Transcript - BSFC #23: Dawn on the Coast
Brooke Suchomel: 0:07
Welcome to the Baby-sitters Fight Club, where the first rule is, you don't talk about Fight Club. Instead, you talk about the battles fought and the lessons learned in the Baby-sitters Club series of books by Ann M. Martin. I'm Brooke Suchomel, an editor who's revisiting these books after 30 years.
Kaykay Brady: 0:23
And I'm Kaykay Brady. I'm a therapist, and I'm a Baby-sitters Club newbie.
Brooke Suchomel: 0:29
And this week, we are taking you back to April 1989, which was an eventful month. That month, we got the start of the Tiananmen Square protests, the student led demonstrations in Beijing against government corruption and authoritarianism. That was going on over in Asia. Here, stateside, on April 19th, we had the case that became known as the Central Park jogger case.
Kaykay Brady: 0:56
Oh yeah, I remember this very well. New York City was very hysterical at the time. And there was basically like a racial panic in the city and a sort of crime- I mean, real crime in the city, and also just like a lot of crime panic. And the Central Park jogger case came in the midst of this.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:15
Right. So that was the case where they became known as the Central Park Five. These were black and brown boys that were between the ages of 14 and 16, so we're talking kids that were the age of Sam Thomas in this book series. They were wrongfully convicted, the cops honed in on them immediately. Donald Trump went on to call for, "this is why they need a return to the death penalty," in like a full page ad in the paper.
Kaykay Brady: 1:41
Yeah, he bought a whole ad in the Post, right?
Brooke Suchomel: 1:44
Yeah. Truly psycho shit. And while that was happening, the actual perpetrator went on to rape five more women that summer, killing one.
Kaykay Brady: 1:52
Yeah, they even did the DNA, and the prosecutor still didn't believe it. They found that the kids' DNA was not there, and they stuck with their story. They're like, "Well, we don't know when they were there, when they left." Like, "This doesn't mean anything to us."
Brooke Suchomel: 2:08
Right, it was all tunnel vision, and the perception of, "We got it. We got it right. We can't ever be wrong."
Kaykay Brady: 2:14
Yeah, exactly.
Brooke Suchomel: 2:15
When you continue to insist that, it oesn't make the public safe. It ust puts innocent people behind ars and then the actual guilty re allowed to continue to go n, and that might be the reason hy there was such a crime wave in New York City.
Kaykay Brady: 2:28
Well, and also the social safety net was really lacking. There was a major drug epidemic where there was no resources for people struggling with substance abuse. They had closed all of the, you know, what you would call then the "insane asylums" in and around New York City, so people with major mental illness were without homes. There was just a lot of struggle in New York City at the time, and not a lot of resources supporting people that were struggling.
Brooke Suchomel: 2:55
Yeah. We still see echoes of all of that today, right?
Kaykay Brady: 2:58
Yeah, definitely. Definitely not.
Brooke Suchomel: 2:59
That's why bringing up what was going on in We're still on this continuation. You know, if Tiananmen Square and what was going on in New York City, these are themes that still echo. Like, we haven't solved these problems. you look at the grand scheme of history, these events, they happened like a millisecond ago. So we've got some work to do to fix that still.
Kaykay Brady: 3:21
Yeah, did you ever see that amazing timeline that's like, human recorded history-
Brooke Suchomel: 3:25
Yes.
Kaykay Brady: 3:26
And like, beginning of geological time, and you can't even see human recorded history. In the large scheme of things, we're like a blink.
Brooke Suchomel: 3:34
You know, you hear people talk about America as if we're this long standing institution. And it's like, we just got here.
Kaykay Brady: 3:41
Definitely.
Brooke Suchomel: 3:42
Let's get grounded in reality. So lots to chew on with that. But then on the flip side of things-
Kaykay Brady: 3:49
I was gonna say, fuck, we need some good movies, some music-
Brooke Suchomel: 3:52
So here we go...
Kaykay Brady: 3:52
Lift us out of this, America.
Brooke Suchomel: 3:55
Here's what's gonna get us out of this. Michael Dukakis comes to the rescue. Our friend Michael Dukakis, who we talked about in the last episode, who had just lost the presidential election. On April 24, in his position as the governor of Massachusetts, he declared April 24, 1989, to be New Kids on the Block Day across the state of Massachusetts.
Kaykay Brady: 4:16
Oh-oh, oh-oh-oh. Oh-oh, oh-oh. Oh-oh, oh-oh-oh.
Brooke Suchomel: 4:22
Everything's fixed now.
Kaykay Brady: 4:23
Buy stuff.
Brooke Suchomel: 4:24
So that's what was going on globally. Music wise, we had several number ones this month. We had "Eternal Flame" by The Bangles.
Kaykay Brady: 4:34
I remember my mother had some great song with my sister, and I was like, "I want a song with you." And she picked "Eternal Flame."
Brooke Suchomel: 4:42
Ohhhh!
Kaykay Brady: 4:42
I know! I should have been grateful, but I was kind of like, "Ah, gross."
Brooke Suchomel: 4:48
What would you have preferred?
Kaykay Brady: 4:50
Shoot, I don't know. She had with my sister, "I Can't Smile Without You," which is so fucking flawless. I mean, now I think it's really great. And I would pick nothing else now, but, you know, then I was like, "Ah, it's a little saccharine."
Brooke Suchomel: 5:05
You were looking for like "Cherry Bomb" or something.
Kaykay Brady: 5:07
Something in between. Meet me in the middle, Mom. I wasn't ready to share "Eternal Flame" with my mom when I was 13, but now I am.
Brooke Suchomel: 5:16
Oh, that's lovely. Well, maybe some of these other number ones would have been another alternative. So let's go through them and you can let me know if you'd prefer-
Kaykay Brady: 5:23
Yeah! Read 'em off, read 'em off.
Brooke Suchomel: 5:24
Okay. "The Look," by Roxette.
Kaykay Brady: 5:28
Not appropriate, but a great song!
Brooke Suchomel: 5:31
"She Drives Me Crazy," by Fine Young Cannibals.
Kaykay Brady: 5:33
Very appropriate. I drove her crazy. I was such a pain in the ass. You know how they say like, real pain in the ass kids make great adults? I would like to believe that's true about me.
Brooke Suchomel: 5:50
Same.
Kaykay Brady: 5:51
And I was a huge pain in the ass. Precocious! Precocious is an understatement.
Brooke Suchomel: 6:00
Yeah. Yeah, I've been called that a time or two. And then, coming in at number one for three weeks at the end of the month, we had "Like a Prayer" by Madonna, which we talked about much more extensively in the previous episode. And April '89 was a big month for the director of that music video, Mary Lambert, because her movie Pet Sematary was number one.
Kaykay Brady: 6:27
I loved Pet Sematary.
Brooke Suchomel: 6:29
Did you know that the director of Pet Sematary and the director of "Like a Prayer"'s music video is the same woman?
Kaykay Brady: 6:34
Absolutely not.
Brooke Suchomel: 6:35
Isn't that fantastic?
Kaykay Brady: 6:37
Yeah! That was a really scary movie. Even today, I think it still stands the test of time. Scary movie. That little kid? Oh, that little fucking kid. "I play with mommy, I play with daddy, now I play with youuuuuu." Like the cutest little kid in the world, holding a knife, saying that?
Brooke Suchomel: 6:57
I wish we had video for this. Your face, you look like an actual doll. Like, I feel like I'm on Zoom with Chucky right now.
Kaykay Brady: 7:11
I have Chucky in my family, remember we talked about this? And then also the memory scenes of the mom, with like, her mom had MS or something and was in an attic?
Brooke Suchomel: 7:21
Yeah, I don't remember. Pet Sematary is one of those movies that we definitely rented from the gas station on VHS when I was a kid, and watched it at a friend's when her parents weren't home and didn't know that that's what we rented, you know?
Kaykay Brady: 7:34
Perfect.
Brooke Suchomel: 7:35
And it super traumatized me, and we didn't watch it again. It was one of those movies, I watched it once.
Kaykay Brady: 7:40
It's scary! It's hella scary.
Brooke Suchomel: 7:41
For real.
Kaykay Brady: 7:42
Alright, then I'm not gonna do my second impression.
Brooke Suchomel: 7:45
No, do it! Do it, do it.
