Sourced Transcript for BSFC #14: Hello, Mallory
Brooke Suchomel: 0:19
Welcome to The Baby-sitters Fight Club, where the first rule is, you don't talk about Fight Club. Instead, you talk about the Baby-sitters Club series of books by Ann M. Martin. I'm Brooke Suchomel.
Kaykay Brady: 0:30
And I'm Kaykay Brady.
Brooke Suchomel: 0:32
And this week, we are taking you back to June 1988. And if you aren't following our website, social media, anything where I post the links to the Spotify and YouTube playlists for each episode, you're absolutely going to want to do it for June 1988. Because the 10 songs on the playlist for June 1988 are just *chef's kiss.*
Kaykay Brady: 1:05
MUAH! I gave it one for you.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:07
Thank you. It was a beautiful month in music. So we had number one songs from George Michael and Rick Astley, as you do in the '80s, but we also had Debbie Gibson's very first number one with "Foolish Beat."
Kaykay Brady: 1:22
"Foolish Beat"?
Brooke Suchomel: 1:23
It's her song that you don't know by the title. It's her, like, soulful driving ballad.
Kaykay Brady: 1:30
I was gonna make up a song on the spot and that's what I was gonna do. I was gonna be like, "It's a foolish beat, baby." Did I get it?
Brooke Suchomel: 1:40
No, but I think you should take that. You should run with that and make your own. It could be like how George Michael had two songs called "Freedom," and so you had "Freedom" with Wham!, and then you had "Freedom! '90." It could be "Foolish Beat '21" that you just made.
Kaykay Brady: 1:58
"Foolish Beat KK".
Brooke Suchomel: 1:59
"Kaykay edition." I like that. So those were the number ones, but where you really get the taste of June '88 was with the other songs that didn't hit number one, but were in the top 20. So Kaykay, we have multiple Kaykay karaoke classics in June 1988.
Kaykay Brady: 2:07
Ahaha yes!
Brooke Suchomel: 2:18
Including "Kiss Me Deadly." Lita Ford.
Kaykay Brady: 2:22
Lita Ford! Fuck yeah!
Brooke Suchomel: 2:24
Which you throw down on like nobody's business, literally. And then J.J. Fad's "Supersonic," which is the basis of "Fergalicious," another go-to of yours. And I don't know if you've ever done this in karaoke, but if you haven't I'm going to request it right now, which would be Samantha Fox's "Naughty Girls Need Love Too."
Kaykay Brady: 2:51
I've never done it, but I'm open. I mean, I'm more drawn to Lita Ford because Lita Ford had more of a sort of "fuck you" flavor than, like, "fuck me" flavor.
Brooke Suchomel: 3:01
That's true.
Kaykay Brady: 3:02
I'm more into the "fuck you" flavor.
Brooke Suchomel: 3:04
Right.
Kaykay Brady: 3:05
But I'm open!
Brooke Suchomel: 3:07
Although "Naughty Girls Need Love Too," if you watch the video, and again, we do a video playlist every month too, so you can see the video, the video of "Naughty Girls Need Love Too" is so camp. It's so overtly camp. Like, her very, very, very gay backup dancers, the sass that they are serving in this video is kind of a "fuck you" vibe.
Kaykay Brady: 3:30
I need to watch his immediately.
Brooke Suchomel: 3:32
Yeah, it's good stuff. Great music, June '88. And then, I teased this in the previous episode, but this was an amazing month for movies. So I'm not even going to get into all of them, I'm just going to focus on three of them, which I think are classics of every '80s kid's childhood. You had Big.
Kaykay Brady: 3:53
Solid.
Brooke Suchomel: 3:54
Did you see that in the theaters?
Kaykay Brady: 3:55
I probably did. You?
Brooke Suchomel: 3:57
It's one of my earliest memories of actually seeing a movie in the theater.
Kaykay Brady: 4:01
Oh, exciting. My earliest memory is throwing up in The Jungle Book. I puked.
Brooke Suchomel: 4:08
Any particular reason? You were just so disgusted by the stereotypes and the accents?
Kaykay Brady: 4:16
You know when you're a kid, you're just sick all the time. You just puke at the drop of the hat, you know, you have a fever all the time. Just whatever childhood flu I had or whatever.
Brooke Suchomel: 4:25
Anytime somebody plays "The Bare Necessities," do you get like a gag reflex?
Kaykay Brady: 4:29
Do I vomit immediately? I can't say that I've heard it since. Maybe we should try it live.
Brooke Suchomel: 4:35
All right, let's test it out.
Kaykay Brady: 4:36
This will be like, you know, some sort of YouTube influencer nonsense.
Brooke Suchomel: 4:41
Let's see what sort of emotional audio triggers can make Kaykay puke.
Kaykay Brady: 4:46
This is a middle aged woman's version of some YouTube schtick.
Brooke Suchomel: 4:51
It's so stereotypical. What do you think of when you think of a middle aged female YouTube influencer? You think of somebody...
Kaykay Brady: 4:58
Uh, throwing up to “Bare Necessities!” Uh, duh!
Brooke Suchomel: 5:01
It's such a cliche. Oh, man. Yeah, so Big. Big came out this month, and I remember seeing it in the theater, and I still remember my mom covering my eyes when he touched her boob. I never saw that until I was much older because I remember my mom covering my eyes at that part. So. Big.
Kaykay Brady: 5:22
It's so funny because it's so tame.
Brooke Suchomel: 5:24
It's tame until you go back and you actually watch Big with a modern view, and you're like, wait, this is like a 12 year old child, in a man's body, but he's still a 12 year old child. It problematizes things a little bit.
Kaykay Brady: 5:41
Yeah, I can totally see that. I haven't seen it in a while, so I'm thinking of it through my younger brain.
Brooke Suchomel: 5:47
Right. And I think everybody just remembers like, okay, when I say Big, what do you think of?
Kaykay Brady: 5:52
Of course, the iconic piano scene in FAO Schwarz.
Brooke Suchomel: 5:55
Yes. Which to this day is one of the coolest things I can imagine doing. We also had, at the end of June '88, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which is amazing.
Kaykay Brady: 6:08
I remember that well.
Brooke Suchomel: 6:08
And Coming to America. Those three movies all came out in June 1988. It's kind of the dead zone for TV in June, but for the theater, Phantom of the Opera, your favorite play of all time, your favorite theatrical experience, won seven Tonys. Big month for Phantom of the Opera. And then I was like, I wonder what was going on in the Bronx in June 1988.
Kaykay Brady: 6:19
Nothing good.
Brooke Suchomel: 6:31
What was Kaykay's day to day like at this time?
Kaykay Brady: 6:41
That's not true. There was good. There was a lot of breakdancing.
Brooke Suchomel: 6:44
So I found this story, and I wonder if you remember.
Kaykay Brady: 6:48
Oh, God, yes!
