I called Caitlin on Sunday morning to chat and discuss my babysitting job from the previous evening, as she is acquainted with the clients and their children. When I finished telling her about the events of the evening (the kids only cried once and the little boy only touched the dog inappropriately for a moment), she commented, “We should start a babysitting business. We’d make a lot of money.”
“Oh,” I replied. “You mean like The Babysitters Club?” If you don’t get the reference to the book series, clearly you weren’t a girl in elementary school during the nineties.
Caitlin laughed. And then she stopped laughing when she realized that I was still talking, and that I was listing each member of The Babysitters Club, their title in the club, and their favorite babysitting clients. I could practically feel her backing slowly away from the phone, and I can’t blame her. You might say I was a bit obsessed with those books – if my mother was the type to comment on here, she might contribute an embarrassing story about how when I was little I used to sit on the toilet for hours on end, pretending to be, um, busy while I devoured the latest adventures of my favorite sitters. But THANK GOD that story will never come out, because THAT would be humiliating.
My sister bought me the very first Babysitters Club book in 1987 before a roadtrip to our aunt’s in Pennsylvania.
I am still (still!) bitter that my mom made me give all my books to a younger, undeserving neighborhood girl when I was 15. I’d given up reading them several years before (I stopped when Stacey moved back from NYC–stay where you belong, Insulin Girl!), but I cherished those first 22 or so books dearly.
When the movie came out in the mid-’90’s my sister and I saw it in the theatre. Nevermind that we were 18 and 21, respectively. The Club knows no age restrictions. And that is possibly more than anyone needs to know about my former love for the BSC.
Oh ye of known humiliation. Challenge a mother, and you know you have to get it back one hundred fold. I always wondered why such a little body would take hours to “rid itself of the contents within”….now I know, 10 years later. Contrary to others who have the urge to purge their children’s treasures, your Babysitter’s books are still waiting for you — not in the bathroom though.
From McSweeney’s Lists, compliments of one Mr. Robert Hinderliter, this is how I feel about your writing:
A hackneyed, masturbatory miscarriage of a story.
You have managed to coldly and persistently rape the English language for 17 pages. Congratulations.
The fact that this story exists is the ultimate argument against Creationism.
Your embarrassingly ineffectual and flaccid prose made me feel uncomfortable.
This smugly written tripe is an affront to the craft of writing and fails to meet even the most generous definition of adequacy.
Truly abysmal. Maybe singularly so.
You had some nice details.
I wonder who wrote the anonymous comment. Hi, Mrs. Bayer!