday, particularly for the Natural History Museum because I love dinosaurs. However, I don't have the same reverence that others have for the home of Central Park. I love the west coast. I've been to Los Angeles, which is kind of like New York City, but with better weather, impossibly beautiful waiters, and a sheen of friendliness that may be fake, but it really doesn't matter for the three minutes you interact with someone. New York City seems cold and unfriendly and another city with skyscrapers - nothing to revere as the pinnacle of American ingenuity. (At least, not while sourdough was invented in San Francisco, which is my favorite city with an unsustainable cost of living.)

The Baby-Sitters Club, and seemingly Ann M. Martin, disagrees with me. New York City is a treasure. It is a place to be heralded as a new Athens, a new Constantinople, a new Babylon. Many songs have been written about the city - and even whole musicals. And even though all that pop culture, I still think of New York City as a place that seems cool, but no more special than Los Angeles. Maybe our favorite New York Girl Stacey will change my mind about the city. Maybe I'll come out of this book review with a fresh admiration for the east coast. I mostly want to know why everyone seems so grumpy on the east coast.

Even though Stacey moved back to New York and away from the BSC in a previous book, Stacey is still baby-sitting. In fact, she's the resident babysitter for most of her building.

The community announces a meeting to discuss Judy, a "bag-lady" and other people like her, and every parent needs a baby-sitter on the same night. This meeting is the social event of the year! Come have hors devours! Talk about a homeless woman with an obvious drug addiction! Gentrify the neighborhood and get her arrested!

Stacey comes up with a familiar idea - a day camp with her best-friends from Stoneybrook! And since the meeting is for only one day, Stacey can treat the BSC to a New York Weekend complete with a party.

However, if you read the title of this book, you know it isn't going to be smooth sailing for the rest of the book. In fact, this book falls under the BSC trope of "infighting." What are they going to argue about now? Let's find out.

The second the BSC arrives, they've established who they're going to be in this book. Dawn will be playing the part of "Scared Person," Kristy will be "Big Mouth," Claudia will be "Too Much Luggage," and Mary Anne will be "The Tourist" (not the movie). The girls are excited to see their long lost friend, and after they drop off their luggage at Stacey's apartment, which the Scared Person Dawn is thankful that Stacey has a doorman, they go to get lunch.

Mary Anne wants to eat at the Hard Rock Cafe. Dawn asks if it's in a safe neighborhood. Stacey remarks that Dawn used to live in Los Angeles, to which Dawn clarifies that it was outside Anaheim, not Los Angeles proper. I've been to Anaheim - it's not exactly Mayberry, but when the biggest building in the city is The Tower of Terror (now the Guardians of the Galaxy - Mission: Breakout!, because Star-Lord is better than Rod Sterling, for some reason I don't understand) the 100-story skyscrapers of New York that loom over the dark streets are imposing.

The girls are impressed when Stacey says to the host, "'Five for lunch, please.'" I guess girls in the '80s didn't normally go to restaurants by themselves. And I thought Reno was backward. I remember having lunches with my other thirteen-year-old friends at Applebee's, and we all asked for separate checks. It's embarrassing, I know. I apologize to every server to whom I've ever said, "Can we get separate checks?" It's a shameful act and I have no excuse other than that I was thirteen and stupid.

During lunch, Kristy orders "fill-it mig-nun." I ignored the obvious pronunciation error and instead wondered how much Kristy brought with her. Like, I know Watson is rich, but I wouldn't send my thirteen-year-old to New York with enough to consider filet mignon for lunch.