Brooke Suchomel: 6:49
The thing that is so great is that this came up on one of those "On This Day" websites. You know, you can go and it's like, what was the big story of each day. And one of the days had, the big story globally....
Kaykay Brady: 7:05
Oh my God, was a man arrested delivering ice cream to children? Is that what the story is? The Ice Cream Man went down!
Brooke Suchomel: 7:14
Close. Three giant snapping turtles, each weighing over 50 pounds, were found in a Bronx sewage treatment facility. Do you remember this?
Kaykay Brady: 7:23
Wow. I totally do not. That is crazy.
Brooke Suchomel: 7:27
Okay, I was like, that's the biggest thing that happened on this random day in June of 1988? How big of a story was this? Did everybody in the Bronx come to take a look?
Kaykay Brady: 7:38
It was kind of like the Pizza Rat of its day.
Brooke Suchomel: 7:40
Yeah, well, so speaking of pizza, I was like, wait a minute, was this the inspiration for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? I got very excited, but I was like, it feels like that's too late. And I was right, the cartoon was already airing at that time. So maybe that's why it was such a big deal.
Kaykay Brady: 7:56
That would have made my life if you had connected those dots, and it was true. Just some lonely unsuccessful television writer. "I need inspiration!"
Brooke Suchomel: 8:05
Right, 50 pound snapping turtles found in the Bronx sewers. Boom, got it. Inspiration received.
Kaykay Brady: 8:12
It's so funny, because you know, the Bronx was a complete disaster in the '80s. So you'd think they would have bigger fish to fry than turtles.
Brooke Suchomel: 8:20
When you're starting to get to a point where you've got like, almost man-sized turtles...
Kaykay Brady: 8:25
In your infrastructure?
Brooke Suchomel: 8:26
Right, in your sewers...
Kaykay Brady: 8:29
That might say something.
Brooke Suchomel: 8:30
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that might be a metaphor for, let's just say, societal decline.
Kaykay Brady: 8:36
I was extremely afraid of creatures coming out of the toilet.
Brooke Suchomel: 8:41
Dude. Same.
Kaykay Brady: 8:42
You too?
Brooke Suchomel: 8:43
Same.
Kaykay Brady: 8:44
And so maybe I had heard it, I don't know, but I thought there was going to be sharks and snakes coming out of the toilet after me.
Brooke Suchomel: 8:54
"Sharks" is awesome. I'm trying to...
Kaykay Brady: 8:57
Like a baby shark. I mean, I wasn't crazy.
Brooke Suchomel: 9:02
My dad worked for a major food manufacturer who does not sponsor this podcast so I won't name them, but he would get in the mail every month one of those little staple bound brochures about "here's what's going on globally in Major Corporation," whatever. And I was always so bored, I would read anything that came into the house.
Kaykay Brady: 9:29
You'd read that?
Brooke Suchomel: 9:31
Like, I would probably read a light bill, but I would definitely read that. And I remember once, like their "weird news," it would just have like a random section like that, and somebody said that they found a snake in their toilet.
Kaykay Brady: 9:47
Oh no.
Brooke Suchomel: 9:47
This would have been like 30 plus years ago. To this day, I will sometimes still check, is there a snake in my toilet? Never found one...
Kaykay Brady: 9:55
"Tired of these motherfucking snakes in this motherfucking toilet!”
Brooke Suchomel: 9:59
Yeah. Who isn't?
Kaykay Brady: 10:01
I mean, it's reasonable, because the consequences are very high if it were to be so. So it's worth a check! It's all I'm saying.
Brooke Suchomel: 10:10
Right. Likelihood? Very, very low. But if...
Kaykay Brady: 10:15
Consequences? High.
Brooke Suchomel: 10:16
Very high. Yes, exactly. So do you know why, like, was there any reason why you thought that there might be a snake or a shark in your toilet?
Kaykay Brady: 10:24
I think there was a movie. And maybe our listeners can help, the way that my sister helps me remember everything from the '80s. I think there was a movie about sharks coming out of toilets and going into swimming pools. It was not the prequel to Sharknado.
Brooke Suchomel: 10:42
Okay. So, comes out of the toilet. Pulls itself out of the toilet. Walks on its little tail, you know...
Kaykay Brady: 10:50
Now I see it with like a top hat. "Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal."
Brooke Suchomel: 10:55
Goes through the kitchen, out the sliding glass door…
Kaykay Brady: 10:56
And into the pool.
Brooke Suchomel: 11:01
Right. And then just does, like, a lovely forward dive into the pool.
Kaykay Brady: 11:07
No, it was more like the shark was coming into different pipe systems, so a toilet or a pool. I just remember being so horrified, and I also couldn't swim in a pool with my eyes closed, like ever again. I just wouldn't do it. I would only swim with my eyes open underwater.
Brooke Suchomel: 11:27
Do you require contacts now?
Kaykay Brady: 11:30
I do now, so it's kind of an impossibility now.
Brooke Suchomel: 11:34
Right, might have something to do with all that chlorine that got in while you were looking for sharks.
Kaykay Brady: 11:40
Good point.
Brooke Suchomel: 11:40
But as you were saying, the consequences are high if you miss it.
Kaykay Brady: 11:44
Very high. Exactly.
Brooke Suchomel: 11:45
So, worth it. Worth it. So that's what was going on in June 1988, and the 14th Baby-sitters Club book, Hello, Mallory, was released.
Kaykay Brady: 11:58
"Hello, Mallory." Although I sort of made it sound like The Silence of the Lambs guy instead of Newman.
Brooke Suchomel: 12:06
Even better.
Kaykay Brady: 12:07
Even better. "Hello, Mallory."
Brooke Suchomel: 12:09
Poor Mallory. But it's time for some...
Kaykay Brady: 12:11
This book was so good!
Brooke Suchomel: 12:12
This was a good one. This was a rich one.
Kaykay Brady: 12:14
I'm so excited.
Brooke Suchomel: 12:15
I'm looking forward to this conversation. But before we get into the conversation, time for some back cover copy, and I quote, "Mallory Pike has always wanted to be a member of The Baby-sitters Club. The Baby-sitters are so much fun to be around, and so grown up. Now the club members have invited Mallory to a meeting. This might be her big chance! But the Baby-sitters don't make it easy. First Claudia makes Mal feel like a baby on her first sitting job. Then they give her a written test — with questions nobody could answer! Mallory's beginning to think she doesn't want to be a part of the Baby-sitters Club. Maybe she and her new friend Jessi will start a club of their own… It's time to show those Baby-sitters what a couple of new girls can do!" End quote.
Kaykay Brady: 13:01
Boom.
Brooke Suchomel: 13:02
So we've met Mallory many times in previous books, as a babysitting charge and an assistant, but this is the first book that she's narrated, so it's the first time that we're able to get into her head. So Kaykay, how did your perception of Mallory and frankly, your perception of the world of Stoneybrook, change with this new protagonist role?
