Transcript - BSFC #35: Stacey and the Mystery of Stoneybrook

[00:00:00] Brooke: 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.

[00:00:24] Kaykay: And I'm Kaykay Brady. I'm a therapist and I'm new to the books.

[00:00:28] Brooke: And this week we are taking you back to June 1990. One of the events that happened that month, we've talked about this band a few times in the past. This is the month that 2 Live Crew was arrested on obscenity charges in Florida.

[00:00:44] Kaykay: Oh right. Fuckin' Florida! Last time I told the nineties to fuck off. Now I'll just, "Florida, fuck off."

[00:00:52] Brooke: Yes. Our fans in Florida excepted, who I think probably understand the sentiment and share it.

[00:00:58] Kaykay: Yeah. I think our fans in Florida probably say "fuck off Florida" more than anyone.

[00:01:02] Brooke: Yeah, fucking Florida. It goes back further than the nonsense going on with the whole like punishing Disney, et cetera. We can look back at this obscenity charge in June 1990 and see some serious echoes of today. So this was a completely orchestrated culture war campaign. This is after the hearings that ended up resulting in parental advisory warnings being put on what was seen as offensive lyrics and such. So this was after that, where Dee Snider, the lead singer for Twisted Sister, and John Denver and Frank Zappa all testified.

[00:01:46] Kaykay: John Denver?

[00:01:47] Brooke: Yes, but John Denver fucking crushed it.

[00:01:50] Kaykay: Way to go, John Denver.

[00:01:51] Brooke: The moral scolds who called him in to testify thought that he would be on their side and he decidedly was not.

[00:01:58] Kaykay: All right!

[00:01:59] Brooke: So that was fantastic, but that was in the mid eighties. So this in 1990 was a lawyer in Florida who like saw this as his opportunity to like, make a name for himself.

And so basically was just suing people and things that he thought were offensive, and things that would like "harm the children." So you see the echoes of today with the whole critical race theory hysteria. It goes directly back to 2 Live Crew being arrested on obscenity charges for performing their songs in Florida and a record store owner being arrested for selling their album.

[00:02:40] Kaykay: Shut up.

[00:02:40] Brooke: Their perfectly legal album. He was saying, well, a parental advisory warning on it simply wasn't enough. And so 2 Live Crew and this dude, they were going back and forth. So this was actually in the courts. This was not the start of it. 2 Live Crew had been suing back, of like, "You're trying to say that we were so offensive that we shouldn't even be allowed to be sold in the state of Florida. No, we're going to appeal. We're going to sue you back."

All of this stuff, this was a stunt that was being pulled to try to like raise the prominence of this lawyer, right? Who was just like, "No, I'm going to fight for this." This dude is, is disbarred by the way by now.

[00:03:17] Kaykay: Oh, shocking.

[00:03:20] Brooke: Surprise!

[00:03:21] Kaykay: It's just, whenever people try to get you outraged, you gotta look for the money. You just got to look for the money. Because this whole outrage machine all over the place? Money.

[00:03:35] Brooke: A hundred percent. Back then, and today.

[00:03:37] Kaykay: Yeah.

[00:03:38] Brooke: So the good news, it totally backfired at the time. So MTV ended up forming the Rock the Vote campaign. Do you remember Rock the Vote?

[00:03:47] Kaykay: Yeah!

[00:03:48] Brooke: This was all over MTV leading up to the '92 election. Like this was where as part of the Rock the Vote campaign, they had the Bill Clinton town hall with young voters. And this is where you get someone in the audience who was like, "boxers or briefs." And I remember it was like, oh my God. But again, not saying that everything about it was good. Um, but MTV saw this as like sort of the existential threat. They're like, they're going directly at us.

[00:04:18] Kaykay: Right.

[00:04:18] Brooke: And so in response, they formed Rock the Vote. And I haven't done enough analysis into exactly how it played out, but like, you see Bill Clinton get elected on the wave of a lot of young voters who you can tie to getting involved with MTV being like, we have to go after the youth vote. It wasn't happening organically with the parties. And so you've got a business seeing a threat to their business model, and using that to inspire political action with their viewers. And it fucking works.

And the thing that is dangerous about it is, there's a really, really good article in The Washington Post that came out 25 years after this happened. So we're talking June 2015, not that long ago, and it's like, "Isn't it so crazy that there was this panic in the past? Can you even imagine it happening today?" And so this is what they say in 2015, "The crusade was over, and it hasn't reared its head again, at least not with the same intensity. When politicians today attempt to use pop stars as political fodder in culture war fights, it mostly falls flat. See Bobby Jindal and Britney, Mike Huckabee and Beyonce." What the fuck was that? I have to go back and look into that. I don't remember that at all.

