Super Special #2: Baby-Sitters Summer Vacation
All right, guys, I'll be honest with you here. I "picked" this book by reaching blindly into my closet. Everything's kind of precariously balanced in there, and to go digging for a particular book would almost certainly mean painful and embarrassing death. I was hoping for a book I have a strong opinion on (Little Miss Stoneybrook...and Dawn!, Claudia and the Genius of Elm Street, Mallory and the Dream Horse - which I don't own a copy of - Stacey's Mistake...), but this is what I got. Let's see how it goes! I actually haven't read this one in a while. Should be fun! I'll be posting in chunks of four chapters, because to do it by threes would take even longer, and if it turns out I talk too much, well, I do apologize.
Photo taken of my own book. Apologies for the cover damage.
Okay, the cover. I have mixed feelings about the cover. On the one hand, it's the girls making dorky faces and attempting a kickline, exactly the kind of stupid photo you'd take at camp when you were thirteen. (Somewhere there exists a picture of me and nine other tweens stacked into a precarious pyramid that toppled immediately after the photo was taken. Sadly I never did get a copy of that, and I would give my left kidney to get one.)
On the other hand, when you look closely at the girls, it's pretty bleak. Kristy looks okay (and appears to be wearing Chucks, which is awesome). I'm not sure which one is Stacey and which one is Dawn, but I'm guessing that's Dawn next to Kristy and she looks ready to pee and hurl simultaneously. But really, which one of us hasn't been there? Jessi somehow got Emily Michelle's shiny black pageboy, which is freaky to see, and she looks like...the best way I can describe this is if you had a drag queen trying to be Rosario Dawson. But not a good drag queen. Mary Anne is about seven feet tall and is for some reason wearing pigtails. Stacey is staring at Claudia's boobs, and she likes what she sees. On second thought, maybe that's actually Dawn. You'll see what I mean when I get to Dawn's first chapter. Mallory is a dude. Claudia's a midget little person wearing old man shorts.
I just noticed this now, but why are some of the girls wearing polo shirts?! I went to camp in Connecticut, and while it was freaking freezing first thing in the morning, it got ridiculously hot pretty fast.
Two obnoxious little blonde girls are in the background, pointing and laughing. Kind of awesome, except I think the one on the right is meant to be Karen, because I swear Hodges used the same model on the cover of Kristy and the Walking Disaster, and possibly other books. I'll see if I can find scans.
See, the kid with the long blonde hair and vacant expression? Same kid? Yes, no? (I swiped this one from dibbly fresh, but uploaded it to my photobucket so as not to drain their servers further.)
Okay, we can go onto the book now. I didn't expect to have that much to say about a cover.
This book is dedicated to Jean, Barry and Bonkie. I hope to god Bonkie is an animal.
The first page is a letter written by Kristy, but apparently from all the members of the BSC begging Stacey to come to Camp Mohawk with them. Because god forbid they be separated for two whole weeks! Apparently Mary Anne put it off until the last minute and the camp director was over the moon because they "needed more CITs." Really? Are they really that important? I can't remember if my cabins had two counselors or a counselor and a CIT or what, but I do remember thinking that we didn't really need that many people watching a group of seven twelve-year-olds. Uh, come to think of it, we had campers older than thirteen. Aren't most camp counselors at least in high school? This is madness! This is insanity!
THIS! IS! STONEYBROOK!
I know, what was I thinking?
Apparently the letter worked, because the next page is a postcard from Stacey to her parents, and she's on her way to Camp Mohawk. Who would give up summer vacation in NYC to go to camp?
Chapter one:
The card is addressed to Mr and Mrs Edward McGill, 14 W 81st St, Apt 12E, New York, NY, 10000. They went to all that trouble to think of an address and then fudged the ZIP code? WTF sense does that make?! Also, Upper West Side. They really are loaded. I'm keeping this address in mind for when I snark Stacey's Mistake (if I ever dig that book out of the Closet of Doom), because...wow. They're a long walk from the freaking Delacorte Clock.
Stacey's chapter opens with her wondering why the hell she ever agreed to give up her summer vacation in NYC to go to camp. Good. I was wondering about that.
Apparently they wrote her telling her the plan, saying that being a CIT is better than being a counselor because "you get all the fun of being a camper, plus extra privileges, and all the privileges of being a counselor." Um, what? How does that make any sense? How do you get the fun of being a camper if you're wrangling the rugrats? Unless the BSC, being the BSC, spent their junior years at camp throwing together impromptu talent shows with the younger campers instead of doing arts and crafts. Not that I would blame them. Arts and crafts is lame. "All the privileges of being a counselor?" If I were an actual counselor, I would be pissed at that arrangement. Am I alone here?
Stacey wrote back and said no (actually, she said "NO!"), and they wrote back and kept nagging, and she wrote back and said no again, and this went on for "quite a while" and WHY THE HELL DIDN'T THEY JUST CALL?! Given the ever-rising price of stamps, it probably would have been cheaper, and certainly more time efficient. Unless they started this in April, wouldn't summer be over before they were done with this ridiculous game of letter tag? I already hate this book.