Kaykay Brady: 13:31
Your question gets right to what I thought was so brilliant about this book was the shift in perspective. All of the previous books are from the point of view of the members of The Baby-sitters Club, and then all of a sudden this is from the point of view of Mallory, and you see The Baby-sitters Club through Mallory's eyes. And it's sort of like the power structure is completely shifted.
Brooke Suchomel: 13:55
This is a book about power structures.
Kaykay Brady: 13:57
Exactly. It's just so cool, because you never see books... Okay, there's always a main character who's the hero, whose shit doesn't stink, and you know, everything is sympathetic towards their life, their needs, their goals. Then all of a sudden, she shifts it to another person, and you realize that the main characters have their own fucking issues, and they are being shitheads to Mallory.
Brooke Suchomel: 14:19
Right.
Kaykay Brady: 14:20
So it's like the author is right away having the kids realize, "Wow, you know, maybe I'm not always the hero."
Brooke Suchomel: 14:27
Yeah.
Kaykay Brady: 14:28
"Maybe sometimes I'm the villain." It was utterly brilliant. I don't know, what did you think?
Brooke Suchomel: 14:32
I love your line about, "Maybe sometimes I am the villain." It reminds me of...I want to say it's, like, Hot Fuzz? I don't think it's Hot Fuzz. It's where the character is like, "Wait, are we the baddies?" I've been thinking of that a lot in the past few years, and it really came to mind in this book as well. Like, I found this book to be super topical for today. It's really amazing. And I think to your point about how the change in perspective is so helpful to keep any character from being, you know, that Mary Sue character, the protagonist who is perfect. And a perfect protagonist, I'm sorry, those books are boring as hell.
Kaykay Brady: 15:19
Boring as hell.
Brooke Suchomel: 15:19
Right? So boring. And so one of the reasons why I think this book series is so good is that you don't have a single protagonist. Your protagonist shifts every single book, so you get to see everyone from a different perspective, and then you get to go back into their heads. So you see the humanity, really, of every character. But I think what really struck me about this book, in a way that I had totally forgotten about, is you actually only see the Baby-sitters Club members in very limited settings. And you only see them in the context of the power that they wield. Because in other books, even if the focus is not on any given character, that character still exists in the world as a friend, as a classmate, as somebody outside of just "colleague," and even to that point, when it's about the Baby-sitters Club, they're colleagues. They are all in this club together, whereas Mallory is not in the club.
Kaykay Brady: 16:27
Yeah, literally the phrase itself, "in the club."
Brooke Suchomel: 16:29
Right, literally she's outside of it. So you get a protagonist from somebody who is external to the Baby-sitters Club for the very first time in this book. Also, you don't really see any of the other characters in other contexts, because as Ann M. Martin, I think, does a really good job framing it, Mallory's in sixth grade. The other girls are in eighth grade. Mallory doesn't even really see them at school. They're in a different wing of the school, you know, they would have different lunch periods, she tries to find them to see them, she can't even find them at school.
Kaykay Brady: 17:05
Yeah, they live completely apart, and she really puts them on a pedestal, too.
Brooke Suchomel: 17:09
Exactly. Then once she gets closer in trying to join their club, trying to move from this external, held at arm's length distance, to actually get inside that structure, she sees the barriers that they erect to keep her out of that structure. Up until now, what we've seen, none of these characters have ever been presented as perfect. Maybe Dawn is more idealized, because we just haven't spent as much time with her as we've spent with the other characters, because she comes in later. But like, you've seen all of the characters' flaws, but then their flaws are always balanced out by their positive attributes.
Kaykay Brady: 18:02
Yeah.
Brooke Suchomel: 18:03
Then in this book, because you're not spending as much time with them, those positive attributes aren't outweighing the flaws that we see.
Kaykay Brady: 18:12
Yeah. And also, if you think about it, the books up until now, they're always at the bottom of the totem pole. They're either equal power with whoever they're interacting with, or they're below.
Brooke Suchomel: 18:25
Yep.
Kaykay Brady: 18:26
Right? Logan is male, so he's got enhanced status. Shannon is their age, so equal status.
Brooke Suchomel: 18:34
But she's rich.
Kaykay Brady: 18:36
And she's rich, which is also elevated status. For the first time, you see somebody with lower status, because of the age, and it could be that, you know, it's just the perspective, they don't seem as shiny and good. But it also could just be that they're not aware of the ways that they're changing when they get a little power. And if you think about the way that they've been so powerless in their lives, with their parents divorcing, with the sort of changes happening in this period in history, it totally makes sense that when they get a little power, they might get a little crazy. And I think about the way that you can really read this book as this is how people moved from being parented too little, to parenting too much. And this is the age, right? This is the age of folks that then grew up to be helicopter parents. And you can really see it in the experience of these kids. Nobody was taking care of home, nobody's taking care of the siblings, or they weren't enough. I mean, they weren't totally abused. But, you know, that might lead the kids to then go on and overparent as a way of fixing the sort of deficiencies that they had in childhood. I think you're really seeing it here in the way that they're treating Mallory and their whole like, "Kids are so precious. You cannot take a single risk with a child, what is wrong with you?"
Brooke Suchomel: 20:06
Right. Although, like, "Well, I did see you be like, 'Hey, three year old Jamie Newton, go play on the median by yourself,'" you know what I mean?
Kaykay Brady: 20:15
Yeah, definitely. No doubt, no doubt.
Brooke Suchomel: 20:19
So when you're saying that we're seeing the shift from sort of, at best, benign neglect to oppressive helicopter parenting in this book, was there any scene in particular that made you think about that shift?
Kaykay Brady: 20:38
Well, it was mostly the way that they're testing her, and the way that they are expecting her to have absolute knowledge of children. You can sort of see that it's coming out of their anxiety that they don't have control over this person, and they're worried that this person isn't going to bring the same quality that they're bringing. You can see the way that they're responding to that anxiety by over controlling, and over controlling another person. I don't know, I could just imagine all of these kids being grown ups interviewing babysitters or au pairs in 15 years, 20 years, and just something really clicked for me in the ways that kids that were brought up in the '80s. A lot of them then went on to have a sort of overcorrection to the experiences they had, to where they really couldn't let go of control at all.
Brooke Suchomel: 21:37
Right.
Kaykay Brady: 21:37
Because they're saying those things to Mallory, "kids are just so precious, you can't take any chances," I mean, they're just so extreme in the way that they're speaking to her. That's what really made it click for me.
Brooke Suchomel: 21:49
Right, how could you possibly babysit for a child for an hour and a half if you can't draw an anatomically detailed diagram of the entire digestive system?
Kaykay Brady: 22:01
Correct. And that's really just a reaction to anxiety, as I read it. It was just like, "Oh my God, we have to figure out a way to control this, we have to figure out a way to make this a sure thing," because everything is unsure in their lives. So whenever they get a little bit of power, and they're in a little more of a place of responsibility than they even were before, it's like, “try to make it as sure a thing as possible.” Instead of, of course, addressing the underlying emotions they're having about a world that's constantly shifting under their feet.