Kaykay Brady: 7:46
"Rachel! Raaaachellll!" If our listeners have not seen this, they think I've gone off the deep end. But if you've seen it, you know what I'm talking about. Okay, so my friend knew the actress who played the young mother in that scene. And that was actually a man playing the the mother. I feel like movies, when they want to ratchet up the creep factor, they do gender things sometimes.
Brooke Suchomel: 8:16
Mmm. True.
Kaykay Brady: 8:18
There's something discordant, right? Like, maybe your brain is picking something up, and they're relying on your sort of like, transphobia, and whatever you have gender going on bias.
Brooke Suchomel: 8:28
In the act of trying to tap into your inner transphobia and associate it with things to scare you, it's like, "You will be scared if I make you think there's something off gender wise here," in using it in that way, all you're doing is perpetrating that idea, right?
Kaykay Brady: 8:45
Of course, yeah.
Brooke Suchomel: 8:45
So like, by tapping into your transphobia to scare you, all you're doing is further scaring you about things related to gender. It's a vicious cycle.
Kaykay Brady: 8:53
In ways that your brain can't even really unpack, because you didn't even understand what you were picking up in the first place. But you were picking it up. I think I've mentioned this before, but there's a great documentary that explores this called Disclosure on Netflix. It's all about subtle and overt transphobia in the 80s in the 90s, and what that was like as a trans person experiencing that, and what that does to your mind.
Brooke Suchomel: 9:16
Yeah, and how the subtle nature of it is even more dangerous and more insidious, because even though you're being manipulated to think something, you don't realize you're being manipulated to think it, so you can't push back against it. You just think that this is inherently true, and it's not. You're just not cognizant of the ways that you're being manipulated.
Kaykay Brady: 9:36
Yeah, and the same thing happens with disabilities. Making characters with disabilities evil, like that is so fucking toxic, and people are still doing it all over the place. It's a mind blower that more people aren't clamoring about that, but again, it's so insidious and it's so common. It's so hard to see it, you know, even when it's right in front of your face.
Brooke Suchomel: 9:59
Yeah, but being aware that that's a thing, and trying to be cognizant of that, trying to be alert for that, is so important. That's why we try to talk about things like that a lot in the show, too. The things that come out when you're reading a kid's book can have a huge impact on you, even if they aren't the explicit words on the page.
Kaykay Brady: 10:18
Yeah, there is a fuckin' fat article about Matilda, and all the transphobia in Matilda. It's so loaded. The gender policing comes across really clear with a modern read, and it's really disturbing.
Brooke Suchomel: 10:33
Yeah.
Kaykay Brady: 10:34
Anyway, Pet Sematary!
Brooke Suchomel: 10:35
Pet Sematary!
Kaykay Brady: 10:36
What a long and winding road.
Brooke Suchomel: 10:38
As an aside, the director of Pet Sematary, "Like a Prayer," this badass female director with a number one movie for a blockbuster in the 80s-
Kaykay Brady: 10:49
So unusual, even for now.
Brooke Suchomel: 10:51
Yeah. Are you kidding? Like, huge deal. She's still directing, and she has a Netflix Christmas movie coming out that's like, Netflix does Hallmark movies for Christmas.
Kaykay Brady: 11:02
Yeah, they've been doing a lot of those.
Brooke Suchomel: 11:03
It stars Brooke Shields and Cary Elwes from The Princess Bride, and it's in Scotland in a castle. I saw this and I saw who the director was, I was like, "This could take a turn." So this might be one that I actually watch.
Kaykay Brady: 11:22
There's gonna be some subversiveness, is your take on it.
Brooke Suchomel: 11:26
That, or else it turns out that Brooke Shields is like, a zombie murderer. You know, for Christmas! That might be kind of
Kaykay Brady: 11:30
Dope. interesting to watch. Who knows? Keeps you on your toes. It's rare that a Hallmark style Christmas movie keeps you on your toes. Do you know what I mean? Definitely. Although we did watch A Christmas Prince multiple times, just to find all of the shitty errors. In one scene in the movie there's a website, and if you pause it, they forgot to change the text on the website. It just says lorem ipsum. The whole page is lorem ipsum. They just shat it out. It was just like, "We got a weekend to film this!" [fart noise]
Brooke Suchomel: 12:03
Coming from the editorial world, to see what happens when you eliminate quality control and proofreading, a little part of me dies inside every time.
Kaykay Brady: 12:14
Sure.
Brooke Suchomel: 12:15
So the other movies that were number one were just kind of like "eh." Rain Man was up there again. Major League, which I haven't seen and was not aimed at me, so I'm not interested in talking about it. But every Iowan's favorite movie was released, Field of Dreams.
Kaykay Brady: 12:28
Field of Dreams.
Brooke Suchomel: 12:30
And then also some classic teen movies. Say Anything came out this month.
Kaykay Brady: 12:36
Ah, yes.
Brooke Suchomel: 12:37
This one isn't so much a classic as it was just one that I watched all the time. It's called She's Out of Control, and it stars Tony Danza as a dad.
Kaykay Brady: 12:44
Oh, yeah. Okay! And Alyssa Milano?
Brooke Suchomel: 12:48
No, that was his daughter on Who's the Boss? The actress on She's Out of Control is named Ami Dolenz. She was in a lot of things around this time. Her dad was in The Monkees, and The Monkees were everywhere on the teen mags trying to push a Monkees revival.
Kaykay Brady: 13:05
Every fucking Teen Mag Tuesday you post is like half Monkees.
Brooke Suchomel: 13:09
I'm sorry, nobody gave a shit about The Monkees that was reading the teen magazines.
Kaykay Brady: 13:13
Yeah, I did watch The Monkees in syndication when I was young, but I could take or leave them. It was just something to watch before Bewitched.
Brooke Suchomel: 13:20
Oh yeah, you would watch it, but you didn't care about what these 40 year old man's family pictures were like that day.
Kaykay Brady: 13:26
Correct.
Brooke Suchomel: 13:26
I mean, watch The Monkees, that's fine, but like, you're not a teen heartthrob. Stop being on the cover of my teen magazines. Stop it.
Kaykay Brady: 13:35
I mean, some agent must have just had such power to foist this on the teen magazines. Someone was really strong arming.
Brooke Suchomel: 13:43
Oh, the editorial director of like 16 or Bop or whatever D list teen magazine was foisting The Monkees on us at the time got a kickback for years.
Kaykay Brady: 13:54
He's living in a giant mansion in Malibu on this money as we speak.
Brooke Suchomel: 13:58
On this sweet Monkees teen mag promo money.
Kaykay Brady: 14:02
Monkee money! Sweet sweet Monkee money.
Brooke Suchomel: 14:06
And then, Teen Witch! This was the month of Teen Witch!
Kaykay Brady: 14:11
Yeah! Yeah! "Top that! Stop that. I don't really give a about tryna top that. Top that!"
Brooke Suchomel: 14:16
We're gonna need a soundtrack just of you.
Kaykay Brady: 14:18
Singing everything.
Brooke Suchomel: 14:19
Yeah, yeah.
Kaykay Brady: 14:20
I know.
Brooke Suchomel: 14:21
I love it. There's so much.
Kaykay Brady: 14:23
I should get my bongos, just have them at the ready. Just be like, "Taka taka taka taka taka taka tak."
Brooke Suchomel: 14:28
You can have your bongos right next to you and I'll have my keytar right here, and then we could just break out with random jam sessions.
Kaykay Brady: 14:33
I just feel like this takes this podcast to the next level.
Brooke Suchomel: 14:37
Who doesn't love a classic pairing of keytar and bongos?
Kaykay Brady: 14:41
Keytar and bongos over Google Meet. Come on! Are we gonna talk about when we met the Teen Witch?
Brooke Suchomel: 14:48
I think we should.
Kaykay Brady: 14:49
So Brooke and I went to the Castro Theatre to see a screening of Teen Witch, and Teen Witch was there.
Brooke Suchomel: 14:56
The Castro Theatre, for those who don't know, is a movie theater and live performance venue. It's an old school movie theater from like the heyday of theaters, on Castro Street...
Kaykay Brady: 15:08
Yeah, it's gorgeous. It's got a Wurlitzer organ that they play in the front in the beginning. Good popcorn...
Brooke Suchomel: 15:11
Yeah. On Castro, in San Francisco. It is like the pulsing heart of gay San Francisco, basically, is the Castro Theater and everything around it.