Anyway, she changed her mind, because apparently K Ron's psychic tentacles extend throughout the entire Tristate Area, and she's decided to keep a notebook because if she's going to give up summer in New York she wants a record of her adventures at camp. O...kay? I'm not sure I follow the logic there, but we all know we needed that explanation somewhere. I'll just go with it.
And now she's standing in a crowd of parents, kids, counselors, CITs and "junior CITs." I thought the junior CIT thing was made up to humor Jessi and Mal, and Stacey's leaving from New York..? The counselors are twenty years old, which...again, what? Why the hell would thirteen year olds be counselors in training if they can't actually BE counselors for seven years?! And I would be really pissed if I were twenty and sharing privileges and authority with thirteen-year-olds.
We do get some of the Stacey wit when she observes that "Half the people in the crowd were crying. That half was the parents." Heh. Everyone says that, but you just know as soon as the bus is out of sight, they're whipping out coolers full of beer, getting topless and letting the expletives fly.
Stacey's mother is one of the criers, sobbing that her baby is growing up so fast and what is she going to do without Stacey for two whole weeks?! Get a grip, Maureen. Your husband is making seven figures a year. I find it hard to believe that you've never sent your daughter to camp before, or to any sort of summer program where she's pretty much out of your hair for most of the day. Seriously, that's a creepy level of dependency right there.
Meanwhile, some kid in the background is moaning about her teddy being stuffed in a suitcase for three hours and whether or not he'll be okay. Are even six year olds that dumb? I'm pretty sure that even at six I knew that stuffed animals didn't actually need to breathe, and I had an imagination that rivaled Karen's.
More boring exposition, in which we learn of Camp Mohawk's uniform - t-shirts, shorts, socks, sweaters and nightshirts with the Camp Mohawk logo on them. I'm sorry, socks?! Nightclothes?! What kind of creepy-ass camp has a uniform, anyway? Is this normal?!
The logo, by the way, is a teepee, which gets us a lecture from Stacey on "Indian" culture and how "the Mohawk Indians are part of the large Iroquois nation. And the Iroquois Indians lived in longhouses, not teepees." If Stacey knows that off the top of her head, why is she calling them Indians, not Native Americans?? Oh well. As she says in the next sentence, "What can you do? This was camp, not school."
More random samplings of chatter, where the little boy whines again about his teddy suffocating (kid, he doesn't have lungs. I assure you, he does not breathe.) and Stacey's mom yells "Bloomingdale's won't be the same without you!" To which Ed counters, "Right. It'll go broke." Hee. Apparently Mr. McGill and my dad are related (actually, they have very similar surnames. Hmm.) As the bus pulls away, Mrs. McGill calls "Have fun and be careful!" after the bus. Nice bit of continuity in later books; this comes up again.
While boarding the bus (still - does Stacey have the ambulatory equivalent of a stutter? It's taking her forever to go roughly five steps!) Stacey entertains herself by ranking the things parents are shouting on an embarrassment scale of one to ten. Her own parents get an eight until she hears one parent yell "Don't forget to take your vitamins!" which she gives a nine, and drops her own to a six. I go into that much detail simply because...is that really that embarrassing? "Don't forget to change your underwear!" would be embarrassing, or "If you get your period, just go to the infirmary, they have pads there!" but vitamins?
Ah, well, what do I know, I haven't been thirteen in thirteen years. (I'm old. Now I have to go cry. One sec.)
(Okay, I'm back.)
Stacey doesn't know anyone on the bus, so she sits around wondering what she should do. She decides reading would make her look dorky (nice, AMM. I thought you wanted to encourage kids to read.) even though she's reading The Catcher in the Rye right now, which is apparently awesome. I never read that, but I always thought it was for slightly older people.
Aaaand here we go, into a flashback. Don't worry, the wavy lines in your peripheral vision are normal. Just breathe deeply and put your head between your knees if you need to. We'll get through this.
Stacey's parents didn't want her to go to camp because she's diabetic. Stacey reasonably points out that she'll bring her injection kit with her and she's been away for this long before (I told you. So why the hell is her mother having fits?) What I want to know is what they plan to do when Stacey goes to college. Is Maureen going to sleep on the floor of Stacey's dorm and remind her to take her insulin?
...she's totally going to do that, isn't she.
The flashback apparently took the whole three hours, because suddenly, we're at Camp Mohawk. The BSC is reunited and all is well. Stacey is then hit by a flying - and clinging - projectile. Apparently Charlotte's parents thought sleepaway camp would be the perfect way to traumatize their painfully dependent eight-year-old this summer. She's already in tears (okay, I kind of feel for the kid. I didn't go to camp until I was twelve, and the drop-off was kind of hard. Of course, I got over it in all of three minutes, but still, she's only eight, and this just seems kind of mean.) Stacey, who's remarkably stupid all of a sudden, wonders if CharJo is crying over excitement at being at camp.
And thus we head into chapter two. It's a Kristy chapter. Be prepared.
Chapter two:
We open with a postcard addressed to "Charlie and Sam Thomas" and on the line underneath "Andrew and Emily Brewer." That seems needlessly complicated. The postcard exposits that Kristy is a CIT in a cabin full of six eight-year-olds, including Charlotte and Becca Ramsey.