And then this is a quote, "'It's tough to imagine a similar effort even gaining support today, let alone getting to the point of banning albums and arresting artists for performing their music,' Rock the Vote president Ashley Spillane said in an email." Quote, "'That's a direct result of young people exercising their political power.'" That was seven years ago. Thinking like, that time has passed, it's all good now. And, uh, just a year later we saw how wrong that was.

So maybe today's attack on Disney for simply saying, we don't think it's cool to discriminate against the LGBT community," and like really doing nothing more than that. The sort of punishment that the state is trying to bring down upon them. Can we let the backlash commence please? Fucking finally? Let's go.

[00:06:41] Kaykay: Yeah.

[00:06:42] Brooke: The past is not past.

[00:06:44] Kaykay: I'm reading a fantastic book called Principles for Dealing With the Changing World Order, which is all about how, you know, empires have this natural flow of building, gaining steam, being successful in prosperity, and then being in decline.

And one of the big symptoms of decline is polarity. And so this, this guy's sort of thesis is basically like, well, the US is, is in decline. Like a lot of empires have been in decline and part of it is this like really intense polarity.

[00:07:15] Brooke: Yeah. I mean, everything is absolutely cyclical. Although I will say that I don't think it's so much polarity as in like, both sides are so extreme. You know, if you look at how things have shifted, the dramatic shift is really coming in from one direction. And we just think that we're all so polarized because the Overton window is being pulled so dramatically in one direction. We want to think that scales are balanced and they're not. They're just not.

[00:07:41] Kaykay: Yeah, the book doesn't talk about whose "fault" it is, quote unquote. He's just saying, here's where we're at, and this is a sign of an empire in decline. So that's interesting.

[00:07:52] Brooke: Yeah, we can look back to June 1990 and what would become the backlash to the sort of moral scolding that was happening with like the 2 Live Crew arrest and then the backlash to the backlash. And I think we've been living in this era of backlash to backlash to backlash, what really constitutes like our entire conscious existence.

It's funny, when I have conversations with people who are, you know, of a previous generation, and they talk about like, "bipartisanship, when we all work together." And I'm like, "I'm sorry. When was that?" There's a nostalgia for a time that never existed, is what I think.

[00:08:30] Kaykay: As opposed to our nostalgia for fucking shit that really existed, pop culture.

[00:08:37] Brooke: Exactly. Some of the pop culture that did exist in June 1990, apart from the nonsense that was happening in Florida, was pretty fricking fantastic. And specifically on the music charts, oh my God. The playlist for this month, you are going to want it in your earholes. Let me tell you why.

We had three number ones this month. Actually we had four number ones this month. "Vogue" was the first number one. So it carried in to the very beginning of June. That was knocked off the charts by "Hold On," from Wilson Phillips.

[00:09:08] Kaykay: Fuck yes.

[00:09:09] Brooke: That was knocked off by Roxette's "It Must've Been Love," which was then knocked off by New Kids On the Block, "Step by Step." Those were the number ones of June 1990.

[00:09:23] Kaykay: Heavy hitters, all around.

[00:09:25] Brooke: Oh yeah. And I haven't even gotten into what wasn't number one, but is also on this list, which just takes it to the next level. Bell Biv DeVoe, "Poison," hits number three this month.

[00:09:37] Kaykay: Best ever.

[00:09:37] Brooke: MC Hammer's "U Can't Touch This" hits number eight, and Digital Underground's "The Humpty Dance." Two of my favorite songs of all time, "The Humpty Dance" and "Poison." "The Humpty Dance" hit number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100, so I heard it on the radio in Iowa. That wasn't a thing before. So the music for this month was just speaks to my soul.

[00:10:05] Kaykay: That's off the chain. I had "The Humpty Dance" on tape, and I wore that shit out.

[00:10:10] Brooke: I bet you did.

[00:10:10] Kaykay: I mean, so much that this was a tape where there had to be a pencil handy to fix that shit. Cause it was, it was unraveling. It was coming out I was playing it so much. Dang, I loved that song!

[00:10:22] Brooke: Ah, there's a Most Nineties Moment right there. You play a tape so much that the tape gets all like pulled out a little bit, and you have to take it out, and you have to be careful taking it out so that you don't snag the tape on anything when you pull it out of the tape player. And then you take the eraser end of the pencil and wind it, wind the little wheels of the tape to get it back in place.

Gosh, it's been like 30 years since I've done that.