Kaykay Brady: 15:18
It's right next to Hot Cookie.
Brooke Suchomel: 15:22
Ah, Hot Cookie.
Kaykay Brady: 15:23
Where you can get some penis shaped cookies...
Brooke Suchomel: 15:26
Macaroons...
Kaykay Brady: 15:27
Yeah, penis shaped macaroons and boob and vagina shaped, you know, equal opportunity.
Brooke Suchomel: 15:32
And they're delicious. It's a store that sells cookies and brownies, and then it also sells very tight underwear that says Hot Cookie on it. Those are the two things that you can get at Hot Cookie.
Kaykay Brady: 15:44
Yeah, it's great underwear. It's like red tighty whiteys.
Brooke Suchomel: 15:46
Mm hmm. Knows its audience.
Kaykay Brady: 15:48
We had Hot Cookie before we saw Teen Witch, and then we were across the street getting a slice, and we saw Teen Witch emerge from the theater. And like, I sprinted over there, I was like, "I love your movie! I love you!" She was so fucking nice!
Brooke Suchomel: 16:04
She was just walking Castro Street by herself and super super nice. Robin Lively.
Kaykay Brady: 16:09
She was so cool to us. She posed for a picture with me, it was very exciting.
Brooke Suchomel: 16:15
I know, you were glowing. I think you're still glowing. It's been years, and you're still reaping the benefits of that night.
Kaykay Brady: 16:21
God, I love that movie.
Brooke Suchomel: 16:23
We left out a very important point, which is that we didn't just watch Teen Witch and get a Q&A with the stars of Teen Witch. We also got a drag performance, a full drag performance of Teen Witch. It was a Peaches Christ production, acting it out, it was spectacular. And this was actually the first time I'd ever seen it, because again, I didn't have HBO, so I had never seen Teen Witch.
Kaykay Brady: 16:47
Oh, that must have blown your mind.
Brooke Suchomel: 16:49
I'm there as a woman in my mid 30s, watching this for the first time. But the best part about it was, we were sitting a row right behind these younger gay guys, they must have been in like their early 20s, and they knew every word, of not just the songs, which they did, but also key lines in the movie. It was like Rocky Horror Picture Show, but for Teen Witch. Dancing, singing, "I'm gonna be the most popular girrrrrrrl." A lot of very cute guys singing that.
Kaykay Brady: 17:27
How about, "We! Like! Boys! We like boys! We like boys!"
Brooke Suchomel: 17:34
Oh my God, for no reason. Why are you doing that? Why are you dancing around in-
Kaykay Brady: 17:40
Leotards, and less.
Brooke Suchomel: 17:42
In leotards, and like, using a towel as a prop? In the locker room, for no reason, just, "We! Like! Boys!" It was so ridiculous and I loved it so much.
Kaykay Brady: 17:55
I mean, look. Listeners, if you haven't seen Teen Witch, I hate to be this person that's like, "Oh my God, you haven't seen that?" But you gotta see that! It's Halloween. It's the perfect time. It is October, get yourself some Teen Witch.
Brooke Suchomel: 18:13
Yeah, preferably, if you can see it with a lot of drag queens-
Kaykay Brady: 18:17
Twenty year old gay men.
Brooke Suchomel: 18:18
Yeah, and young gay men. That is the peak experience. But otherwise, yeah, treat yourself.
Kaykay Brady: 18:24
Treat yourself to Teen Witch.
Brooke Suchomel: 18:25
Just do us a favor. Don't think too hard, when you watch it the first time, about the messages.
Kaykay Brady: 18:29
No, let it wash over you.
Brooke Suchomel: 18:30
Soak in the campiness the first time, and then do the critical review the second time you watch it. The first time, just take it all in. It's fine.
Kaykay Brady: 18:37
Don't start your thesis until your fourth watch.
Brooke Suchomel: 18:41
Right. Oh man. And then not much was happening on TV. I mean, not much can really top Teen Witch.
Kaykay Brady: 18:48
No. I mean, we don't even have to talk about anything else.
Brooke Suchomel: 18:50
She's the Sheriff ended. There we go. She's the Sheriff, if you want more expansive discussion of Suzanne Somers' She's the Sheriff, you can get that in Episode Seven of this podcast. So that is what is happening when the 23rd Baby-sitters Club book, Dawn on the Coast was released, so it's time for some back cover copy. And I quote, "Dawn can't wait for her trip to California. Besides all the sun and fun, it's her first visit since her brother Jeff moved back to live with their dad. California is better than Dawn ever remembered it. The beaches are beautiful, Disneyland is a blast, and Californians eat healthy food. Plus, Dawn's best friend Sunny has even started her own babysitting club. After one wonderful week, Dawn begins to think that she might want to stay in California like Jeff. Dawn's a California girl at heart. But could she really leave Stoneybrook for good?" End quote. So Kaykay, in our last episode, you mentioned that you were looking forward to seeing the depiction of California checking in on Dawn's relationship with her brother. What did you think?
Kaykay Brady: 19:57
Great book. I really enjoyed this book. It was fun to see, you know, Ann M's vision of California, which was like beaches, Disneyland, Mexican food. Which was interesting. It was nothing but health food and then Mexican food that they don't comment on.
Brooke Suchomel: 20:13
Yeah, that was one point that I was like, I could see that. Because even your most health conscious Californians are still going to throw down on a burrito.
Kaykay Brady: 20:22
They're going to take that one moment not to be a sanctimonious turd about it.
Brooke Suchomel: 20:27
It's very rare that you meet people that are as sanctimonious about their food as Dawn is.
Kaykay Brady: 20:32
That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. California is like the East Coast, it's all on a spectrum, and oftentimes, it's socio economically tied, right? Where wealthier people are eating healthy and thinking that's the way everyone should eat. And then lots of different people from different cultures, eating in different ways, and having different perceptions of what the purpose of food is and what kind of foods stay enjoy eating. So it is funny. It's a real one culture view of how Californians eat and how they think about food.
Brooke Suchomel: 21:05
Oh yeah, the monoculture of California that you see-
Kaykay Brady: 21:08
It's really funny.
Brooke Suchomel: 21:09
It doesn't exist.
Kaykay Brady: 21:10
It's only blonde people. It's only blonde people!
Brooke Suchomel: 21:14
I don't care where you are. Even if you're in Sweden. If you look around and you only see blondes? Run. You're in a horror movie. Something's wrong.
Kaykay Brady: 21:23
Or Sweden.
Brooke Suchomel: 21:23
But even Sweden, they have dark hair! Brunette erasure, ginger erasure...
Kaykay Brady: 21:28
You're saying you've stepped into like, the Valley of the Dolls.
Brooke Suchomel: 21:30
Yeah, I'm saying something is wrong. Literally, Dawn is like, "I'm with 10 people, and literally every single one of us is blonde."
Kaykay Brady: 21:37
But yeah, that was really funny, the California monoculture. I got a kick out of that. And I thought it was a cool book about change and choice, and how difficult it can be to experience change and make choices when there's no very clear right or wrong answer, which in life, there almost never is. And as somebody that lives on the west coast, and a lot of my people are on the east coast, I really related to this book. And I really related to the pain of wanting those worlds to just be able to exist in the same place, and they're just never going to. So you gotta make a choice, you know?
Brooke Suchomel: 22:21
I wonder if you pulled out this line too, because we have similar situations in that way, I thought this was really astute, and a really great explicit line from Ann M. You know, a lot of the good messages that we get, you kind of find in the implicit things that are being shown. But this was on the page, where she said, and this is written in Dawn's words, "What I wanted was to be able to share all of the things that I loved with all of the people that I love."
Kaykay Brady: 22:49
Exactly, that's exactly what I was just referencing, and that just really struck me in my heart. I was like, "Yeah, I get that, Dawn."
Brooke Suchomel: 22:58
Yeah, cuz that's really fucking important, and it's really fucking hard. You made a really great point about choice, because this is really hard when you have a relative wealth of choices and interests. If you have the luxury of having access to choice. You know, not everybody can just like, move, right?
Kaykay Brady: 23:22
Especially all the way to the east coast, and like, buy an old spooky farmhouse.