Kristy starts the chapter commenting that "the tables have turned, the shoe is on the other foot, and all that stuff." For once she's not the one forcing everyone to write in a stupid notebook. Surprisingly, Kristy's okay with being made to do something she didn't think of. This must be an early book.
And now we have to learn about how they arrived upon the great idea of coming to camp. I...do we need this? Beyond "It was summer, we were bored, our parents are loaded, so we figured 'why not'?"
You see, Dawn has this amazingly novel invention known as a "VCR," on which "Dawn tapes things she sees on TV." Thanks for clearing that up, Kristy. I thought she attached electrodes to her head every night and used it to record her dreams. Kristy also makes sure to tell us that Dawn is fucking obsessed with The Parent Trap and watches it "at least once a week." She also apparently makes the girls watch it all the time. They really are saints to put up with Dawn.
So, one viewing of the movie gets the girls talking in an awkward and stilted manner about how they'd all love to go to camp. And apparently once they all decided to go, this AMAZING and completely UNHEARD OF decision to send your children to SUMMER CAMP "spread fast," and suddenly half of Stoneybrook is sending their children to the same freaking camp. Of course they are.
I'm going to skip the Kristy info because we all know it and, really, it's boring as hell. Cut to Kristy, David Michael and Karen getting ready to board the bus. Andrew is really bringing the Ralph Wiggum today:
"'Where are you guys going?' Andrew asked [them] for about the twelfth time that morning. No wonder he didn't understand. We were going someplace where we could play for two weeks."
I've read that about ten times and it still doesn't make sense to me. Assuming that Andrew isn't actually meant to have an IQ slightly lower than that of your average eggplant, why can't he understand the concept of camp?
About a hundred Parent Trap references (I was forced to watch that on...either a school overnight or some school thing years back, and we seriously all laughed our asses off at how terrible and corny it was. When eleven-year-olds are appreciating something ironically...it ain't good.) later, Kristy spots Charlotte crying and clinging to her parents, begging them not to send her to camp. Kristy swears camp was Charlotte's idea, because she saw the brochure (which Kristy declares "pretty glitzy," with pictures of kids doing arts and crafts and going on nature walks. People in Stoneybrook are easily impressed, huh?) Charlotte's parents tell her to call anytime, which seems like it would only make her homesickness worse, but hey, I'm not a psychologist.
Everyone piles onto the bus. Jackie Rodowsky waves his arm out the window and his Camp Mohawk baseball camp flies away. Margo barfs. (Seriously, there's no lull or act break, this happens one after the other.) David Michael starts a round of "one million bottles of beer on the wall," and they're still in the nine hundred ninety-nine thousands of bottles of beer when they arrive, and Charlotte, who had managed to pull herself together on the bus ride over, falls apart again. Man, I like Charlotte and all, but I'm starting to see why her family wants her gone for a while. She seems exhausting.
Next is a Claudia chapter. I can't wait to read her postcard.
Chapter three
Claudia doesn't disappoint. She starts her postcard off with "Dear Mimi, who are you?" Oh, Claudia. This is also the postcard addressed to "Mrs. L Yamamoto." If anyone out there ever meets AMM, please ask her about that. Otherwise it's going to bother me for the rest of my life.
Claudia's in charge of nine year olds, including Vanessa Pike and Haley Braddock (ugh. I freaking can't stand Haley.)
Claudia wastes no time in getting her bitch on. In her first paragraph, she complains about how Charlotte is "crying all over" Stacey while Claudia wants to hug her BFF, damn it. No, seriously, she says this. I paraphrased a bit, but Claudia is literally annoyed that she can't hug Stacey because Charlotte's clinging to her. Again, Charlotte is annoying right now, but she's also eight for fuck's sake, and you'd think a member of the BSC would be a little sympathetic to a child in distress. Oh and Mary Anne has a tissue handy. Of course she does.
Stacey and Claudia catch up, mostly talking about Mimi's stroke, which seems like an adult conversation, not really the thing kids would spend that much time discussing. Maybe I'm just a bitch, but I wouldn't have wanted to hear about my friend's grandmother's speech therapy in excruciating detail if I hadn't seen her in months. Definitely not at that age, and probably not now.
Claudia the Moron calls Lake Dekanawida "Lake Dekadonka." The camp director's name is Mrs. Means and everyone calls her "Old Meanie." God this is gonna be a long book.
Claudia has a co-CIT, which...didn't they just say they were hurting for CITs? Six nine-year-olds do not need three people supervising them. Her name is Sally, and she appears "sophisticated, but not snobby." Let's see how Claudia's first impression pans out. Their counselor is named Meghan, and the four kids we've never met before are Leeann, Brandy, Jayme and Gail. Three our of four names are actually names children born in the late 70s or early 80s might actually have. That has to be a record. I don't think I've met anyone under the age of sixty named "Gail," though.