[00:10:51] Kaykay: I mean, I think I probably still have tapes from high school and college. Take that CDs.

[00:10:57] Brooke: Yeah. The tapes don't get scratched. They just get unwound, and you just have to whip out the trusty number two pencil and everything is fine.

Movies, we had three number ones as well that month. We had Total Recall. Another Arnold movie.

[00:11:12] Kaykay: Schwarzenegger.

[00:11:13] Brooke: Another 48 Hours, the sequel to 48 Hours with Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte.

[00:11:19] Kaykay: I never saw any of this. I don't know why.

[00:11:22] Brooke: We gotta lot of cop stuff here, because that was also...

[00:11:25] Kaykay: Yeah, so much cop stuff.

[00:11:26] Brooke: Also knocked out by Dick Tracy. So yet another...

[00:11:29] Kaykay: Ah, I do remember that. That was like a real sensation when it came out, people were obsessed with that shit. You know, Madonna and, uh, what's his face? "You're So Vain."

[00:11:38] Brooke: Warren Beatty.

[00:11:39] Kaykay: Madonna and Warren Beatty, I think, were dating at the time, and so people were just fascinated.

[00:11:45] Brooke: Madonna in 1990, again, she's got "Vogue" at number one, and then Dick Tracy coming out with like her starring role as a torch singer. They had the Dick Tracy soundtrack too, where she was the soundtrack for the movie. Did you see Dick Tracy in the theater?

[00:12:03] Kaykay: I did. Yeah, I totally did.

[00:12:05] Brooke: I did too.

[00:12:05] Kaykay: I mean, it was such a sensation. I couldn't avoid it. I had some sort of spy watch. It was Dick Tracy inspired. I don't, maybe I got it for Christmas or something.

[00:12:14] Brooke: So like Dick Tracy was like this, you know, forties detective comic, very noir. And they take it and bring it out in 1990 as the sort of like Technicolor movie version of it. But it was really in that style of like oversaturated, but also dark, that the Tim Burton Batman was in. And they really were like selling it to kids too, which is kind of funny to me.

[00:12:46] Kaykay: Yeah.

[00:12:47] Brooke: Cause it's really not a kid's movie, but McDonald's sure did have Happy Meal toys of Dick Tracy. But it did have a kid in it. Whose name was, in the movie, The Kid.

[00:13:00] Kaykay: What did the kid look like?

[00:13:01] Brooke: He was also the son in Hook. You've seen this kid.

[00:13:05] Kaykay: I'm sure I have.

[00:13:06] Brooke: You've absolutely seen this kid.

[00:13:08] Kaykay: Oh yeah. Of course. Definitely saw this kid. This kid was a very nineties, Charlie Korsmo owned the nineties.

[00:13:18] Brooke: For real. But looking into it, it's like, why was it pitched at us? It's because it was produced by Touchstone, which is Disney's adult movie production arm.

[00:13:31] Kaykay: Yeah.

[00:13:31] Brooke: So this was not a kid's movie, but a kid is in it. Ergo, let's put Dick Tracy stuff in your McDonald's Happy Meals with your chicken nuggets. The fucking nineties. Fucking nineties, man.

[00:13:48] Kaykay: They haven't quite gotten their synergy down yet.

[00:13:50] Brooke: Not quite.

[00:13:51] Kaykay: Like there's still, it's a, it's a fledgling baby.

[00:13:54] Brooke: What's so funny though is the toys that they had. There was like a Dick Tracy watch for sure that they had, but then like the toys that they had in the kids' meals are just like little PVC figures. It's just like a little Warren Beatty. That's all it is. It doesn't do anything.

[00:14:15] Kaykay: Come on, don't you need Warren Beatty in your pocket?

[00:14:18] Brooke: Yeah. He's wearing a snazzy yellow jacket and checking his watch. Here you go, kids. That's what you've always wanted, a like 40 year old man checking his watch. In your form, just for you! So that was a thing.

And then, TV. It's June, so nothing really noteworthy was either starting or ending. However, there was a three hour live broadcast on Nickelodeon, first time they ever did a live broadcast, of the opening day celebration for Nickelodeon Studios at Universal Studios.

It is freaking hilarious to watch. So the whole thing is on YouTube. It has the commercials and everything included, which is very much my jam. Because that is like time travel. Like you're just being bombarded with commercials. And you're like, I remember this, I remember that.

[00:15:11] Kaykay: And the other thing about the commercials, it's like what we were talking about last time, you get all those crazy insidious little messages that you missed when you were a kid. And now you watch it, and you're like, oh, racist, fatphobic, ableist. Holy shit.