Brooke Suchomel: 22:34
Yeah, I like your take on it as anxiety. You can definitely tell that you've got the adolescent counseling perspective on it, and it's making me rethink my own interpretation, which was perhaps a little less generous. And I think that a lot of this has to do with not just the treatment of Mallory, but also what we see in the treatment of Jessi, who is, as we are told, the first black student in grade six at Stoneybrook Middle School. Stoneybrook is so freaking white that Mallory was immediately able to say, "There are six black kids in our entire school and they are in seventh..."
Kaykay Brady: 23:17
Yeah, they don't even like the French in Stoneybrook.
Brooke Suchomel: 23:20
Right!
Kaykay Brady: 23:21
They think the French are fucking spies.
Brooke Suchomel: 23:22
Right. So I was very focused on this emphasis on status hierarchies, and the desire that a group has to maintain power by oppressing people outside of the group, and how they define that. I was looking at it from more of a structural standpoint, and not so much from an individual standpoint, which, I think your take on it is more empathetic to the individual characters, for sure.
Kaykay Brady: 23:57
They also are not necessarily mutually exclusive, because there's actually a lot of research coming out now that's basically saying social hierarchies are there to quell anxiety.
Brooke Suchomel: 24:07
Hmm. For those who are higher in the hierarchy, whatever that individual hierarchy might be. Because somebody who is at a prestigious level within one hierarchy can be at a very low level or excluded entirely from another hierarchy. So where they find that power, they're going to latch on to it to quell that anxiety.
Kaykay Brady: 24:30
Yes. And then also people manipulating that anxiety, right? Class anxiety, status anxiety, manipulating that anxiety to have people oppress each other, so that the system stays invisible. So I think your read and my read live together. I don't think they cancel each other out at all.
Brooke Suchomel: 24:51
Yeah. No, I wasn't seeing it as they cancel each other out. It's just, again, it just goes to show that this particular book, and I think all of the Baby-sitters Club books, honestly, they're all so rich in the way you can interpret them. I mean, sometimes they're more overt in the message that the author wants you to take away from it. But I think, in this particular book, it's clear that Ann M. Martin is trying to make a point about unfair treatment.
Kaykay Brady: 25:25
Definitely.
Brooke Suchomel: 25:25
I think that much is clear. There's a reason why Jessi and her family's treatment as a black family moving into Stoneybrook is presented at the same time as we see Mallory attempting to gain entrance into the Baby-sitters Club. These are parallel stories, for sure. But I think that what you can read into it about, "Okay, why is it that way?" You can go so many different ways, and that is also reflective of reality. Everything in life is complicated. There is no black and white.
Kaykay Brady: 26:09
It's so true.
Brooke Suchomel: 26:10
Everything is a shade of grey, with very few exceptions. And I think we live in a world that is used to Good and Evil. And it's like, "Well, that's not how it is." You can see, even little things, like Mrs. Pike is surprised when she sees Jessi in their kitchen, when Mallory brings Jessi over.
Kaykay Brady: 26:33
Yeah, she's not overtly hostile.
Brooke Suchomel: 26:35
No, she's not.
Kaykay Brady: 26:36
Just surprised.
Brooke Suchomel: 26:36
She's surprised. And Ann M. Martin didn't have to put that in there. She didn't have to say she's surprised, but she does. So that just goes to reiterate how isolated and excluded Jessi must feel at all times. Because when she's introduced, you see, you know, students immediately start shooting rubber bands at her head, and the teacher does nothing. She brings up all the time that Jessi is being mistreated, and the adults around her aren't doing anything about it. Looking at it now, it's really brave to present things that way in 1988.
Kaykay Brady: 27:22
It's very unusual. This is a very unusual direct assessment, look at racial tension.
Brooke Suchomel: 27:29
Yes.
Kaykay Brady: 27:30
Like, if you think about all the shit that was happening in the '80s, there were definitely shows that featured black protagonists. But nobody was really sitting down in those shows and addressing race, it's just like, "Oh, they're black. They're white. Everybody's in harmony. La la la la la! We have no problems here."
Brooke Suchomel: 27:46
Right, and a portrayal that like, "Racism is KKK members burning crosses and overtly using racial slurs. That's what racism is, so you don't want to do that." I think we all got that message loud and clear. But what wasn't ever addressed was all of the ways that oppression and marginalization and exclusion come in, in ways that aren't so overt.
Kaykay Brady: 28:19
Yeah, the systematic elements.
Brooke Suchomel: 28:21
Absolutely. We see overt examples of racism in this book. We absolutely do. But then we also see a lot of Jessi just sitting alone at lunch. Nobody will go sit with her, you know?
Kaykay Brady: 28:36
Yeah. And microaggressions, too.
Brooke Suchomel: 28:38
Microaggressions for days, as well as that little turd shooting rubber bands at her head.
Kaykay Brady: 28:44
That fucker!
Brooke Suchomel: 28:45
And the bigger turd of the teacher who saw it and did nothing. That is an experience of racism that hopefully people know now, I think we're much further along in 2021 than we were in 1988, when this book was written, at understanding all of the various harmful ways that bias and marginalization can seep into society, but I don't know that we were really getting that message at the time. And she isn't, obviously, overtly coming out and saying, "Look at all of these examples of marginalization and microaggressions." We didn't even really have terms for that at the time, right? But you can see that at least she was conscious of that. And, you know, this is obviously a book written by a white woman who had plenty of privilege. Just to be able to be an author, and have that be your job, in and of itself is a privilege. So she was coming from a position of privilege and certainly we shouldn't take what Ann M. Martin says about racial relations in the '80s as gospel, by any stretch of the imagination. But reading it now, it was interesting to see this sort of complex way that racism and marginalization was addressed in this book, in a time in which I think we were presented with racism in much more explicit black and white terms. And that presentation of black and whiteness of racism, obviously not just in terms of racial groups, but "black and white" in terms of clear binaries on what racism is and is not, how harmful that actually is. So that you think, you know, it's kind of like now when we're trying to combat the systemic racism that pervades all levels of our society, and particularly talking about policing. You will hear people say, "Well, the police have never treated me badly." And it's like, you're white. Of course you haven't seen it. You are not in the group that has these experiences. You are excluded from that experience, due to the nature of your skin color, so just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. I think that a lot of that comes from this definition that we were given of what racism and prejudice is, and to see little inklings of that in this children's book that was written 33 years ago was really interesting to me.
Kaykay Brady: 31:27
Yeah, it's really forward thinking.