Trekking up to the cabin with their luggage, they have to turn around go back twice, because one kid forgot her Garfield bag (holy shit, a semi-modern reference), and Vanessa took the wrong suitcase. I know she's an airhead, but she doesn't know her own luggage?! The cabin is a summer camp cliche, and the counselor's bed has a curtain around it for privacy. I'm assuming because they actually have secondary sexual characteristics.
At my camp, the counselors had their own cabins and we were basically on our own after lights out. I'm not sure if that's abnormal or not, but I definitely preferred that arrangement, at least in theory. It seems less fun to have an authority figure hovering over you all night long. (And only the oldest kids got rowdy in the slightest. The eight year olds governed themselves like a well-oiled machine.)
The kids are grossed out by having group bathrooms. What the hell were they expecting? Claudia is amazed by the canteen, which sells stuff like postcards, toothpaste, and (OMG!) candy! It's really not hard to impress these people. There will also be dances with the boys from around the lake. Yay.
Chapter four:
Jessi chapter. Her postcard is addressed to "Mr and Mrs Alex Ramsey." I'm starting to think everyones' names were changed to John as a joke on AMM.
Mal and Jessi are actually campers, in a cabin full of eleven-year-olds. Yet they're still "junior CITs." God, this must be a small camp if they're pulling stuff like that to humor a couple of random kids. (And clearly it is, since there seems to be space for twelve kids in each age group.)
Naturally, Jessi leads by telling us that she's nervous because besides herself and her sister, there are only a couple of other black campers at Camp Mohawk. I think there were three nonwhite kids at the camp I went to. No one gave them trouble. I get that race is an issue everywhere, but it seems weird to me that Jessi experiences outright racism wherever she goes. I grew up in a rich white kid's world just like the BSC did, around the same time as the BSC did, and while I'm sure the few minority kids who did turn up in my schools had their problems, none of the kids in my grade were like "HOLY FUCK A CHINESE PERSON" or whatever. We didn't tell the kids who spoke Spanish to learn English already, we didn't ask the black kids if they secretly had weird tribal names, and we didn't think that black people existed solely to clean houses. At the very least, people were subtler about their racism.
Jessi immediately sets to work proving to us that the reason nobody likes her has nothing to do with her race and has everything to do with her being a prissy goody-goody kiss-up dweeb, as she tells us how she and Mal basically wrote essays in the comments section on the staff application begging to be allowed to be CITs despite being the same age as some of the campers. And somehow they get catered to and are now "junior CITs," designated with helping the littlest kids with arts and crafts and stuff.
Jessi and Mal are bunking with Maureen, Mandi, Mary O and Mary T. Jessi is not only black, but is the only one with a name that doesn't start with Ma-! For some reason, she's convinced this will make her stand out more. Another reason nobody likes Jessi: she turns every little freaking thing into a crisis.
When they're told to choose bunks, Jessi and Mal make a "mad dash" for the cabin to make sure they get to share a bed, while the other girls just kind of wander up choose. Also why they don't like you: you act like you're eleven. Don't you know that everyone in your weird little bubble must act like an adult at all times? At least Jessi's self-aware enough to feel like a "great big baby," but she can't put her finger on what she's doing wrong. God, Jessi, do you want a list?
Case in point: Jessi and Mal constantly interrupt their unpacking to ask where the other is putting things like their toothpaste and shorts, nevermind that they have three shelves apiece to use. Again, Jessi, the list. You sure you don't want it? If I'd heard my bunkmates saying "I'm putting my toothpaste on the bottom shelf on the left," I'd think they were weird and not want to talk to them. I mean, it's not even that it's juvenile, it's just...who does that, you know?
Then Mal invites Jessi to hang out with her up on the top bunk, and Jessi is afraid to. And then she wonders why everyone is laughing at her. After she sucks it up and climbs up there, Mallory gives her a Junior CIT armband that she's made.
Jessi, you're a dork. And not the cool kind of dork that knows the minutiae of every Farscape episode ever produced and recite Monty Python. You're the creepy mouthbreathing kid who likes bugs and smells like sour milk. YOUR BLACKNESS IS SECONDARY. IT IS THE LEAST OF YOUR CONCERNS RIGHT NOW.
Autumn (their counselor) calls Jessi and Mal out in front of everyone to point them out as Junior CITs. Yeah, that's going to help them blend in. The Ms tease them about their being in trouble for wearing something that's not part of the uniform and Mal panics. Turns out Autumn just wanted to announce that Jessi and Mal will apparently be choreographing some dance routine to do at Parents' Day.
Of course they will.
Mary O teases the girls by calling them the "Bobbsey Twins" (wow, current), and Mandi points out that they don't exactly look like twins, if you know what she means, and I think you do. And Mal retorts by...oh, god, this is painful. She "haughtily" points out that each set of Bobbsey twins consisted of a boy and a girl (naming all four of them), so how alike could they have looked?
Well, they were all the same race, Mal, you kind of have to give them that much. (I...assume they were, anyway. For all I know, Freddy and Flossy were the mailman's kids. Those books were terrible. I never read them too closely.)
Mandi, of course, just laughs that they read the fucking Bobbsey Twins books, and Jessi decides to "help" by lying that "Of course they both do." Which they don't. They read Nancy Drew and horse stories. Seriously, Jessi, what the frick were you trying to accomplish there? You might as well tell them no, we don't wet the bed any more, now that we wear our big girl pull-ups every night!