[00:15:26] Brooke: Oh yeah. Like, gender norms. They are really selling me not just this product, but also gender norms.

[00:15:34] Kaykay: Gender norms all over the place.

[00:15:35] Brooke: Right. So I was watching this and it had a lot of their Nickelodeon stars at the time, like Melody and Brad from Hey Dude are some of the co-hosts on it. And they're like in character as Melody and Brad hosting this. It's funny because it's live and they've never done a live thing on Nickelodeon before. Like, they point that out, this is the first time they've ever done anything live. And so they like cut back to them and they're sitting there and you see them just sitting there, like awkwardly kind of like looking off to the side for their cues.

Like you can tell they're very much like on, and then they get their cue. And then they immediately start laughing like, "A ha ha ha! Oh, this is such a fun party!" And they look at each other. It's so jarring. It's so jarring. It's great.

[00:16:24] Kaykay: That's frightening.

[00:16:26] Brooke: Yeah. You got a little peek behind the curtain. You're like, you know, watching this like eight years old and all of a sudden you see a peek behind the curtain.

[00:16:33] Kaykay: "Wait, TV is not real."

[00:16:36] Brooke: But they call it, so it's like, speaking of insidious messaging. So when they start this and they're like, "We're taking you to Nickelodeon Studios," and they call it "World Kid Headquarters" and quote, "This is the one place where you belong." So again, really tapping into like, if you're a kid and you're hearing it, you're like, "Nickelodeon, the one place where I belong. I am joining the cult of Nickelodeon. This is my headquarters."

[00:17:05] Kaykay: "One of us. One of us."

[00:17:07] Brooke: "One of us. One of us." Yeah. And you can watch Steven Spielberg get slimed. So that's what happens on this.

[00:17:14] Kaykay: I'm pro slime.

[00:17:17] Brooke: So that's what was happening in June 1990, along with the 35th Baby-Sitters Club book, Stacey and the Mystery of Stoneybrook, that was released. So it's time for some back cover copy. And I quote, "Unlike Claudia and Dawn, Stacey has never been much for mysteries and ghost stories. But when she and Charlotte Johanssen hear terrible noises coming out of the old Hennessey place, Stacey thinks the babysitters definitely have a mystery on their hands.

Mallory claims the house once made her have a horrible nightmare, and Kristy discovers that it was built on top of a graveyard. Does Stoneybrook have a real live haunted house? The babysitters are going to find out, no matter how scary it may be!" Were you captivated by this mystery Kaykay?

[00:18:08] Kaykay: Um, I enjoyed the mystery. I won't say that I was captivated per se. This was an interesting, like mashup of Amityville Horror, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and Nancy Drew.

[00:18:21] Brooke: And all of those things are cited, either by name or by code names, you know. Where it's like, they refer to The Amityville Horror explicitly, including descriptions of scenes from the movie.

[00:18:34] Kaykay: The flies.

[00:18:35] Brooke: Like the flies.

[00:18:36] Kaykay: The faces in the windows.

[00:18:38] Brooke: Yeah. And then they refer to, what's the code name for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark?

[00:18:43] Kaykay: It's like, Scary Stories Not to Tell.

[00:18:46] Brooke: Right, Stories You Should Absolutely Not Read When the Lights Are Not On or something like that. Like, it's a pretty ham-fisted code name. But yeah, all of those things are referenced in this book, yeah.

[00:18:58] Kaykay: Yeah, it makes it, it definitely makes it more clever when she like explicitly references and plays on it.

[00:19:03] Brooke: Right and Pet Sematary.

[00:19:05] Kaykay: Yeah, I was just gonna say, Pet Sematary. And also, good on Ann M. She took the Indian burial ground trope and took the Indian out of it to just have it be a burial ground, which like feels ahead of her time. Because this was like a trope that was all over the place and very problematic. And it's like, she had some sort of instinct about that, which, good for you Ann M.

[00:19:28] Brooke: I was nervous about that, I have to say.

[00:19:30] Kaykay: I was too, I was like, oh, the burial ground...

[00:19:33] Brooke: I know, did you feel your hackles go up when you saw that like, it's on an ancient burial ground? I was like, oh, no...

[00:19:40] Kaykay: Oh, 100 percent. I was like, this is where we're going. So I was pleasantly surprised.

[00:19:42] Brooke: I was like, we're gonna tread into Poltergeist territory. Yeah.

[00:19:45] Kaykay: Yeah. She kept it on the rails. Yeah, I think Pet Sematary is based on that too. It was like every fucking movie had this trope.