Brooke Suchomel: 31:30
Again, this is in the '80s, so I think the attempt is good, but you do see some issues with the sort of dismissal of the "Hey, Stoneybook is racist as fuck. Were you aware?" conversation that they have at the end, where Kristy is like, "Oh, I can't imagine that racism will be a problem for any of our clients. That's just not going to be a problem for our people." And it's like, "Ehhh..."
Kaykay Brady: 31:55
I mean, a very realistic portrayal of what a white kid would have said in that time period.
Brooke Suchomel: 32:02
Yes, and frankly even now, to this day.
Kaykay Brady: 32:05
Definitely. Definitely.
Brooke Suchomel: 32:06
I remember, even myself, being like, "Oh, what do you mean that Iowa's racist? No, we're not Southern." You now what I mean? I think a lot of people grow up with that willful blindness, because you don't want to imagine that the people that are around you can be that way.
Kaykay Brady: 32:24
It's a psychological bias that humans have. They have a bias that they believe what they see is what everyone sees. It's just how brains work, so you have to be taught that it's not true, and you also need to be taught about that bias.
Brooke Suchomel: 32:37
Yes. I think that's why there's so much of a focus on using terms like "lived experience." Your lived experience, not just what you've heard, but what you have actually directly experienced, that is your experience and your experience only. That is not any other individual's experience. So when people are talking about what their lived experience is, if it differs from yours, that doesn't mean that it's not valid, because they're living a different life and having different experiences. But that's still a concept that people still have a ways to go to understand.
Kaykay Brady: 33:13
People are still challenged with this.
Brooke Suchomel: 33:14
And it is challenging, because everybody only sees their own life. You only see what's in front of you.
Kaykay Brady: 33:19
I mean, the human brain is the human brain. It's a lifelong process of figuring it out and working with it.
Brooke Suchomel: 33:27
Yep, definitely. I'd like to hope that we've come a long way in the 33 years since this was written, although I think what's happened is a lot of the things that used to be sort of secret, and like, "So long as you don't let your biases scream out in the overt ways that we've been taught is racist and inappropriate, then that bias doesn't exist," I think now people are starting to learn that that's not true. For some people, they see that as justification for then just going ahead and screaming out that bias. And I think other people are seeing that as like, "Oh wow, I really need to work on myself." So...interesting to see how it all plays out.
Kaykay Brady: 34:09
We're here to encourage the latter.
Brooke Suchomel: 34:11
We definitely encourage the latter.
Kaykay Brady: 34:12
And we try to encourage it in ourselves.
Brooke Suchomel: 34:14
Absolutely, yeah. None of us are perfect.
Kaykay Brady: 34:15
Nope.
Brooke Suchomel: 34:15
I'm certainly not. But wanting, striving to be better every day. Not necessarily for perfection, but try to be better.
Kaykay Brady: 34:23
Yeah, and then also just modeling humility on that front. And modeling that, like, everybody's gonna make mistakes, and that is part of the process.
Brooke Suchomel: 34:33
Totally.
Kaykay Brady: 34:34
And you don't need to withdraw from the process because you're struggling and you don't know and you're making mistakes. Having the humility to be like, "I don't need to be perfect in this, but I need to keep trying. I need to keep trying to be better every day." God, we can have a whole podcast on white privilege for like another four hours.
Brooke Suchomel: 34:55
For sure. Well, we have Jessi in the series now, so I have a feeling that this topic is not going to go away anytime soon.
Kaykay Brady: 35:07
The other thing is that she does something really skillful, which is, she sort of deconstructs the power paradigm by having you empathize with Mallory.
Brooke Suchomel: 35:21
Yeah.
Kaykay Brady: 35:23
They've done really cool psychological experiments where they have someone have a little bit of an experience, and then someone tells them a story about someone else having that experience, and they can empathize 1000 times more. So it's sort of what you were saying before, they really set up Mallory as being an outsider, and so for the white 10 year old, 12 year old, 13 year old that's reading this book, all of a sudden they're placed in the outsider role. And so they can more greatly empathize with Jessi, who has even more of an outsider status. So I thought that was really skillful, and you could really miss it. Because ostensibly, any of the plot action of this book can just be summed up as really simple, but you can really miss like the very cool complex things that are going on underneath.
Brooke Suchomel: 36:15
Yeah, to your point about how if you get people to put themselves into the shoes of, to, you know, have some sort of an experience and then say, "Oh, this other person who might be different from you also had this experience," it reminds me of a couple of episodes ago when we discussed how if you tell someone what to think, they're much more likely to put up a wall, versus if you get them to open up their minds to other ideas and come to conclusions on their own, it's more likely to stick.
Kaykay Brady: 36:52
Exactly.
Brooke Suchomel: 36:54
That can be used in really damaging ways, as in the ways that a lot of right wing propaganda is, you know, we talked about it, where it's like, "You're smart, you think for yourself," you get people like Rush Limbaugh who basically poisoned, and I've seen it personally firsthand, targeted at isolated people, particularly in rural communities, who might be feeling like they are kind of lost in the changes that are happening in society, and seeing that that is an opportunity. You can get into their heads, and you can get them to think what you want them to think if you portray yourself as their friend. So it's like, "You're smart, you think for yourself," get them buttered up, get them to listen to you. And then bam, hit 'em with the toxicity and the bullshit that will bring down everybody else's lives around them as well as their own.
Kaykay Brady: 37:45
Yeah.
Brooke Suchomel: 37:46
Or, you can use that to get people to actually feel empathetic towards other people and to see the commonalities that they have, right? So I think you're totally right, I almost hope that people reading this wouldn't see the skill that Ann M. Martin is displaying.
Kaykay Brady: 38:06
Yeah, I really don't think, especially not kids, they're not going to see that skill at all. I mean, they're not even going to know that that's happening to them, that they're empathizing with Mallory, that their mind is being opened, that their skills and feelings are being tapped.
Brooke Suchomel: 38:22
Totally.
Kaykay Brady: 38:23
They wouldn't know it, of course they wouldn't know it. So that's, to me, why it's so skillful. Nobody makes a grand speech about race or anything. I mean, it's unreal, it's so ahead of its time. I just can't think of another book or another show or movie that was thinking along these lines at the time.
Brooke Suchomel: 38:44
Right, without beating you over the head that this is the message.
Kaykay Brady: 38:47
That's what I mean.
Brooke Suchomel: 38:49
And then you're like, "I get it." You end up getting like, "Ugh, okay, I hear you," and you end up kind of droning it out, being like, "Okay, I won't ever use racial slurs," you know? And it's like, just because you don't use racial slurs against people, that doesn't mean that you're not racist. And I think that we have a ton of people who think that right now because of the way that that message was communicated.
Kaykay Brady: 39:12
You know, it really shows the way that, one of the things Ann M. does through this whole series is she's opening your heart. All of the experiences is a heart opening, not a heart closing. It's a mind opening, not a mind closing. So for all the things that we nitpick about and say, "Holy shit, '80s nonsense." The true flow of the book is so true to that principle of open heart, open mind. I think it's got to be why so many kids took this series and got so much out of it. I was talking to a friend the other day and she's like, "I love your podcast, and I loved the Baby-sitters Club books. It made me realize there was a place called Connecticut."