Brooke Suchomel: 23:26
Right. But even just, most people don't have the resources or the opportunities to move away. A lot of people don't who want to, and if you want to, if you've got interests that require you to get out of where you grew up for one reason or another, and you have the opportunity to do that, and if you also make strong bonds with others, and those people that you make strong bonds with also have a wealth of choices and interest, eventually you're going to grow apart from people.
Kaykay Brady: 23:59
Yeah, definitely.
Brooke Suchomel: 24:00
Both physically and emotionally. And if you are empathetic, like Dawn is empathetic, this is really, really painful, and it can make for some really anguishing decisions that you have to make.
Kaykay Brady: 24:13
That's a really good word, "anguishing."
Brooke Suchomel: 24:15
Normally you don't have the freedom to make those major decisions when you're 13. But Dawn does. Again, Dawn has these big adult burdens put on her shoulders at a really, really young age, and we see that play out in this book, I think.
Kaykay Brady: 24:34
Yeah, it's a really heavy, heavy burden to be on a 13 year old and I definitely had the experience of feeling, you know, how unfair it felt reading it, and reading it from her perspective, and just sort of a "person that doesn't have kids" perspective, like, Man, is that really how it works? That's fucked up.
Brooke Suchomel: 24:56
In what sense?
Kaykay Brady: 24:57
In the sense of like, a 13 year gets to decide what parent they live with and what their life looks like. It just feels like that's too much choice for 13.
Brooke Suchomel: 25:07
Yeah, usually that's not how it works, in my experience. I know a lot of kids of divorce, and no. I think that's one of the problems that we see with both the good and bad side of Dawn's family dynamic is that she's more empowered than than most kids, but at the same time, when you get empowered, you can also get burdened with things, if you don't have the skills yet to figure out how to weigh all of these different options.
Kaykay Brady: 25:38
And also, you're holding the life choices of others, too. In a way that you often, not totally true, but often you don't as an adult, right? If you're going to like, end a relationship as an adult, it's sort of like your choice and your consequence. So it's extra loaded and difficult, because it's your parents making that choice. And then you're left with making the choice out of the no good choices that you weren't part of creating. So man, I could just really feel the toughness of being in this situation.
Brooke Suchomel: 26:15
She's in a unique situation within the book, too, because there are other kids who have divorced parents, right? You know, you've got that with Kristy, but Kristy's dad doesn't want anything to do with her. And so Kristy, there's no choice there to make, Kristy just has to go along with it and sort of deal with the fallout. And then Jessi understands, and she writes to Dawn an empathetic note about how it must be feeling for her to be back in her hometown and feeling the emotions of that. Jessi just went back to her hometown and visited and was sort of weighing that too. She had a line where she said, "Where is home?" That was a question that she was grappling with. And she was like, "I guess it's Stoneybrook now," you know, it's kind of passive, like, it just is, for Jessi, because Jessi doesn't have this choice. But Dawn does. So again, it's like Dawn is in this weird situation where she's just kind of floating out there. And when you're trying to figure out who you are, to not feel grounded is scary.
Kaykay Brady: 27:25
Very much so. And I think Ann M. does a great job of bringing us into that struggle, and in a way that a kid could wrap their brain around. And also a grown up, you know? Pretty well done.
Brooke Suchomel: 27:36
Yeah. Did that come out for you for in terms of what they were fighting? How would you define the battle that we see in this book?
Kaykay Brady: 27:44
Change and choice. Those are the two words that popped out for me. And in terms of how they did it, that's kind of hard for me to arrive at. I think what I would arrive at is to say, Dawn did a good job of like, letting it happen. You know, not jumping on one choice or another, but really sort of keeping it open and letting the decision kind of come to her. She let the process play out, was sort of how I saw she got there. What did you have for what they were fighting and how
Brooke Suchomel: 28:21
I think we're on the same page. I had the they were fighting it? battle that we saw was trying to strike a balance between the self and your surroundings. And your surroundings can include surrounding people. So like, figuring out who you are and what you need, and then where does that actually place you, and what are the trade offs that you give away when you make a choice. That was the battle we see play out.
Kaykay Brady: 28:48
And you're totally right, and there's battles everywhere. Jeff wanting her to stay. Dad, being on the surface, trying to display some neutrality, but really not. You know, Mom having what she imagines is like a breakdown in Stoneybrook, thinking of her moving. It's this constant battle and tension in the interpersonal dynamics through the entire book. You're totally right.
Brooke Suchomel: 29:11
Yeah. And I think the tool that we see Dawn use is really contemplation. She does a lot of thinking. I think this might have been the first pros and cons list I ever saw in my life, when she writes down the pros and cons of if she were to stay in California. And then also communication, but I have mixed feelings about the takeaway messages from this book, because it felt like- when she comes up with her pros and cons list, it looks pretty heavy on the California side. And she does communicate, but she doesn't communicate with people back east. Again, it's the thing that we see in this book series, where she's not talking to the people that would be potentially negatively affected by this. Instead of having those honest conversations that might help her resolve the fears about what happens if she does this, what would the impact be on these people? She just kind of assumes the worst, and so doesn't talk to them. It's cast as like, "If Dawn decides that she does, in fact, belong in California." Her dad is like, "Well, you have to hurry up and make a decision, because we're gonna have to change your flight."
Kaykay Brady: 30:29
Oh, that was crazy train. In two days? No, let her go back to Connecticut and talk about it.
Brooke Suchomel: 30:34
Yeah, like, "You work this out." And so that was the thing, you don't see her talking it out with her mom, you just see this, "I'm going to make a decision. I need to go into my space to make a decision, and then make a decision, and report back to the affected people what the decision is going to be." Instead of being like, "I'm feeling really conflicted about this, and I don't know. I need to talk to the people affected, so that I can get a better picture." So she's really putting that burden of making the decision solely on her shoulders. And it also is not giving her the opportunity to talk out some of the problems that she has, some of the reasons why she thinks California might be a better place for her, to talk that out with her mom to see, "Hey, maybe we can change the at home dynamics so that the home dynamic will be better." Because I think one of the things that you see with Dawn, and why she is feeling this pull towards California, is in California, she's allowed to be a kid. And in Connecticut, she is not.
Kaykay Brady: 31:33
Yeah, she's parentified.
Brooke Suchomel: 31:35
One of the first things that we see in the book is Dawn's mom coming home being like, "Oh, did you make dinner yet?" Because dinner is Dawn's job. So she's got that, and then she's always babysitting all the time. And in California, she's able to go to the beach with her friends.
Kaykay Brady: 31:51
And there's a housekeeper that's cleaning and cooking.
Brooke Suchomel: 31:54
Yeah, she's got a clean house and regular food available to her that she's not responsible for.
Kaykay Brady: 32:02
Barley casseroles!
Brooke Suchomel: 32:03
Fuckin' barley casserole, come on. Here's the thing. I actually really enjoy both barley and casseroles, but I would never be like, "Have a barley casserole."
Kaykay Brady: 32:12
Preach. Exact, exact.
Brooke Suchomel: 32:15
I think there's branding needs, the vegetarians in the 80s, at least in Ann M. Martin's world, needed some help with branding.
Kaykay Brady: 32:22
They sure did. I love your word "contemplation." And it's so funny that you picked that word, because first of all, I was like, Good God, Dawn needs a therapist to work through this because-
Brooke Suchomel: 32:35
Everyone in this book, in all of these books, needs a therapist.
Kaykay Brady: 32:37
Needs a therapist, oh yeah. But a huge part of hat therapists do with people, especially worried well people, not people struggling with very intense mental illness, is you're helping people to manage choice and change. And change is so hard. There's five stages of it, and the first stage is pre contemplation. The second is contemplation. So I was looking at the stages of change and thinking of Dawn. So it's really funny o me that you picked that word "contemplation," because that’s the biggest theory of change that psychologists use when they’re working with people. And that's exactly what a therapist would help Dawn with, right? A neutral party, a true neutral pa6rty to be like, "Alright, let's look at the positives, let's look at the negatives." Exactly what you're saying. "Okay, how do we get home in the east coast to be a little closer to this?" Anyway, I love that you clocked that word. Totally fits in with what Dawn is doing and what she could have used even more help doing.
Brooke Suchomel: 33:14
Right. So you said there are five stages of change?
Kaykay Brady: 33:39
Yeah.
Brooke Suchomel: 33:39
How do you see all of those stages playing out in this book? Does Dawn like, hop off at a point before she's supposed to? How do you see that translate?