[00:19:52] Brooke: Right. Which is like, again, feeding into negative feelings about like, Native Americans are frightening and othered and mystical, as opposed to being like real human beings.

[00:20:06] Kaykay: And also like a very clear representation of projection, right? So like white people projecting their own guilt for what they did to native populations onto some mystical story about native populations coming to get them.

[00:20:22] Brooke: Right. And also being like, oh, this is how they're getting their revenge on us or something like that. Like, we are now the ones who are bearing the burden of the wrongs done by our ancestors or something. And so everything is actually fine now, because they're haunting us. So we have no further obligation to right the wrongs.

[00:20:41] Kaykay: Oh, it's back in balance. Here we go.

[00:20:42] Brooke: Yeah. This like paranoia that we have that isn't actually happening. Hint, hint, nudge, nudge. But this actually wasn't written by Ann M.

[00:20:50] Kaykay: Yeah. It's interesting because this one didn't feel as, you know, painful in some ways, but again, I didn't feel as engaged and there's less processing. Less of that like emotional relationship processing and more plot-based.

[00:21:02] Brooke: Yeah. So this is the first Baby-sitters Club book that was ghost written by Ellen Miles. So the last one that we had was by Mary Lou Kennedy, who we were not as enthused with.

[00:21:17] Kaykay: We were not fans of Mary Lou's work.

[00:21:19] Brooke: Right. Did you find Ellen Miles to be a step forward in the ghost writer direction?

[00:21:25] Kaykay: Definitely. I give Ellen Miles like a B. This book was a B.

[00:21:29] Brooke: Yeah.

[00:21:29] Kaykay: How about you?

[00:21:30] Brooke: I wrote down that I think she's much more convincing with Ann M's voice.

[00:21:35] Kaykay: Yes.

[00:21:36] Brooke: She seems to better understand the style and what we're looking for. Like, almost every chapter in this book passes the Bechdel test.

[00:21:44] Kaykay: Nice.

[00:21:45] Brooke: You know? The last book was very focused on heteronormativity and like what the girls should be doing and thinking, as they're preparing to like devote their lives, basically, to serving as a romantic partner. This book had none of that whatsoever. It's all about the girls working through things together.

[00:22:06] Kaykay: You get Stacey's conversation with her dad at the beginning. You get obviously their interactions with the male babysitting charges, although there aren't even as many of those in this book as there are in most. And then you get them going and kind of harassing an elderly man on his death bed at the end. But otherwise... Dude. What was his name? Mr.... Mr. Hennessey?

[00:22:33] Brooke: Ronald Hennessey.

[00:22:34] Kaykay: "I'll drink a bottle Hennessy up on yourself. So just let me introduce myself, my name is Humpty." Okay, tie back.

[00:22:42] Brooke: Yes. It all comes together.

[00:22:43] Kaykay: It all comes together. Ellen Miles was as obsessed with The Humpty Dance as I was.

[00:22:50] Brooke: Yeah. And you know, there was more of this sort of questioning in it, that I feel like it got overused. Like you could tell that there were some parameters that were given to these ghost writers of like, "We want to see how you do X. We want to see how you do Y. We want to see how you do Z." So you could see her like ticking some boxes.

[00:23:08] Kaykay: We want to see you do Amityville Horror. We want to see you do Scary Stories. We want to see you do Nancy Drew, a little skosh of Pet Sematary.

[00:23:15] Brooke: Have we had Pet Sematary explicitly referenced in these books before?

[00:23:19] Kaykay: Um, no. We were talking about Pet Sematary, but I don't know how we got off on that.

[00:23:26] Brooke: It would have come out in like 89, I think, so we would have been discussing it.

[00:23:31] Kaykay: Oh, right.

[00:23:32] Brooke: It is interesting how there are some really age inappropriate things that get brought up in the Baby-sitters Club. Like you get the Rosemary's Baby references, you know, where it's like, "Laine lives in the apartment complex from Rosemary's Baby." And it's got eight year olds knowing what Rosemary's Baby is. Just referencing Pet Sematary and Amityville Horror. But like, to be honest, I saw the Amityville Horror.

[00:24:00] Kaykay: I watched that shit, of course.

[00:24:01] Brooke: Because it was on like TBS at like 11, 11:00 AM on a Saturday.

[00:24:07] Kaykay: Oh my God. There is a scene, seriously, it is like burned into my brain as like an early trauma. There's a scene where like a little girl has her hands in the window sill. And the window sill comes down on her hands and like, a little blood pop-- it's like, now watching, it's not that gross, but I just happened to have the TV on and I was flipping channels and I flipped to that scene and like, I will never get it out of my mind. I was so terrified, horrified, traumatized. And then I realized later that was from Amityville Horror.