Brooke Suchomel: 39:57
This is actually all the Connecticut Tourism Bureau. Yeah, it was sponsored by the State of Connecticut.
Kaykay Brady: 40:04
So she's a California kid, right?
Brooke Suchomel: 40:05
Yeah.
Kaykay Brady: 40:06
Anyway, so she was just talking about that kind of stuff, and you realize this book series was so seminal for so many kids. And yes, it's the little fun things like that, but it's more than that. It's the heart opening. It's the mind opening.
Brooke Suchomel: 40:19
Yeah. I mean, it's really the reason why we're doing this podcast in the first place, as we discussed in the very first episode. You know, you talked about getting people to have an experience, and then hear from other people that have had that same experience to make that connection, how critical that is in developing empathy in a world that can often feel every day less and less empathetic. But also, I think, it's those poles, right?
Kaykay Brady: 40:50
Yeah, the binaries.
Brooke Suchomel: 40:51
This book feels so timely because it is a book that is 100% about power structures, and how people wield power when they get it.
Kaykay Brady: 40:58
Well, and the fact that this is the group that we've been following for so long, gives you empathy for the ways that even this group of kids that you like, and you know that they're good people, the way that they fall into those power structures. They understand that they've been doing that by the end, and they sort of try to repair.
Brooke Suchomel: 41:16
Right.
Kaykay Brady: 41:17
And then also the vulnerability to group think and group pressure, you see that a lot. And Ann M. does a fantastic job of writing these scenes where, I think people are pressuring Claudia to look something up or say something a particular way, and she does it. Because, you know, Kristy is at her back saying, "You gotta do it this way, this is the way it goes," right? So there's also that sense of, when groups get together, what happens to the human mind and the human heart? They close. They can close.
Brooke Suchomel: 41:50
Right, because they feel like "all of our needs are met within this circle," you know? And that's never the case. Not to get too kumbaya, but we're all connected. We all live within a system. And when any part of the system fails, that ripple effects to all parts of the system. So a broken system, even if you're like, "I'm self contained within one part of it, I'm okay," you're not, because you exist within a system. And so the very nature of progress should be working towards getting all parts of a system to function equally well. Because until that happens, everything within a system is in danger. The system itself is in danger.
Kaykay Brady: 42:37
Totally.
Brooke Suchomel: 42:37
So I think, you know, you see Stoneybrook as thinking that it's a closed system. Right? Stoneybrook as being like, "Wait a minute, these bougie Manhattanites with permed hair have moved out of this house. And now we have a black family from New Jersey, and that is throwing off the system." Nobody comes, the Welcome Wagon doesn't come over, and Jessi notices it and she remarks on it.
Kaykay Brady: 43:09
Yeah, of course she does.
Brooke Suchomel: 43:09
And Mallory is, like, stunned to see the way that Jessi and her family are being treated. To your point, she identifies, the very first page is Mallory talking about who she is. And she starts off by saying she's got glasses. The very first page is just focusing on the glasses that she has to wear. Quote is, "If you think it's easy to blend in when you come from an eight kid family, wear glasses, and furthermore are the only one you know with a head of curly hair, you're wrong." So I don't know if blending in is as much the point as fitting in. You know, she feels like she doesn't really fit. She talks a lot about how she doesn't have a best friend, she wonders what that must be like. You know, she's got a lot of responsibility that's put on her plate. It seems like she's never been allowed to really truly be a kid, given that her mom had eight kids under the age of six at one point. And so she feels isolated and she's trying to gain entrance into group with the Baby-sitters Club much in the same way that Jessi is like, "Okay, now I'm in this town. I come from a town in New Jersey," that isn't real. I looked it up. But she comes from a predominantly black community where her entire neighborhood is black, and she had all of her family members on the same street. So she comes from a very tight knit system where she perhaps does quote unquote "blend in" in a way that Mallory seems to be looking for. And she knows that she definitely does not here in Stoneybrook, and Stoneybrook just makes that isolation feel much more stark for her. So it starts off the book by Mallory framing how she feels out of place. And then she and Jessi, when she goes over to Jessi's house for the first time and goes in her room, this is page 38 and 39, they start talking about, "Oh, wow, looks like you like horse stories," and Jessi's like, "I like any story." So they're bonding over their love of books, and then they're bonding over how they both wear glasses, and how neither of their moms will let them get pierced ears, and they're the oldest kids in their family. They're focusing on the ways that they're the same. And they find comfort in that in a way that like, I don't think it's presented as either of them are looking for a mirror image. They're just looking for a way not to go through this world alone. To feel like they have someone that they can bond with, somebody that they can feel not as isolated as they are, and that's the thing that brings them together. And it's the thing that ultimately gets them what they want.
Kaykay Brady: 46:08
Yes, power to the people.
Brooke Suchomel: 46:10
Hell yeah. I mean, that's what I had for, you know, what they're fighting, is they're fighting these power structures that are hostile and exclusionary.
Kaykay Brady: 46:20
Yeah, I had the same.
Brooke Suchomel: 46:21
And the tool that they're using is solidarity, right?
Kaykay Brady: 46:26
Amen.
Brooke Suchomel: 46:26
They basically give two middle fingers up to that exclusionary system. They don't take the shit, they're like, "Here's what I want. What we want is, we love babysitting, we want to babysit. And if the Baby-sitters Club won't listen, fuck it, we'll start our own club." And they use that to get leverage. I mean, they basically unionize.
Kaykay Brady: 46:50
I have the exact same thing, and I think they also use empathy. So they use solidarity and they use empathy. They're empathizing with each other. They're crossing any divides that they might have between each other with empathy. And then also, actually, they have a fair amount of empathy for the Baby-sitters Club, even after they're treated miserably. They don't go to war with them, they really try to kind of understand where they're coming from. And then in the end, you know, everybody can kind of come together. So it's both the solidarity and the fighting of the power structure, and seeing the human beings within the power structure so that there can be some sort of reintegration of the whole. And I thought that was really cool, because I thought it might be that they were going to spin off into another book series or something. And they were going to be at war with the Baby-sitters. I was like, "Fuck yeah, I can get behind that," but anyway. But I thought it was kind of cool that they all came together in the end, and the Baby-sitters Club realized that they were being douchebags and fixed their shit.
Brooke Suchomel: 47:57
To your point about how Mallory and Jessi, the way that they're like, "We're gonna make sure that we work this out together," bridging that divide to get to the point about hierarchies and power structure, when Mallory is like, "Okay, who should do what? What officer should we be?" And Jessi is just like, "Let's not have officers, let's be equal."
Kaykay Brady: 48:18
Yeah, that was so cool!