Kaykay Brady: 33:50
Well, the stages are pre contemplation, which is like, you're not even aware that there's a situation or a problem. Contemplation is like, it's starting to occur to you, like, "Hmm, I might need a change here." So you see Dawn definitely hit those two stages. And then the third stage is typically planning, and then the fourth stage is action, and then the fifth stage is maintenance.
Brooke Suchomel: 34:10
Okay.
Kaykay Brady: 34:11
You also see these are kind of canted towards substance abuse, because that's often where they're used. "Maintenance," for example. But I would say you probably see Dawn going all the way to action. She just goes super fast. That's the thing, the timeline is so truncated, it's not super believable. And it's part of what you were saying about the dad, like, there's no way that a kid could go through all these stages of change in what, how long was she there?
Brooke Suchomel: 34:40
Two weeks.
Kaykay Brady: 34:40
Two weeks. It takes a grown up, it depends on the person, but six months? A year? I mean, it can take forever. So it's just very unusual that you would see somebody race through all five stages in two weeks.
Brooke Suchomel: 34:53
And I would imagine that a lot of people get really freaked out by what comes up at stages two and three-
Kaykay Brady: 34:59
Totally.
Brooke Suchomel: 35:00
With contemplation and planning, that they just sort of hop off and don't actually-
Kaykay Brady: 35:04
Actually, they never hop off, they just move up and down. Because once you move past pre contemplation, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. You could spend the rest of your life fighting to not move to another stage, but you can never put the genie back in the bottle.
Brooke Suchomel: 35:19
So if you don't take some sort of action, and then work to maintain that action, or change that action once the action is taken, and then you might start a new cycle of like, pre contemplation, it's possible that you could be stuck at one point in that cycle for like, the rest of your life, potentially.
Kaykay Brady: 35:38
Definitely, and a good example of this would be lifelong substance abusers, you'll often see that they can get stuck in earlier stages. And it's funny too, because the old model of addiction treatment only treated people in the action stage. If you were in an earlier stage? "Bye, see you. If you're not sober, you can't be here, fuck off." So it was actually only treating people who had attained the action level of change. But now what we understand about addiction science is that people spend much longer in pre contemplation and contemplation, and that's when you can help them most. Because they need the most help getting out of those stages, because you could stay stuck so long in those stages.
Brooke Suchomel: 36:20
Right. And then you can come up with a better plan, if you get help at the pre planning stages. A more effective plan.
Kaykay Brady: 36:26
Yeah. And then also, you take out a lot of the shame. And you know, most people feel crazy that they can't make a decision. Like Dawn, you know, you can tell, there's so much suffering in it. A lot of people have this feeling of like, "Why can't I make a decision? What's wrong with me?" And in fact, this is just the way humans are, so having people understand like, "Oh, I'm totally normal. Change is this ever evolving cycle of stages," once they can see that and accept that, a big burden gets lifted from their shoulders, and they can identify where the are in the process, and what might we have to do to get you to the next stage.
Brooke Suchomel: 37:06
Right. So what was your take then on how Dawn resolves this tension and the decision that she makes in this book?
Kaykay Brady: 37:17
Okay, so I have the professional therapist opinion, and then also the fiction reader opinion. The professional therapist would say, that's probably too fast to be moving through those stages of change. It's unlikely to stick. This is likely to come back. She's likely to enter a cycle again.
Brooke Suchomel: 37:38
Oh, yeah. She's right back on contemplation, I think, before this book ends.
Kaykay Brady: 37:43
Yeah, that's my professional opinion. Fiction opinion? I don't know. I could also see Ann M. kind of just tying it up and be like, "Okay, that's over." I'll be curious to see, as just a fiction reader, what she does with it.
Brooke Suchomel: 37:57
As a reader, how did you feel about the decision that she made?
Kaykay Brady: 38:01
I was surprised, because I honestly I didn't know what the outcome was going to be of this book. I thought she was gonna stay in California. There was something about that truncated timeline that made me be like, Oh my god, I think Ann M. is doing this.
Brooke Suchomel: 38:14
What made you feel that way? What led you to feel like she would stay?
Kaykay Brady: 38:17
Because it was just coming so fast and hard, and the list was so clear in California, so to me, it was like a twist at the end. And I just wasn't sure what tipped her back. It was all of this about California, California, California, and then I thought, What tipped her back? And it wasn't made so explicit for me.
Brooke Suchomel: 38:37
Do you have any feelings about what tipped her back?
Kaykay Brady: 38:40
She got a note from- who was it? Sent her a note, a little kid. Nicky?
Brooke Suchomel: 38:44
Nicky Pike. Yeah, she got a few notes. But Nicky Pike, who was basically like, "I'm creeping in the walls of your house. Come back soon!"
Kaykay Brady: 38:53
She's like, "Oh, I miss my tiny stalker that lives in my walls. How could I give that up?"
Brooke Suchomel: 39:01
"Can't leave him! How could I say no to my tiny stalker that lives in my walls, and sends me messages from 3000 miles away?”
Kaykay Brady: 39:07
It's the age old question, for all of us.
Brooke Suchomel: 39:11
Jesus.
Kaykay Brady: 39:12
I don't know. So it felt a little unbelievable to me. How 'bout you?
Brooke Suchomel: 39:16
Yeah. Um, it made me feel bad, reading it. As I mentioned, the explicit question that Ann M. was working through in this book, I felt like that was really good. I feel like the focus was really good. I feel like focusing on the ways that change impacts a kid, and the ways that choice- because you know, when you're a kid, you kind of think like, "Oh, once I'm able to make my own decisions, life will be great."
Kaykay Brady: 39:45
Yeah.
Brooke Suchomel: 39:46
And then you realize how difficult and painful, and the trade offs that are involved- rarely in life is there a clear, "Oh, this is obviously the right thing to do. No other option is the right thing to do." You're always weighing pros and cons, and so I think it captured the pain of that, as I said, the anguish of that, in a really good way. I think in a really mature way, in a way that I don't see this captured this effectively in a lot of books written for adults. Like, this was good!
Kaykay Brady: 40:16
Definitely, definitely.
Brooke Suchomel: 40:18
But I think where she ultimately landed with the decision led to some implicit messages that I was not fond of. But I think that these were messages that were considered to be very admirable in the 80s. So I can see a time when it was like, Yep, Dawn's making the right decision. It's not even so much that she's making a right or wrong decision, but I felt like the reasons why she was making a decision were not beneficial to her. The messages that I got, was basically like, "One, your obligations matter more than your needs." Dawn goes back because she feels guilty. Honestly, that's what it comes down to. She doesn't think that her mom is capable of basically living her life independently.
Kaykay Brady: 41:04
Caring for herself, yeah.
Brooke Suchomel: 41:06
Yeah. And she feels like, "Oh gosh, this kid, my little stalker is waiting for me." You know? She gets all of these messages in the mail that's really appealing to her to return, from various degrees of intensity. She gets that from Nicky and Kristy. You know, Jessi's note is more ambivalent, with her, "Where's home? I guess it's Stoneybrook now." And you can tell that that registers with her, but like, the fact of the matter is Jessi doesn't have a choice in that situation. But Dawn does.
Kaykay Brady: 41:37
Yeah.
Brooke Suchomel: 41:37
I think it can be really scary to be like, "Oh, man. Okay, well what happens if I do actually exert agency?" Then you're responsible for that decision, as opposed to being like, the decision to not make a choice can feel like you're sort of giving up that responsibility, but that's not a choice. To not make a change is still a choice.
Kaykay Brady: 41:55
Yep.
Brooke Suchomel: 41:55
So I think it landed on this, like, "What you owe to other people matters more than what you need to thrive." And not just to thrive at an economic or social level, but to thrive at a biological and emotional level. Dawn is so much happier, she talks all the time, says that she feels free, she's able to be a kid. And she feels like, I think, like she can't be a kid. It's that codependency.
Kaykay Brady: 42:27
Yeah, I was just gonna say, she's really, we would call it "enmeshed" with her mother, in a way that's kind of hindering her.
Brooke Suchomel: 42:35
Yeah.