Cripes. I'm all for being who you are in the face of teasing - that's pretty much how I lived my entire childhood, because I always thought maturity was overrated, and frankly I still do - but this is really depressing.
And on that note, I'll see you all next time.
Photo taken of my own book. Apologies for the cover damage.
Okay, the cover. I have mixed feelings about the cover. On the one hand, it's the girls making dorky faces and attempting a kickline, exactly the kind of stupid photo you'd take at camp when you were thirteen. (Somewhere there exists a picture of me and nine other tweens stacked into a precarious pyramid that toppled immediately after the photo was taken. Sadly I never did get a copy of that, and I would give my left kidney to get one.)
On the other hand, when you look closely at the girls, it's pretty bleak. Kristy looks okay (and appears to be wearing Chucks, which is awesome). I'm not sure which one is Stacey and which one is Dawn, but I'm guessing that's Dawn next to Kristy and she looks ready to pee and hurl simultaneously. But really, which one of us hasn't been there? Jessi somehow got Emily Michelle's shiny black pageboy, which is freaky to see, and she looks like...the best way I can describe this is if you had a drag queen trying to be Rosario Dawson. But not a good drag queen. Mary Anne is about seven feet tall and is for some reason wearing pigtails. Stacey is staring at Claudia's boobs, and she likes what she sees. On second thought, maybe that's actually Dawn. You'll see what I mean when I get to Dawn's first chapter. Mallory is a dude. Claudia's a midget little person wearing old man shorts.
I just noticed this now, but why are some of the girls wearing polo shirts?! I went to camp in Connecticut, and while it was freaking freezing first thing in the morning, it got ridiculously hot pretty fast.
Two obnoxious little blonde girls are in the background, pointing and laughing. Kind of awesome, except I think the one on the right is meant to be Karen, because I swear Hodges used the same model on the cover of Kristy and the Walking Disaster, and possibly other books. I'll see if I can find scans.
See, the kid with the long blonde hair and vacant expression? Same kid? Yes, no? (I swiped this one from dibbly fresh, but uploaded it to my photobucket so as not to drain their servers further.)
Okay, we can go onto the book now. I didn't expect to have that much to say about a cover.
This book is dedicated to Jean, Barry and Bonkie. I hope to god Bonkie is an animal.
The first page is a letter written by Kristy, but apparently from all the members of the BSC begging Stacey to come to Camp Mohawk with them. Because god forbid they be separated for two whole weeks! Apparently Mary Anne put it off until the last minute and the camp director was over the moon because they "needed more CITs." Really? Are they really that important? I can't remember if my cabins had two counselors or a counselor and a CIT or what, but I do remember thinking that we didn't really need that many people watching a group of seven twelve-year-olds. Uh, come to think of it, we had campers older than thirteen. Aren't most camp counselors at least in high school? This is madness! This is insanity!
THIS! IS! STONEYBROOK!
I know, what was I thinking?
Apparently the letter worked, because the next page is a postcard from Stacey to her parents, and she's on her way to Camp Mohawk. Who would give up summer vacation in NYC to go to camp?
Chapter one:
The card is addressed to Mr and Mrs Edward McGill, 14 W 81st St, Apt 12E, New York, NY, 10000. They went to all that trouble to think of an address and then fudged the ZIP code? WTF sense does that make?! Also, Upper West Side. They really are loaded. I'm keeping this address in mind for when I snark Stacey's Mistake (if I ever dig that book out of the Closet of Doom), because...wow. They're a long walk from the freaking Delacorte Clock.
Stacey's chapter opens with her wondering why the hell she ever agreed to give up her summer vacation in NYC to go to camp. Good. I was wondering about that.
Apparently they wrote her telling her the plan, saying that being a CIT is better than being a counselor because "you get all the fun of being a camper, plus extra privileges, and all the privileges of being a counselor." Um, what? How does that make any sense? How do you get the fun of being a camper if you're wrangling the rugrats? Unless the BSC, being the BSC, spent their junior years at camp throwing together impromptu talent shows with the younger campers instead of doing arts and crafts. Not that I would blame them. Arts and crafts is lame. "All the privileges of being a counselor?" If I were an actual counselor, I would be pissed at that arrangement. Am I alone here?
Stacey wrote back and said no (actually, she said "NO!"), and they wrote back and kept nagging, and she wrote back and said no again, and this went on for "quite a while" and WHY THE HELL DIDN'T THEY JUST CALL?! Given the ever-rising price of stamps, it probably would have been cheaper, and certainly more time efficient. Unless they started this in April, wouldn't summer be over before they were done with this ridiculous game of letter tag? I already hate this book.
Anyway, she changed her mind, because apparently K Ron's psychic tentacles extend throughout the entire Tristate Area, and she's decided to keep a notebook because if she's going to give up summer in New York she wants a record of her adventures at camp. O...kay? I'm not sure I follow the logic there, but we all know we needed that explanation somewhere. I'll just go with it.