Brooke Suchomel: 48:19
I really liked that line. And I'll say, you know, there is certainly something to be said for hierarchies in terms of, or at least defined roles, not so much hierarchy...
Kaykay Brady: 48:32
Oh my God, it's so hard to have a hierarchy-less organization. I've worked in them. They're really fucking hard.
Brooke Suchomel: 48:36
Yeah, I have worked in companies that have attempted it, and it was not great. At least the thing that's important, though, is to have a definition of roles and to have clear ways of communicating, and to have empathy be at the heart of it. So it's like, yes, you might be, quote unquote, "higher" in the hierarchy. But that doesn't mean that you're better. It just means that you might have more responsibility. Moving, quote unquote, "up the ladder" in and of itself, that doesn't mean that you are better than or more important than anyone, it just means that your job is different.
Kaykay Brady: 49:11
I'm so glad you're saying that, because it was another thing I saw, which was, if a group is having success, all of a sudden, they believe that they are extremely high status, and they deserve to be there. And other people don't deserve to be there. So you kind of saw that thought process working out in this book.
Brooke Suchomel: 49:30
Right, because they're so busy. So they're like, "We're so busy, we must be..."
Kaykay Brady: 49:33
Yeah, they're like, "We're the shit." They've forgotten that they don't know how to tie a tourniquet. They don't know how to draw the human digestive system. But they're amazing! Why the fuck should they have to? But this kid better know how to do it! That's a great example of how groups work and how people's psychology changes the higher they go up in an organizational chain. It was really cool.
Brooke Suchomel: 49:54
Yeah, you set standards for others, even those that are at lower positions in the hierarchy that you're in, you set higher standards for them than you set for yourself.
Kaykay Brady: 50:06
Exactly. Exactly.
Brooke Suchomel: 50:07
And that does come up at the end, where that is acknowledged, and I wanna say, is it Dawn? Is Dawn the one that points out what they're doing?
Kaykay Brady: 50:18
I think it might have been Dawn.
Brooke Suchomel: 50:19
Yep, it is. Excellent. Yeah, it's Dawn. So Dawn says, "I don't think we should expect more from anyone else than we do from ourselves."
Kaykay Brady: 50:28
Snap.
Brooke Suchomel: 50:29
There's Dawn, the one who I maintain has the highest emotional intelligence of anyone else in The Baby-sitters Club. Went along with it, but in the end, she's the one that's like, "Maybe this wasn't cool." And we see like what happens when you hold people to those standards that they can't possibly meet when Mallory, the way that she's being scrutinized when she's on her sort of test run with Claudia, who was looking over her shoulder, and she's like, "Every move I make is being monitored." I mean, it just immediately made me think of, like, what it must be like to be a black person who is pulled over, or black person who is shopping in a department store. You know, where it's like because you know that you're being looked at at all times, you get kind of, like, jumpy and looking over your shoulder like, "Okay, who's looking at me now?" And that act of being like, "Okay, I know I'm being monitored," people will use that as justification for the monitoring. It was the same way with Mallory. Every little thing she did, Claudia is there taking notes and correcting and pointing out every little bitty thing, not even that she did wrong, but that she did differently from what Claudia herself would do, and that in and of itself is wrong. It was really reflective of the way that I think we see prejudice and implicit and, frankly, explicit bias play out in society today. So this book is deep. It's a good one.
Kaykay Brady: 52:05
It's so deep. What did you have for '80s Moments?
Brooke Suchomel: 52:09
For '80s Moments, it's funny, there wasn't a whole lot of other...
Kaykay Brady: 52:14
Oh my God, for some reason, I found a million.
Brooke Suchomel: 52:16
Did you?
Kaykay Brady: 52:17
Yeah!
Brooke Suchomel: 52:18
I have one. So can I give you my one and then you can go to town?
Kaykay Brady: 52:22
Yeah.
Brooke Suchomel: 52:22
Okay. So my Most '80s Moment was the name that Mallory and Jessi picked for their club, which is Kids Incorporated.
Kaykay Brady: 52:32
Kids Incorporated!
Brooke Suchomel: 52:33
Which was a show on the Disney Channel. This was a show that I always wanted to watch, but we didn't subscribe to the Disney Channel, so I was never able to watch it.
Kaykay Brady: 52:41
Oh, boo.
Brooke Suchomel: 52:42
But it took me right back full circle to, who was in Kids Incorporated? Fergie. "Fergalicious" started out with Kids Incorporated.
Kaykay Brady: 52:53
Whoa. Okay, so I did watch Kids Incorporated, and I love Fergie, and I've never made that connection that I probably watched her.
Brooke Suchomel: 52:58
Yes. Stacy Ferguson. So she was Stacy in Kids Incorporated.
Kaykay Brady: 53:04
Holy shit.
Brooke Suchomel: 53:04
And so I did a little research. I was like, wait, Kids Incorporated was definitely a thing by 1988. And it was.
Kaykay Brady: 53:11
I did the same, yeah.
Brooke Suchomel: 53:12
It was. But it said she was the youngest cast member when the show started in 1984, and then by the time she left six years later, she was the oldest cast member. So Fergie is the OG of Kids Incorporated.
Kaykay Brady: 53:28
"We're Kids Incorporated! K! I! D! S!"
Brooke Suchomel: 53:32
So I knew the theme song. Like, the Kids Incorporated theme song will come into my head just randomly.
Kaykay Brady: 53:38
Same!
Brooke Suchomel: 53:38
Every few months, I'm washing the dishes, the Kids Incorporated theme song pops into my head.
Kaykay Brady: 53:43
It was like some psychologist banged this out in a lab, like, "How do we create a song that is so painful and yet will never leave your psyche until the day that you die?"
Brooke Suchomel: 53:52
They mastered that assignment, so “well done” to that psychologist. That was my '80s moment. What were some of your favorite ones, since you had so many?
Kaykay Brady: 54:02
Well, I can't remember what mom it was, but the quote was something like, "Mom says she has better things to do than pack eight lunches five times a week." And I was like, "You go, '80s mama." So again, here was the '80s where like, it was okay for moms to have things they wouldn't do for their children.
Brooke Suchomel: 54:18
Oh yeah. Well, this was obviously before the invention of the Lunchable.
Kaykay Brady: 54:22
Sure.
Brooke Suchomel: 54:22
The Lunchable solved that problem.
Kaykay Brady: 54:24
So that was one. And then I think it surprisingly was Claudia in a babysitting assignment who said, "We don't ask the kids what they want to eat. We tell them what they're eating." And I was like, that's also very '80s. I don't know about you, but my parents weren't like, "What do you feel like for dinner?" It was like, "We're having pot roast. Deal."
Brooke Suchomel: 54:44
Right.
Kaykay Brady: 54:44
"Deal." So that felt very '80s, and I think that's probably changed for a lot of people. And then "jinx." People are doing jinxes all over the place in this book.