Kaykay Brady: 42:35
And yeah, what you say makes such sense, and I'm also thinking about the gendered implications of that, with the brother going to California and bam! Like, "Fuck this. I'm going to act out, I'm gonna get in fights at school and get sent back to California and peace out and fuck all y'all," and then everything's great for him. It works out and he's like, "Awesome!" And everything's working out for the fucking dad. And then you have Dawn, you know, that is feeling again, like what you said, she needs to sacrifice her needs and what makes her thrive, so that other people can function. Which is a real gendered message in our society.
Brooke Suchomel: 43:14
Yeah. Even like, why is her brother thriving so much? And what's one of the things that she thinks about? The house is clean and the food is so good and all of that, and it's a woman who was doing that, right?
Kaykay Brady: 43:25
Yes, correct.
Brooke Suchomel: 43:25
It's like, "A woman needs to care for things."
Kaykay Brady: 43:27
A replacement woman that's getting paid.
Brooke Suchomel: 43:29
Yeah. Same thing, I mean, this was just a little aside, but when Mary Anne and Claudia are baby sitting over at Jamie Newton's, and there's the crowd of eight kids or whatever that they're watching, including this little misogynist that comes up every once in a while.
Kaykay Brady: 43:43
There's a lot of girl hating in this book, which is...funny.
Brooke Suchomel: 43:46
Even Jeff says, when Dawn says that she's gonna go back to Connecticut after all, he's like, "It's because we're boys, isn't it?"
Kaykay Brady: 43:53
Yeah, I remember that. It felt really out of place to me and discordant, but now that we're talking about it, I'm like, huh, yeah, maybe it wasn't.
Brooke Suchomel: 44:02
And even with the baby sitting, when they're watching all of those kids, and Mary Anne's going to serve dinner. She gets the two oldest girls that they're watching to come help serve dinner.
Kaykay Brady: 44:17
I saw that!
Brooke Suchomel: 44:18
And then it's like, "Oh, it turns out the boy can actually help feed the babies or whatever." But it's never like, "Hey, oldest kid, here, come help me with dinner." Because he's a boy, and he's watching TV, you know? So there's things that you pick up that hopefully you're more cognizant of now, hopefully you wouldn't see that being presented now. But when you read that, you just think, "Well, that's just normal. That's just what girls do. It's what women do, men just don't do those things," because you don't see it happening in fiction. And so sometimes if you don't see it happening in other parts of culture that you consume, that leads you to be like, "Well, if I don't see it at home, that's normal." It's a cycle.
Kaykay Brady: 44:29
Yeah, it's also, what you're talking about goes back to what we were referencing before, the insidiousness of those subtle messages that are not made explicit, but come to live in your brain and your identity.
Brooke Suchomel: 45:08
Exactly. And so I think that the implicit messages as I was reading, I was like, Oh man, I feel not great about this decision that Dawn makes, and just was unpacking what made me feel disappointed by that. Why I felt like this was not a good decision for her and why I felt like, me as the reader, I was pushing back on this as being presented as a positive thing. And I was like, Why is that? And it was because these implicit messages, I was like, I feel like you want me to think something that I don't think is good. But in the 80s, that would have been, like, "You sacrifice. That's what you do, you sacrifice. That's a good thing."
Kaykay Brady: 45:44
Yeah. To some degree, this is the whole message of the Baby-sitters Club. This club is packed full of examples of subverting your own needs, your own safety, your own well being for the kids in your charge. Many of the babysitters being too young to really even be able to make good choices around that. So I think it's so true, and I think it's a place where some of those implicit messages are really coming out with this plot, and showing themselves to be more problematic. Because let's play this out. Let's play out what happens for Dawn and her mother, which is probably, you know, nobody's there to like help Dawn finish the stages of change, and make a decision that's going to serve her, right?
Brooke Suchomel: 46:33
Mm hmm.
Kaykay Brady: 46:34
So Dawn probably spends like most of her teenage years, and maybe her young twenties, managing her mother's life and being enmeshed. And then possibly some real resentment starts to grow, maybe she has to cut off with her mother, you know, just like, not great stuff.
Brooke Suchomel: 46:55
Yeah, these aren't healthy relationship dynamics.
Kaykay Brady: 46:57
It's unlikely that Dawn just goes to college, and the mom's like, "I'm fully functioning and everything's great." And Dawn's like, "I'm not resentful at all about the fact that I didn't move home to California where I wanted to be."
Brooke Suchomel: 47:09
Yeah. Because you see, that is where she wants to be. That's made really clear. And so I think that was another implicit message that I got from this, which again, was like, "Yes, this is a good thing in the 80s," was like, "Even if something isn't working, you just keep pushing on it. You don't flip flop." When she tells her dad that she isn't going to stay in California after all, she says, "I like both places. I like them a lot. But I've made my home at Mom's now. It's time for me to go back." That's after Jessi said, like, "I guess Stoneybrook is home now," and so it's like, "Well, I guess Stoneybrook is home now." No, that's not- just because Jessi said that, it's a bit of a different context, and I think you're taking it out of context. Versus like, a few pages earlier, just 20 pages earlier on the book or whatever, she tries to write a note to her mom that she crosses out multiple times, trying to figure out, "How am I going to tell my mom this is what I'm thinking?" And then she's like, "Well, I didn't send it," because again, it's almost like the pain of having the conversation was too much for her to bear in the moment. So it's like, just put off the conversation and then put off resolving what could be resolved by the conversation. But she says, "How do you tell your mother that you want to move away from her? That you want, in fact, to move to the other side of the country?" She knows what she wants to do, but it's like the burden of doing it is too scary. So she just opts to like, "Just keep pushing, it'll work out," you know? But I don't believe it will.
Kaykay Brady: 48:39
This is the place where it just broke my heart. She didn't have an ally, you know, that really is sort of speaking for her, on her behalf, with no agenda. Because it's too much for a 13 year old. Like, of course a 13 year old is not going to be able to pull that trigger.
Brooke Suchomel: 48:54
Yeah.
Kaykay Brady: 48:55
I mean, Jeff can, because Jeff seems to have a different relationship to responsibility and his own rights to be happy.
Brooke Suchomel: 49:04
Yeah, it kind of feels like being a younger brother gives you some freedom that you don't have when you're an older sister.
Kaykay Brady: 49:10
Definitely. And I think like, that's age, that's gender. It's a lot, you know, and for Dawn it really sucks. Also, play this out. I was thinking, in the book, "Man, if Dawn moves back to California, maybe the mom would move back."
Brooke Suchomel: 49:24
Why is she there?
Kaykay Brady: 49:25
What is the mom doing in Stoneybrook?
Brooke Suchomel: 49:26
I don't know why she's in Stoneybrook. It just doesn't make sense. I mean, I know they say, "Oh, she wanted to be back where her family is," or whatever, and her family's rich or something. But like, if her family's rich, why...like, she's living in this shitty farmhouse.
Kaykay Brady: 49:40
Yeah, just help her out in California.
Brooke Suchomel: 49:41
Yeah, it didn't make any sense. I get that it happens because we need this plot structure in the book, but there had to be a better way to justify why Dawn's mom isn't in California, and like, what her ties are there. Because the Trip Man? And it doesn't seem like her parents...
Kaykay Brady: 49:59
No, you don't see the parents a lot.
Brooke Suchomel: 50:00
Yeah, I agree. And then I think the other message that I got that was making me, like, "Oh, I got this message, and I wish I wouldn't have gotten this message as a kid," is that "It's better to be busy than to be free."
Kaykay Brady: 50:13
Ah, she said, "Oh yeah, I love the We Love Kids Club, but they're just not as busy as the Baby-sitters Club," but I'm like, "Who the fuck cares?"
Brooke Suchomel: 50:23
So here's what's funny. That is presented as a positive at the beginning, right? She's at the We Love Kids Club. She's sitting next to her best friend from California, started her own...
Kaykay Brady: 50:34
There's no visors. There's no director chairs...
Brooke Suchomel: 50:36
Right, there's no hierarchy. They're all just like, it's relaxed, it's chill. And she said, "The We Love Kids Club might not be as busy or have as big a business as the Baby-sitters Club, but it sure was fun." That's how it's introduced. And she's like, "Oh my God, we can just chat and paint our nails and talk about things? It's not being run like a drill sergeant?"
Kaykay Brady: 50:59
They have the best quote, she said, "What are the roles here? Who's who?" And she just goes, "Oh, everybody just does what they do." And I was like, that's the most California thing I've ever heard, and I love it. It's why I live here.