[00:24:40] Brooke: That you were probably just like innocently--

[00:24:43] Kaykay: I was like six, maybe?

[00:24:44] Brooke: Sitting on your couch, and it's just what happened to be on.

[00:24:47] Kaykay: Well actually, I wasn't sitting about my couch, cause there was no remote. So I was standing at the TV and of course, so it was like, I was probably as tall as the TV, so it was like surround screen.

[00:25:01] Brooke: You basically were Carol Ann in Poltergeist, and on your TV was that scene from The Amityville Horror.

[00:25:08] Kaykay: Yeah! That's exactly right. Oh my God. But that shit was on TV, you know?

[00:25:15] Brooke: We had that shit in like our elementary school library. Again, this is what's so fucking wild to me. I'm sorry, I know I can't let it go. But just like going back to like the fucking nonsense with books being banned from libraries and they're banning books that are like, "Kids, you're all okay. Express yourself, how you feel." Like, "You are loved." You know, basically like things that are meant to uplift and like make kids feel more secure in their skin.

Or like, be honest with kids. Like an honest overview of history written at like a level that is appropriate for kids to understand. That's what's being banned now, but these same people had no fucking problem putting The Amityville Fucking Horror in my goddamn school library. Like why is that there? It's not even real. It's just fucking nonsense propaganda. Like, what?

[00:26:10] Kaykay: It's because it's not really about the kids.

[00:26:13] Brooke: Oh I know.

[00:26:14] Kaykay: That's just, you know, the vehicle.

[00:26:17] Brooke: But then why did they want us reading The Amityville Horror? Why did they want us reading Sybil?

[00:26:24] Kaykay: Have you heard the, uh, You're Wrong About for Amityville Horror?

[00:26:28] Brooke: I have.

[00:26:29] Kaykay: Yes!

[00:26:29] Brooke: Highly recommend.

[00:26:30] Kaykay: I loved that!

[00:26:30] Brooke: Listeners, if you haven't, it's what, it's like a three-part series?

[00:26:34] Kaykay: It's a three part series that is captivating.

[00:26:37] Brooke: On the truth behind Amityville Horror. And again, all this shit is whitewashing. It's like the true story of The Amityville Horror is like, yes, the family was murdered.

[00:26:46] Kaykay: Domestic violence.

[00:26:47] Brooke: Right. It was domestic violence.

[00:26:49] Kaykay: Basically, like clearly there was domestic violence happening in the home and...

[00:26:52] Brooke: In both ways, right? A family was murdered by one of the sons of the family. And then that house is sold and is purchased by a young couple who fairly recently got married and the new husband, who is the stepfather of the kids who live in the home, clearly seems like he was, they were just didn't know what they were getting into. Got in over their head financially.

[00:27:15] Kaykay: They get in way over their head financially.

[00:27:17] Brooke: And it was like, "Oh shit, we're way over our skis with how much we paid for this house. We can't afford it. How are we going to get out of it? I know, let's make up this story."

[00:27:27] Kaykay: "Ghosts!"

[00:27:27] Brooke: Yeah. And so that's basically what happened. It's all a fucking scam because a white dude overstretched himself financially, and the rest of us all have to pay for it, including our fucking psyches with these goddamn stories that were on our TV and in our library. And we couldn't escape it, and they even make their way into Stacey and the Mystery of Stoneybrook. Did I get that right? That's kind of it.

[00:27:53] Kaykay: Yeah. Bang on.

[00:27:54] Brooke: Yeah. Story of our lives.

[00:27:55] Kaykay: Highly recommended. Go listen to that podcast. Very good.

[00:27:59] Brooke: And I love how they always sort of break down like how our misperceptions about the world got to be that way. The different forces that are at play that are kind of ensuring that we don't actually understand.

[00:28:11] Kaykay: Yeah. It's a, it's a really good exercise in critical thinking and like an experience of people, just sort of thoughtfully questioning narratives, cultural narratives that are just kind of handed to us. I love this idea of pieces that subvert dominant paradigms and narratives, and really want to question it because it's such a healthy exercise for all human brains to be doing this.

[00:28:37] Brooke: Yeah. And it shows how fun it is. I think that like sort of taps into the same thing that we try to do with like looking at a critical eye on the messages that you receive. But if you go into it with just like an open spirit to seeing what you find, it's really fun. It can be enraging...

[00:28:55] Kaykay: Yeah.