And now she's standing in a crowd of parents, kids, counselors, CITs and "junior CITs." I thought the junior CIT thing was made up to humor Jessi and Mal, and Stacey's leaving from New York..? The counselors are twenty years old, which...again, what? Why the hell would thirteen year olds be counselors in training if they can't actually BE counselors for seven years?! And I would be really pissed if I were twenty and sharing privileges and authority with thirteen-year-olds.
We do get some of the Stacey wit when she observes that "Half the people in the crowd were crying. That half was the parents." Heh. Everyone says that, but you just know as soon as the bus is out of sight, they're whipping out coolers full of beer, getting topless and letting the expletives fly.
Stacey's mother is one of the criers, sobbing that her baby is growing up so fast and what is she going to do without Stacey for two whole weeks?! Get a grip, Maureen. Your husband is making seven figures a year. I find it hard to believe that you've never sent your daughter to camp before, or to any sort of summer program where she's pretty much out of your hair for most of the day. Seriously, that's a creepy level of dependency right there.
Meanwhile, some kid in the background is moaning about her teddy being stuffed in a suitcase for three hours and whether or not he'll be okay. Are even six year olds that dumb? I'm pretty sure that even at six I knew that stuffed animals didn't actually need to breathe, and I had an imagination that rivaled Karen's.
More boring exposition, in which we learn of Camp Mohawk's uniform - t-shirts, shorts, socks, sweaters and nightshirts with the Camp Mohawk logo on them. I'm sorry, socks?! Nightclothes?! What kind of creepy-ass camp has a uniform, anyway? Is this normal?!
The logo, by the way, is a teepee, which gets us a lecture from Stacey on "Indian" culture and how "the Mohawk Indians are part of the large Iroquois nation. And the Iroquois Indians lived in longhouses, not teepees." If Stacey knows that off the top of her head, why is she calling them Indians, not Native Americans?? Oh well. As she says in the next sentence, "What can you do? This was camp, not school."
More random samplings of chatter, where the little boy whines again about his teddy suffocating (kid, he doesn't have lungs. I assure you, he does not breathe.) and Stacey's mom yells "Bloomingdale's won't be the same without you!" To which Ed counters, "Right. It'll go broke." Hee. Apparently Mr. McGill and my dad are related (actually, they have very similar surnames. Hmm.) As the bus pulls away, Mrs. McGill calls "Have fun and be careful!" after the bus. Nice bit of continuity in later books; this comes up again.
While boarding the bus (still - does Stacey have the ambulatory equivalent of a stutter? It's taking her forever to go roughly five steps!) Stacey entertains herself by ranking the things parents are shouting on an embarrassment scale of one to ten. Her own parents get an eight until she hears one parent yell "Don't forget to take your vitamins!" which she gives a nine, and drops her own to a six. I go into that much detail simply because...is that really that embarrassing? "Don't forget to change your underwear!" would be embarrassing, or "If you get your period, just go to the infirmary, they have pads there!" but vitamins?
Ah, well, what do I know, I haven't been thirteen in thirteen years. (I'm old. Now I have to go cry. One sec.)
(Okay, I'm back.)
Stacey doesn't know anyone on the bus, so she sits around wondering what she should do. She decides reading would make her look dorky (nice, AMM. I thought you wanted to encourage kids to read.) even though she's reading The Catcher in the Rye right now, which is apparently awesome. I never read that, but I always thought it was for slightly older people.
Aaaand here we go, into a flashback. Don't worry, the wavy lines in your peripheral vision are normal. Just breathe deeply and put your head between your knees if you need to. We'll get through this.
Stacey's parents didn't want her to go to camp because she's diabetic. Stacey reasonably points out that she'll bring her injection kit with her and she's been away for this long before (I told you. So why the hell is her mother having fits?) What I want to know is what they plan to do when Stacey goes to college. Is Maureen going to sleep on the floor of Stacey's dorm and remind her to take her insulin?
...she's totally going to do that, isn't she.
The flashback apparently took the whole three hours, because suddenly, we're at Camp Mohawk. The BSC is reunited and all is well. Stacey is then hit by a flying - and clinging - projectile. Apparently Charlotte's parents thought sleepaway camp would be the perfect way to traumatize their painfully dependent eight-year-old this summer. She's already in tears (okay, I kind of feel for the kid. I didn't go to camp until I was twelve, and the drop-off was kind of hard. Of course, I got over it in all of three minutes, but still, she's only eight, and this just seems kind of mean.) Stacey, who's remarkably stupid all of a sudden, wonders if CharJo is crying over excitement at being at camp.
And thus we head into chapter two. It's a Kristy chapter. Be prepared.
Chapter two:
We open with a postcard addressed to "Charlie and Sam Thomas" and on the line underneath "Andrew and Emily Brewer." That seems needlessly complicated. The postcard exposits that Kristy is a CIT in a cabin full of six eight-year-olds, including Charlotte and Becca Ramsey.
Kristy starts the chapter commenting that "the tables have turned, the shoe is on the other foot, and all that stuff." For once she's not the one forcing everyone to write in a stupid notebook. Surprisingly, Kristy's okay with being made to do something she didn't think of. This must be an early book.