Brooke Suchomel: 54:53
Oh yeah, the pinkie jinx.
Kaykay Brady: 54:54
The pinkie jinx, which I remember, and then I had Kids Incorporated.
Brooke Suchomel: 54:58
Yeah. I'm sure Kids Incorporated is on YouTube.
Kaykay Brady: 55:02
Oh yeah, I'm sure.
Brooke Suchomel: 55:03
And so now I'm gonna, like, for the first time in my life, I just might actually finally get to watch Kids Incorporated.
Kaykay Brady: 55:10
You live that dream! Now you have pit bulls, you don't have bunnies, you've got pit bulls, and you're gonna be able to watch Kids Incorporated. You see what grown up life is like?
Brooke Suchomel: 55:18
I mean, if you would have told eight year old me that one day I could watch all the Kids Incorporated I want, with a dog on either side of me, while eating candy for breakfast if I wanted to? Holy shit, like, this is the best part of being an adult.
Kaykay Brady: 55:35
You hear that, kids? It gets better. It gets better.
Brooke Suchomel: 55:38
It does. There's a lot of bullshit that comes to aging, but there's also candy for breakfast.
Kaykay Brady: 55:45
Yeah, your body falls apart, but hey, you get to watch whatever you want.
Brooke Suchomel: 55:48
Yeah, you can exacerbate the process by eating candy for breakfast if you choose to. Speaking of candy for breakfast, I love that Mallory thought that a club was just people like standing around making fudge. I want a fudge club. Why is Fudge Club not a thing?
Kaykay Brady: 56:04
Let's do it. We're grownups!
Brooke Suchomel: 56:04
I love it.
Kaykay Brady: 56:05
Hey, we started this podcast. We could start a fucking fudge club!
Brooke Suchomel: 56:08
Fudge Club!
Kaykay Brady: 56:11
I'm sure I could whip together a song like I whipped together the theme song of this podcast. No problem.
Brooke Suchomel: 56:16
I kind of hear, like, remember SNL with Will Ferrell and Molly Shannon, when they had Dog Show? And it was like clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap "Dog Show!" I'm hearing it like clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap "Fudge Club!"
Kaykay Brady: 56:31
"Fudge Show!" Oh, I changed it to Fudge Show. I messed it up!
Brooke Suchomel: 56:32
Fudge Club makes Fudge Show. It's great. Yeah, and also, I do have to point out, there were a couple of canonical moments in here where I was like, hold on a second. Threw me for a loop. So first of all, I felt vindicated in that Mallory said Claudia has a pair of earrings that is a dog and a bone.
Kaykay Brady: 56:59
I saw that and thought of you.
Brooke Suchomel: 57:02
I was like, "I knew it!" So Stacey also had it, maybe Claudia inherited Stacey's, who knows? But growing up, I was like, Claudia has the dog and bone earring. And so she does.
Kaykay Brady: 57:14
I saw that myself and felt very vindicated for you, my friend.
Brooke Suchomel: 57:19
Thank you. Thank you. Clearly you saw how important that was to me. But then also, Mallory is a redhead. I don't care what this book says. This book says she has dark brown hair, and I have never seen a picture of Mallory with dark brown hair. Mallory is always represented as having red hair, so I choose to believe that she has red hair. I'm going to ignore what Ann M. Martin says.
Kaykay Brady: 57:43
Beautiful.
Brooke Suchomel: 57:44
Also, the Perkins baby was born and was not named Randy.
Kaykay Brady: 57:50
I feel slighted. I feel betrayed.
Brooke Suchomel: 57:53
We were promised a Randy either way. Either way, that baby was going to be Randy Perkins. And instead, we're stuck with Laura Beth.
Kaykay Brady: 58:03
Horseshit.
Brooke Suchomel: 58:04
Yeah. So now that we have established that The Baby-sitters Club is in the process of changing, you know, we don't get a confirmation at the end that Mallory and Jessi make it into the Baby-sitters Club, but it's teased pretty heavily that they do. And now that we've got a shift in the Baby-sitters Club dynamics, they're going to branch off and go on their first Super Special. Even though right now we're talking about Book 14, Hello, Mallory, the next episode will not be focused on Book 15. Because in between Book 14 and Book 15, we had Super Special Number One, Baby-sitters on Board.
Kaykay Brady: 58:49
Shut your mouth. Is that where Baby on Board came from?
Brooke Suchomel: 58:54
Yes, Ann M. Martin patented Baby on Board.
Kaykay Brady: 58:57
Is she like a billionaire because she patented Baby on Board?
Brooke Suchomel: 58:59
I hope so.
Kaykay Brady: 59:00
Which, by the way, I saw the best version of that the other day. It said Former Baby on Board.
Brooke Suchomel: 59:09
It's just like a 50 year old man?
Kaykay Brady: 59:11
Yeah, but it's so great, because it's like, why is my life any less valuable than a baby? I was a baby once! I died
Brooke Suchomel: 59:19
Like, "I was planning on intentionally laughing. ramming into your vehicle, but I saw that you have a small child in it, so I will take my aggression out on someone else."
Kaykay Brady: 59:22
"So I'll rethink that."
Brooke Suchomel: 59:31
Yeah. No, that's...”Former Baby on Board.”
Kaykay Brady: 59:35
It was like a picture of a guy like this, waving. Just like a stupid stick figure waving. I died.
Brooke Suchomel: 59:43
You know, when you think about it? We're all former babies.
Kaykay Brady: 59:45
We're all Former Babies on Board. When I see babies...you know, babies struggle a lot. They can't regulate their emotions. They just struggled to regulate. They haven't learned how to yet, so they're just fucking all over the place, you know? And when I see babies, I I think, that is still going on in every one of our minds.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:00:03
Yeah.
Kaykay Brady: 1:00:04
Like, that is the human mind just sort of in its essence. And we're all just trying to manage it. I don't know, it gives me a lot of empathy for people.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:00:11
Yeah, we're all still trying to master the concept of object permanence. When we play peek-a-boo, are you coming back? I hope so. I hope so! We'll find out. Keeps you on your toes. Yeah, so we'll find out if there are Babies on Board along with the Baby-sitters on Board in the next episode, which I'm excited about.
Kaykay Brady: 1:00:33
Sure, I mean, given how this series goes, the whole town could send their children with them out to the cruise. "Oh, you're going on a cruise ship? Why don't you take 45 kids? None of them can swim."
Brooke Suchomel: 1:00:43
Yeah, these 13 year olds will take care of them the whole time. Just go get shitfaced on the lido deck.
Kaykay Brady: 1:00:48
"Here's four dollars!"
Brooke Suchomel: 1:00:49
Right. Yeah, exactly. Looking forward to discussing that with you in our next episode, Kaykay.
Kaykay Brady: 1:00:56
Me too.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:00:57
But until then...
Kaykay Brady: 1:00:59
Just keep sittin'!