Brooke Suchomel: 51:12
Yeah, no, totally. She's just like, "Oh," in response. It's like, "'We don't have anything like that. Everybody just does what they do.' 'Oh,' I said." So she's kind of taking that as a possibility that didn't occur to her.
Kaykay Brady: 51:27
Yeah, it's breaking her mind.
Brooke Suchomel: 51:28
Yeah. Because they have been under this rigid way of running this child business. And the California version of it, the phone might not be ringing off the hook, but like, why do you have to work all the time anyway? You're a kid. You want to get a couple of babysitting jobs a week, which is like, what she gets? Fine! You don't have to be working every freaking day.
Kaykay Brady: 51:55
Well, and also, you know, we've talked a lot about how we see some of that need to stay busy and working as a little bit of discomfort with emotions.
Brooke Suchomel: 52:04
Yeah.
Kaykay Brady: 52:05
And so seeing through this lens, it really is very tragic, because it's kind of like Dawn is just at the precipice of some sort of emotional breakthrough. And, you know, she kind of feels that her only option is to just go back to those patterns, which probably aren't serving her so great.
Brooke Suchomel: 52:23
I mean, she lands and the Baby-sitters Club is waiting for her at the airport, and she says, "Home just a few minutes, and already I was booked!" So they show up, they're like, "We've booked a bunch of babysitting jobs for you!"
Kaykay Brady: 52:35
Yeah, she's like, "That's great. That's fine. I love this."
Brooke Suchomel: 52:38
So she could be in California, be a kid. She's on the beach, and she says, with her friends, she's just ecstatic. She uses the word "ecstatic." She's just playing. Then she gets home to California, and it's like, "Time to go to work!" You know? Time to go to work. At home, and in other people's homes.
Kaykay Brady: 52:56
It's kind of bleak.
Brooke Suchomel: 52:58
Yeah. I was sad. I was sad for Dawn, I was sad for the decision. I liked the way that the portrayal of the pain of having to make a decision is made, but I was not a fan of the decision that was made, and the implicit reasons that we see for why she comes to that. It made me sad for her.
Kaykay Brady: 53:20
Yeah, definitely. I think that's really insightful. And I guess I had seen it more as just like, unfinished. But you're totally right. What could have happened if Dawn could have stayed with this line of thinking? It's amazing to think about.
Brooke Suchomel: 53:38
And it's funny, because I think as a kid reading this, we're supposed to be really wanting her to make the decision to go back to Connecticut.
Kaykay Brady: 53:45
Yeah, you want the club to stay together. It's the whole raison d'etre of the series.
Brooke Suchomel: 53:49
Yeah, just a few books before, we've already lost Stacey, so you really want to keep that together. Which in that sense, you're in alignment with Dawn on that. But reading it as an adult, and having that sort of distance from your own needs as a reader who wants this particular plotline and character dynamics to continue, and looking at it from a sense of like, Well, what are the messages, if we're taking this and looking at this as like, "What if these were actual people?," you have a different read on it.
Kaykay Brady: 54:27
Yeah. That's so interesting, too, and I'm thinking about if these were actual people, Dawn's behavior actually lines up really, really well with what you see in change theory. Which is, people will actually have breakthroughs, and then immediately go backwards. It's actually really frustrating for therapists, because therapists care for their clients and want to see their clients progress. You really have to work on it, though, with yourself as a therapist, because if you expect people to have linear progress, you can't be a therapist. Like, you just can't have that job, because people don't work that way. In fact, it's so common that someone would have this amazing breakthrough, and then they go exactly in the other direction the next day. It's so common, so it makes sense for me that Dawn would do that. And also, I believe, if this is a real person, I have hope that she's gonna go back into another change cycle, and she's gonna find what she needs to move towards what's going to feed her, you know, as a person. Now, what is Ann M. gonna do? I don't know. But if I was Dawn's therapist, I would leave with hope. Because it's just a typical cycle, and the fact that she engaged in the cycle is great progress, even though she goes backwards. That's the nature of the beast.
Brooke Suchomel: 55:42
Right. That's making me think about how, you're right, so much of life and reality is cyclical, yet we live in a society that presumes that everything is linear. I mean, the only thing that's linear, really, is time. Well, depending on how you look at it, right?
Kaykay Brady: 56:00
And dude, maybe that's just our perception of it!
Brooke Suchomel: 56:02
Dude, time is a flat circle!
Kaykay Brady: 56:04
This is all a fucking simulation!
Brooke Suchomel: 56:05
Whoa!
Kaykay Brady: 56:07
Exactly right. That's exactly right. And when you work in these stages of change, that's never a loss. It's never a loss. What they say is, you cycle upward. You kind of have no choice but to cycle upward, especially if you don't have any like major thing blocking you, like a major substance abuse or, you know, there's certain things that really can block you. But if you're functioning at a pretty high level, you kind of have no choice but to circle upwards, and so I think Dawn would and will circle upwards.
Brooke Suchomel: 56:37
Yeah, I hope so.
Kaykay Brady: 56:39
We got your back, Dawn.
Brooke Suchomel: 56:41
Seriously!
Kaykay Brady: 56:42
Dawn, call me! 13 year old fictional Dawn, call me. I'm a marriage and family therapist.
Brooke Suchomel: 56:47
You'd be perfect. Oh my God, I want to send every single Baby-sitters Club member to therapy with you specifically.
Kaykay Brady: 56:56
Oh my gosh, there's like an Esther Perel podcast popping in my mind. I'm just giving therapy to fictional characters.
Brooke Suchomel: 57:03
That actually sounds really dope. Ha!
Kaykay Brady: 57:10
Oh, that's...that's a mind blower. Holy fuck. I mean, the actor who played the character would have to be so fucking good. That would be the hard part. It would be very difficult.
Brooke Suchomel: 57:19
Hopefully, one of the things that you could explain to Dawn as her therapist is that maybe it's not the best to like, listen to the ex hippie who sends you off to a carnival in a field behind a mall. Like, Dawn, think about what would lead you to think that- just because Mrs. Austin is a weaver doesn't mean that it's necessarily a good idea for you to take Clover and Daffodil off to a carnival...in a field...behind a mall.
Kaykay Brady: 57:50
You know, I was really loving, I clocked Clover and Daffodil right away, and I was like, "See?! A flower child!"
Brooke Suchomel: 57:59
I was like, "Goddamn it!"
Kaykay Brady: 58:01
I was like, "Whoa, it's a little on the nose, dude. C'mon."
Brooke Suchomel: 58:02
Clover and Daffodil and Sunny. These are the names of people in California, yeah. I just wrote, "California slander." There was some serious slander. You've got Sunny transplanting baby spider plants while sitting on the green shag rug in her bedroom. By the way, we also enjoy things that are not celery. We mentioned this, you know, but like, zucchini bread is not an indulgence for us. That's just breakfast. That's like a snack, whatever.
Kaykay Brady: 58:32
We eat great here. We have such great food here.
Brooke Suchomel: 58:34
Yeah.
Kaykay Brady: 58:35
All kinds of food. All kinds of food, not just barley casserole.
Brooke Suchomel: 58:39
They're gonna be like, gnawing on the baby spider plants as their snack in the middle of their meeting of the We Love Kids Club. "Mmm, organic!"
Kaykay Brady: 58:48
What else do they have, like zucchini slices? Come fucking on.
Brooke Suchomel: 58:52
It was like, "She crunched down on some celery." And Dawn is like, shit talking to Stacey, "We're the club with a difference. No Ring Dings!" Let people have their
Kaykay Brady: 59:04
I know. That's what I'm saying! Sanctimonious Ring Dings! turd.
Brooke Suchomel: 59:08
Yeah. You don't have to eat it if you don't want to, you know? It's the same thing, like, you don't like gay marriage? Don't have one. You don't want a Ring Ding? Don't have one. Let people live their goddamn lives, Dawn. Come on. Normally you're cooler than that. Shit.
Kaykay Brady: 59:23
Yeah, I don't know what Ann M. is, uh, why she's like, so harping on this food thing constantly. Maybe it's just something, she feels like it's an easy Dawn character plot point, but it's just endless. It gets really old.
