BSC

This is not a post about Boston Sports Club.

In second grade, in the winter time, I took a book out of the library that cemented my status as a bookwork forever. It was called Claudia and the Bad Joke.

Yes, my friends, it was a Baby-Sitters' Club book, and I was forever hooked.

I pored over them like they were manna from the wilderness. My cousins just happened to have passed down a whole box of them to me around that same time and I read them with gusto. I'd discovered the Baby Sitter's Little Sister books the summer before, about Karen Brewer and her antics and her two of everything, but somehow the BSC characters pulled me in the way only my favorite of books have done since.

I wanted to move to the fictional Stoneybrook, CT (I knew it was not a real town because I, too, lived in CT.) I wanted to join their meetings, help construct kid kits, write in the notebook, and pilfer candy from Claudia Kishi's bedroom.

My favorite character was Stacey McGill. I still write some of my S's like her's, and used to dot my i's with hearts just like she did. My third grade self wanted to become a model, just like Stacey.

Early on in the relationship, I wrote a letter to the author of the series, Ann M. Martin. No response. Then my mother, the library director, found Ann at a huge book show in New York City. Mom scored several autographed books with a note in one of them (Dear Clare, Keep on reading! Keep on writing! Love, Ann M. Martin). I was thrilled.

Ann also mailed me a BSC fan club application, which of course I filled out and sent in. My application came with, among other things, a map of Stoneybrook with each sitter's house and street plotted out, along with each baby sitting charge's home. I spent hours plotting the courses from Kristy's house to Stoneybrook Middle School, from Stacey's house to Claudia's, from Jessie's house to Matt Braddock's. I would daydream that I hung out with all of them. When I played with my exorbitant number of barbies I had enough to give each Barbie a BSC name. They were all adults, and lived together in a mansion. Mary Anne and Logan (Ken) were married, Kristy and Bart (Ken) were dating. I had a black barbie for Jessie, an old Barbie that used to be my mother's and looked vaguely Asian as Claudia. Everyone else was blonde, obviously. Mary Anne and Mallory were actually represented by Skipper, since I didn't have quite enough Barbies to do the job. Another Ken rotated around as the boyfriend of various other members.

Now that I think about it, though, the ladies of the BSC had lasting effects on my life:

- I'm still an avid reader
- Dawn taught me at an early age the importance of environmental sustainability
- I enjoyed, and indeed strove for, baby-sitting jobs, which led to an awesome part time nanny job when I lived in London, involving me being flown to Salzburg and Nice for family trips
- Stacey's short run with the cheerleading squad inspired my own cheer experiences, giving me coordination, a mild ability to dance, and quite a few awesome friend!

These weren't just whimsical, Pleasantville-esque stories, either. Ann M. Martin brought up real issues in a way that communicated them very well to 8-12 year olds. Adoption, handicaps, cancer, death, prejudice, divorce, these were all themes of different books.

Martin recently wrote a prequel to the series, and Scholastic re-released a bunch of them. The original audience is old enough to have their own young daughters, and wants them to have an accessible series with positive role models. I hope these books are still around if I have daughters.