[00:28:55] Brooke: But it is rewarding. Like, any sort of process that is aimed at getting to the truth, if you devote yourself to it and you make sure that you hone the skills that you need to do it effectively, because you can do it very ineffectively, which I think is what we see in this book. It really gets to what happens in this book too, which is like, start digging for the truth, but like be cognizant of your confirmation bias, please.

[00:29:25] Kaykay: Yeah. And also the idea that like, there's a reason why so many news programs are done through humor because there's so much truth in humor. And also there's something about humor that feels more accepting of like, "This is the human condition and we all need to learn from it," versus outrage. Because outrage is like, "This is not me. This is fucking you." It's like very rigid and tense, and like, "not me," but like, I don't know. There's something about humor that is like beautifully warm and like inviting in a way.

[00:30:03] Brooke: Well, because you have to connect. You have to connect with your audience in some way. Humor only works if your audience can identify something about it in themselves. Humor reveals some sort of bond.

[00:30:17] Kaykay: Yeah. It's also more work for that reason. It's, it's harder to do that than to just be like, "Rar rar rar rar, everything sucks."

[00:30:26] Brooke: Right. Cause you can say everything sucks, but that's not funny. So you have to find...

[00:30:30] Kaykay: Yeah, and it also doesn't like find any truth. Like it doesn't bring you to any larger concepts or truth, and so it's not productive.

[00:30:38] Brooke: Right.

[00:30:38] Kaykay: In fact, it's like reductive and harms you and others. But humor is like very creative.

[00:30:46] Brooke: Yeah.

[00:30:46] Kaykay: It's like the rules of improv, like "yes and."

[00:30:50] Brooke: Right.

[00:30:50] Kaykay: That's humor.

[00:30:51] Brooke: Yeah. And that's where you can find the catharsis, right? Cause I think like, if you're just raging without humor, I don't know if the catharsis is really there. Cause like how do you resolve it? How do you move on from the rage? There's no, there's no flip side.

Anger and like joy are kind of diametrically opposed. They're not total opposites, but they live in different worlds. And so humor is what brings in an aspect of joy into the equation. It's kind of like what you can latch onto to move on, to move forward from just living in the aftermath of the rage.

[00:31:29] Kaykay: Yeah. And the rage also like has an element of fighting against reality in a way that just makes you tighter and tighter and tighter and like more unhappy and more and more unhappy, versus like humor really turns towards reality.

[00:31:42] Brooke: Yeah.

[00:31:43] Kaykay: It's calling out a shared reality.

[00:31:46] Brooke: Yeah.

[00:31:46] Kaykay: Versus like fighting against it and rejecting it.

[00:31:50] Brooke: It's such a great point because I think that that is something that we're missing today, is that sense of shared reality. It seems like so many people are living in just incredibly different worlds. Like just seeing... you're in the same space and not seeing the same thing. And it's like, how do you break through that? I don't know about you, but I saw that in this book as well. This book... this book has some moments.

[00:32:15] Kaykay: It's a little all over the place.

[00:32:17] Brooke: This book has some moments where I'm like, "Oh... oh no, what's happening?" I'm worried about Stacey, Kaykay.

[00:32:25] Kaykay: She's hallucinating!

[00:32:26] Brooke: Did you leave his book worried about Stacey?

[00:32:28] Kaykay: Yes! I mean, it's never good if you're hallucinating.

[00:32:32] Brooke: Right.

[00:32:33] Kaykay: That's called a break with reality. Let's call it a psychotic break. Definitely if you have a major medical condition like diabetes, you better share that with that doctor in New York.

[00:32:42] Brooke: So I'm the doctor in New York. "Stacey, tell me about what happened last weekend. Why did your parents call an emergency appointment with me..."

[00:32:53] Kaykay: "With both me and your psychiatrist."

[00:32:57] Brooke: Right.

[00:32:58] Kaykay: Yeah, so... wow. I mean, where to start? Okay. So first of all, Charlotte, her grandpa's sick and her family needs to go tend to him. And so they're going to be gone for a week and they decide that Charlotte can't come with them because of school. So Charlotte is staying with Stacey and they're kind of just like exploring the neighborhood, and they explore this super old house that they're currently in the process of breaking down.

But it's like a historical house that they have to like take the plumbing out and take the historical elements out of the house before they break it down. And they keep going to the house and sort of seeing things. They saw a face in the window, just like the pig in Amityville Horror. And they go back to the house on the day when the house is finally gonna get completely demolished and Stacey hallucinates that the whole fucking thing is on fire, and the old man that they see in the nursing home is dying in the fire.

[00:33:57] Brooke: Yeah. And she's like looking around, too. So that's the part that was really...