Brooke Suchomel: 59:39
She's like subtweeting some specific Californian Cafe Gratitude eating-
Kaykay Brady: 59:42
Cafe Gratitude! Wait, we should tell them about Cafe Gratitude. Go, please.
Brooke Suchomel: 59:52
I never had the experience, myself, of eating at Cafe Gratitude. I've only heard of it. Have you eaten there?
Kaykay Brady: 59:59
I have.
Brooke Suchomel: 59:59
It's not in Berkeley anymore, so...
Kaykay Brady: 1:00:01
Right. But it was this restaurant where- Audrey and I have this joke where we think hippies and like, commune folks- and Audrey lived on a commune with hippies, so like, no tea, no shade...
Brooke Suchomel: 1:00:12
We joke because we love.
Kaykay Brady: 1:00:14
Some of my best friends are hippies.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:00:15
We're razzing.
Kaykay Brady: 1:00:16
We're taking the piss. But all you eat in a commune is what we would call "Brown," which is just some form of brown slop.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:00:24
"Mmm, Brown time."
Kaykay Brady: 1:00:26
Yeah! So whenever we go to some sort of hippie commune thing, we're like, "Oh, we're gonna get Brown? Oh look, we're eating Brown. Sweet." But you would get served a pile of Brown. Whether that would be brown lentils, you know, whatever the Brown du Jour.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:00:43
But it's all raw.
Kaykay Brady: 1:00:44
Yeah, it's all raw vegan, and all the dishes are called like, "aspiration" or like, "intention."
Brooke Suchomel: 1:00:51
But it's "I Am." So it's like, "Yeah, I'll have the avocado smoothie, aka I Am Empowered."
Kaykay Brady: 1:01:00
If you wanna eat...
Brooke Suchomel: 1:01:02
That is my Ring Ding.
Kaykay Brady: 1:01:03
Empowered Brown...
Brooke Suchomel: 1:01:04
That is my Ring Ding situation.
Kaykay Brady: 1:01:05
You eat Empowered Brown.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:01:06
It's not for me, but you know, I'm not going to hate on those who love their Brown. It's just not my thing.
Kaykay Brady: 1:01:13
Yeah, that's exactly what you're saying, and I totally agree with it. Everybody gets make their own choices, but you don't get to constantly throw shade on other people's choices. Especially, there's so much colonialism and classism built into that, that is so problematic. And I totally understand that Ann M., this was not even a twinkle in our eyes in the 80s, thinking this way, but that is the roots of it.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:01:14
Yeah, I mean, there is a there is a fair amount of like, "Ooh, you don't know what you don't know," in this book.
Kaykay Brady: 1:01:31
Oh yeah, of course.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:01:34
With like, the way that the Baby-sitters Club is described as "different kinds of people, with different interests, all getting along beautifully." And it's like, Well, that's great, but Stoneybrook is still racist as fuck. When she brings this up in comparison to Jessi's note where Jessi talks about how she went back to visit her old hometown and just thinking about what that means. And it's like, Orange County's not perfect, but I'm pretty sure Jessi feels significantly more comfortable in her skin in her old town than Dawn does in hers. Dawn might fit in more in California than in Stoneybrook, but that delta is exponentially smaller than Jessi's. Like, you are not the same. Stoneybrook's diversity might seem like the UN to Dawn, but I guarantee you, Jessi would disagree.
Kaykay Brady: 1:02:31
Yeah.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:02:32
That's a toe that it seems like Ann M. is willing to dip in, lightly, into some fairly lukewarm water, but not plunge in, whether it's because of her own experience or just because of the 80s-ness of it all at the time.
Kaykay Brady: 1:02:47
Yeah, it's always struck me, and this is pure instinct, but it's always struck me like, she doesn't know where to go. You know, not anything malevolent, just like truly not knowing, and going as far as she can. And taking that chance, at least.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:03:02
Intentions are good, but the capabilities are perhaps a bit limited.
Kaykay Brady: 1:03:06
Yeah.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:03:08
That still does leave you sometimes, and I can say this for me as a white kid growing up in a very, very, very homogenous white community. That does lead you to have a incorrect understanding of the dynamics of race relations, because you're only getting depictions of them from people who also have an incorrect understanding of race relations.
Kaykay Brady: 1:03:33
Yeah, well put.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:03:34
So a little problematic there. What did you have for 80s moments?
Kaykay Brady: 1:03:38
I had the term, "Say it, don't spray it." You remember what a sensation that fucking term was?
Brooke Suchomel: 1:03:50
Bring it back.
Kaykay Brady: 1:03:52
I will say it as a therapist. Wouldn't that be therapeutic?
Brooke Suchomel: 1:03:58
Wait, that could be the name of your clinic!
Kaykay Brady: 1:04:00
Say It Don't Spray It Mental Health. Ha! Brooke is like, on the ground right now. She's not capable of standing up right now, she's laughing so hard.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:04:16
Hand to God, if I saw a therapist had a clinic named Say It Don't Spray It? Immediately, I'd be like, "I don't care what your waiting list is like. I don't care."
Kaykay Brady: 1:04:24
"I will wait ten years."
Brooke Suchomel: 1:04:25
Yes! Oh my god, that's so good.
Kaykay Brady: 1:04:33
That is definitely an Arrested Development level joke.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:04:38
That has levels. That has levels! Oh man.
Kaykay Brady: 1:04:45
Yes.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:04:45
Okay, I'm gonna get it together. Um, mine was everything about the airline travel experience.
Kaykay Brady: 1:04:51
Yeah, good one.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:04:52
Where Dawn has a no smoking ticket. It's not just like you went into a restaurant and was like "Smoking or Non?" That was a thing. You went into a restaurant, it's like, what section were you gonna sit in. But you booked an airline ticket smoking or non. Like, what?
Kaykay Brady: 1:05:09
One person having one puff on an airplane mean every single human in that plan gets it in their lungs.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:05:16
Everyone had a smoking ticket! Literally, everyone had a smoking ticket.
Kaykay Brady: 1:05:22
My childhood was a smoking ticket. Both my parents smoked, ugh.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:05:28
Oh my god. So yeah, you had smoking, you had people literally waiting with you and for you at the gate.
Kaykay Brady: 1:05:36
Her mom walks her into the plane!
Brooke Suchomel: 1:05:37
Yeah, fucking lunch on the airplane. Lunch! National magazines, Adventures in Babysitting! They watch Adventures in Babysitting on the airplane.
Kaykay Brady: 1:05:47
On the plane.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:05:48
Bring that back! We should bring all of these things back, except for the smoking seats. That can stay.
Kaykay Brady: 1:05:54
"Say it, don't spray it," number one. That's number one that we bring back, and then second, better airline travel.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:06:01
Yeah. I mean, "Say it, don't spray it" is definitely more important than better airline travel. For sure.
Kaykay Brady: 1:06:05
Yeah, that has much more impact on our day to day lives.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:06:08
Right. Yeah, so this was an interesting time capsule of a lot of things about the 80s. Not just "Say it, don't spray it," travel, but also definitely, you know, you mentioned the gender dynamics, how we saw that play out. And the next episode has gender dynamics right in the title. So this should be interesting, because we will be talking about Book 24, Kristy and the Mother's Day Surprise.
Kaykay Brady: 1:06:40
This one is raising alarm bells. All those words in relation to this book, I'm having some cortisol being activated right now.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:06:50
This is a reason why someone comes to Say It Don't Spray It therapy. It's like, "Why are you here, Kristy?" "I'm here because of the Mother's Day surprise, when I was 13."
Kaykay Brady: 1:07:00
I can't wait, I can't wait. I'll make sure to drink some chamomile tea before I crack this book.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:07:05
Yeah, we'll find out what that is, and maybe we could try, maybe we could experiment. We'll do the next episode, I will be Kristy sitting in your office at Say It Don't Spray It.
Kaykay Brady: 1:07:13
And I will be the president and CEO of Say It Don't Spray It Mental Health Services.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:07:18
And we will be discussing the impact of this Mother's Day surprise from my childhood on who I am today.
Kaykay Brady: 1:07:24
I love it. Will I be wearing a visor?
Brooke Suchomel: 1:07:26
I hope so.
Kaykay Brady: 1:07:27
Okay, great.
Brooke Suchomel: 1:07:28
But until then...
Kaykay Brady: 1:07:30
Just keep sittin'! [THEME] I don't really give a about tryna top that. Stop that!