And now we have to learn about how they arrived upon the great idea of coming to camp. I...do we need this? Beyond "It was summer, we were bored, our parents are loaded, so we figured 'why not'?"
You see, Dawn has this amazingly novel invention known as a "VCR," on which "Dawn tapes things she sees on TV." Thanks for clearing that up, Kristy. I thought she attached electrodes to her head every night and used it to record her dreams. Kristy also makes sure to tell us that Dawn is fucking obsessed with The Parent Trap and watches it "at least once a week." She also apparently makes the girls watch it all the time. They really are saints to put up with Dawn.
So, one viewing of the movie gets the girls talking in an awkward and stilted manner about how they'd all love to go to camp. And apparently once they all decided to go, this AMAZING and completely UNHEARD OF decision to send your children to SUMMER CAMP "spread fast," and suddenly half of Stoneybrook is sending their children to the same freaking camp. Of course they are.
I'm going to skip the Kristy info because we all know it and, really, it's boring as hell. Cut to Kristy, David Michael and Karen getting ready to board the bus. Andrew is really bringing the Ralph Wiggum today:
"'Where are you guys going?' Andrew asked [them] for about the twelfth time that morning. No wonder he didn't understand. We were going someplace where we could play for two weeks."
I've read that about ten times and it still doesn't make sense to me. Assuming that Andrew isn't actually meant to have an IQ slightly lower than that of your average eggplant, why can't he understand the concept of camp?
About a hundred Parent Trap references (I was forced to watch that on...either a school overnight or some school thing years back, and we seriously all laughed our asses off at how terrible and corny it was. When eleven-year-olds are appreciating something ironically...it ain't good.) later, Kristy spots Charlotte crying and clinging to her parents, begging them not to send her to camp. Kristy swears camp was Charlotte's idea, because she saw the brochure (which Kristy declares "pretty glitzy," with pictures of kids doing arts and crafts and going on nature walks. People in Stoneybrook are easily impressed, huh?) Charlotte's parents tell her to call anytime, which seems like it would only make her homesickness worse, but hey, I'm not a psychologist.
Everyone piles onto the bus. Jackie Rodowsky waves his arm out the window and his Camp Mohawk baseball camp flies away. Margo barfs. (Seriously, there's no lull or act break, this happens one after the other.) David Michael starts a round of "one million bottles of beer on the wall," and they're still in the nine hundred ninety-nine thousands of bottles of beer when they arrive, and Charlotte, who had managed to pull herself together on the bus ride over, falls apart again. Man, I like Charlotte and all, but I'm starting to see why her family wants her gone for a while. She seems exhausting.
Next is a Claudia chapter. I can't wait to read her postcard.
Chapter three
Claudia doesn't disappoint. She starts her postcard off with "Dear Mimi, who are you?" Oh, Claudia. This is also the postcard addressed to "Mrs. L Yamamoto." If anyone out there ever meets AMM, please ask her about that. Otherwise it's going to bother me for the rest of my life.
Claudia's in charge of nine year olds, including Vanessa Pike and Haley Braddock (ugh. I freaking can't stand Haley.)
Claudia wastes no time in getting her bitch on. In her first paragraph, she complains about how Charlotte is "crying all over" Stacey while Claudia wants to hug her BFF, damn it. No, seriously, she says this. I paraphrased a bit, but Claudia is literally annoyed that she can't hug Stacey because Charlotte's clinging to her. Again, Charlotte is annoying right now, but she's also eight for fuck's sake, and you'd think a member of the BSC would be a little sympathetic to a child in distress. Oh and Mary Anne has a tissue handy. Of course she does.
Stacey and Claudia catch up, mostly talking about Mimi's stroke, which seems like an adult conversation, not really the thing kids would spend that much time discussing. Maybe I'm just a bitch, but I wouldn't have wanted to hear about my friend's grandmother's speech therapy in excruciating detail if I hadn't seen her in months. Definitely not at that age, and probably not now.
Claudia the Moron calls Lake Dekanawida "Lake Dekadonka." The camp director's name is Mrs. Means and everyone calls her "Old Meanie." God this is gonna be a long book.
Claudia has a co-CIT, which...didn't they just say they were hurting for CITs? Six nine-year-olds do not need three people supervising them. Her name is Sally, and she appears "sophisticated, but not snobby." Let's see how Claudia's first impression pans out. Their counselor is named Meghan, and the four kids we've never met before are Leeann, Brandy, Jayme and Gail. Three our of four names are actually names children born in the late 70s or early 80s might actually have. That has to be a record. I don't think I've met anyone under the age of sixty named "Gail," though.
Trekking up to the cabin with their luggage, they have to turn around go back twice, because one kid forgot her Garfield bag (holy shit, a semi-modern reference), and Vanessa took the wrong suitcase. I know she's an airhead, but she doesn't know her own luggage?! The cabin is a summer camp cliche, and the counselor's bed has a curtain around it for privacy. I'm assuming because they actually have secondary sexual characteristics.
At my camp, the counselors had their own cabins and we were basically on our own after lights out. I'm not sure if that's abnormal or not, but I definitely preferred that arrangement, at least in theory. It seems less fun to have an authority figure hovering over you all night long. (And only the oldest kids got rowdy in the slightest. The eight year olds governed themselves like a well-oiled machine.)
The kids are grossed out by having group bathrooms. What the hell were they expecting? Claudia is amazed by the canteen, which sells stuff like postcards, toothpaste, and (OMG!) candy! It's really not hard to impress these people. There will also be dances with the boys from around the lake. Yay.
Chapter four:
Jessi chapter. Her postcard is addressed to "Mr and Mrs Alex Ramsey." I'm starting to think everyones' names were changed to John as a joke on AMM.
Mal and Jessi are actually campers, in a cabin full of eleven-year-olds. Yet they're still "junior CITs." God, this must be a small camp if they're pulling stuff like that to humor a couple of random kids. (And clearly it is, since there seems to be space for twelve kids in each age group.)
Naturally, Jessi leads by telling us that she's nervous because besides herself and her sister, there are only a couple of other black campers at Camp Mohawk. I think there were three nonwhite kids at the camp I went to. No one gave them trouble. I get that race is an issue everywhere, but it seems weird to me that Jessi experiences outright racism wherever she goes. I grew up in a rich white kid's world just like the BSC did, around the same time as the BSC did, and while I'm sure the few minority kids who did turn up in my schools had their problems, none of the kids in my grade were like "HOLY FUCK A CHINESE PERSON" or whatever. We didn't tell the kids who spoke Spanish to learn English already, we didn't ask the black kids if they secretly had weird tribal names, and we didn't think that black people existed solely to clean houses. At the very least, people were subtler about their racism.
Jessi immediately sets to work proving to us that the reason nobody likes her has nothing to do with her race and has everything to do with her being a prissy goody-goody kiss-up dweeb, as she tells us how she and Mal basically wrote essays in the comments section on the staff application begging to be allowed to be CITs despite being the same age as some of the campers. And somehow they get catered to and are now "junior CITs," designated with helping the littlest kids with arts and crafts and stuff.
Jessi and Mal are bunking with Maureen, Mandi, Mary O and Mary T. Jessi is not only black, but is the only one with a name that doesn't start with Ma-! For some reason, she's convinced this will make her stand out more. Another reason nobody likes Jessi: she turns every little freaking thing into a crisis.
When they're told to choose bunks, Jessi and Mal make a "mad dash" for the cabin to make sure they get to share a bed, while the other girls just kind of wander up choose. Also why they don't like you: you act like you're eleven. Don't you know that everyone in your weird little bubble must act like an adult at all times? At least Jessi's self-aware enough to feel like a "great big baby," but she can't put her finger on what she's doing wrong. God, Jessi, do you want a list?
Case in point: Jessi and Mal constantly interrupt their unpacking to ask where the other is putting things like their toothpaste and shorts, nevermind that they have three shelves apiece to use. Again, Jessi, the list. You sure you don't want it? If I'd heard my bunkmates saying "I'm putting my toothpaste on the bottom shelf on the left," I'd think they were weird and not want to talk to them. I mean, it's not even that it's juvenile, it's just...who does that, you know?
Then Mal invites Jessi to hang out with her up on the top bunk, and Jessi is afraid to. And then she wonders why everyone is laughing at her. After she sucks it up and climbs up there, Mallory gives her a Junior CIT armband that she's made.
Jessi, you're a dork. And not the cool kind of dork that knows the minutiae of every Farscape episode ever produced and recite Monty Python. You're the creepy mouthbreathing kid who likes bugs and smells like sour milk. YOUR BLACKNESS IS SECONDARY. IT IS THE LEAST OF YOUR CONCERNS RIGHT NOW.
Autumn (their counselor) calls Jessi and Mal out in front of everyone to point them out as Junior CITs. Yeah, that's going to help them blend in. The Ms tease them about their being in trouble for wearing something that's not part of the uniform and Mal panics. Turns out Autumn just wanted to announce that Jessi and Mal will apparently be choreographing some dance routine to do at Parents' Day.
Of course they will.
Mary O teases the girls by calling them the "Bobbsey Twins" (wow, current), and Mandi points out that they don't exactly look like twins, if you know what she means, and I think you do. And Mal retorts by...oh, god, this is painful. She "haughtily" points out that each set of Bobbsey twins consisted of a boy and a girl (naming all four of them), so how alike could they have looked?
Well, they were all the same race, Mal, you kind of have to give them that much. (I...assume they were, anyway. For all I know, Freddy and Flossy were the mailman's kids. Those books were terrible. I never read them too closely.)
Mandi, of course, just laughs that they read the fucking Bobbsey Twins books, and Jessi decides to "help" by lying that "Of course they both do." Which they don't. They read Nancy Drew and horse stories. Seriously, Jessi, what the frick were you trying to accomplish there? You might as well tell them no, we don't wet the bed any more, now that we wear our big girl pull-ups every night!
Cripes. I'm all for being who you are in the face of teasing - that's pretty much how I lived my entire childhood, because I always thought maturity was overrated, and frankly I still do - but this is really depressing.
And on that note, I'll see you all next time.