[00:34:03] Kaykay: Well that's where you know it's a hallucination.

[00:34:04] Brooke: Yeah, where she says, she looks around, I'll read this passage because--

[00:34:08] Kaykay: Yeah, it's a good one.

[00:34:09] Brooke: I think you have to like actually hear the passage in order to understand how jarring this is.

[00:34:14] Kaykay: In order to be significantly disturbed enough.

[00:34:17] Brooke: Yeah. So it's on page 129. You know, they're talking about how, okay, the whole second story of this house is gone. She says, it looks like nothing is going to happen. And then quote, "Boy, was I wrong. Just then I saw something very awful. The house, what was left of it, suddenly went up in flames. The fire crackled and roared as it engulfed the wreckage. I looked around terrified. What should we do?

But everybody was just standing there looking slightly bored. Kristy had wandered off to talk to Sam. Charlotte was watching one of the work men pack his tools away into his truck. Nobody else seemed to see the fire. I turned back to check again. Maybe I'd been imagining things once more, but the flames were even higher.

Now smoke curled up as the fire moved quickly through the tumbledown structure. And then, just as in my dream, I saw a figure. It was calling for help. It looked like an old, old man. Was it, could it be Mr. Hennessey? I couldn't believe my eyes! Just as in my dream, my feet were rooted to the ground. I wanted to help, but what could I do?

Then I felt Charlotte tugging on my hand," and Charlotte's asking her, "Let's go," blah, blah, blah, blah. And then she looks back and she says that she doesn't see a fire. So it's like a page of, not just she's seeing this, but she looks away, she sees other things that are happening that are real, she looks back and it's still happening.

And the only time that breaks for her is when Charlotte touches her hand. When she has like a physical, so like she's having these visual hallucinations tied in with visualizing things that are truly happening. So like the two worlds are blending and they only get separated when Charlotte touches her hand.

So that's why Stacey had an emergency meeting with her doctor and her psychiatrist.

[00:36:13] Kaykay: Yeah, that's what you would hope. That's not exactly what happened, but that's what you would hope! But instead, something more fucked happens, which, Stacey then has a sort of feeling of panic inside that she needs desperately to see Mr. Hennessey. And she runs to the nursing home and he's died. Okay, so then you're reading the book, or I'm reading the book and I'm like, wow, this is beyond fucked. So you're now telling me this was a premonition of this dude's death.

And then somehow the book decides that it wasn't a premonition of his death, and everything was fine because he left her a letter. And in the letter he's like, "Oh, remember all those scary things I said about the house? They didn't happen." And so then she determines, "Oh, okay. Everything was fine, and I just was imagining that and everything's good."

[00:37:01] Brooke: Yeah. He writes a letter on his death bed to the girl. He had never met in his life who just showed up the previous day at his nursing home with like three other young strangers to him. And he just fucks with them and talks about Old Rubbernose who like haunts the house and he's like, "Ha ha, I'm going to go die now. And I'll leave you a letter telling you I was fucking with you." It's fine.

[00:37:29] Kaykay: So weird.

[00:37:29] Brooke: It's all totally fine! This doesn't happen. But now...

[00:37:33] Kaykay: I was just gonna say, the nineties were fucked but they weren't this fucked.

[00:37:37] Brooke: Well, I mean, kind of.

[00:37:38] Kaykay: This happened to you? Do tell!

[00:37:40] Brooke: This specific thing didn't happen to me. I did not specifically gather three of my friends to go track down a strange man on his death bed in a nursing home, to show up and be like, "I understand that your house is haunted. Tell me why it's haunted." And then he fucked with my head and then I hallucinated things. And then he sent me a letter saying, "Ah, ha, ha, just kidding. I'm dead now."

That didn't happen. But what would have been amaze-- like, I'm just picturing a world where now Stacey teams up with Karen Brewer--

[00:38:18] Kaykay: Oh, this is so Karen Brewer.

[00:38:19] Brooke: And they become young witches under the tutelage of Morbidda Destiny. And then there's like a supernatural-- cause you get the Baby-sitters Club Mysteries. But if it's like coming from that angle, like multi-generational witches in training...

[00:38:33] Kaykay: Whoa. It would be like X-Files, but like two Scullys. And like witchy Scullys. Get rid of the fucking suits, they're out. Grow that hair out a little bit, get yourself some sort of earthy smock. Woman of the Woods, we'll get some Woman of the Woods energy coming in.

[00:38:51] Brooke: Wouldn't that be fun? Aren't you sad that we don't get that? Like, if I were to sum up this book, it's like Stacey goes Q. You know, like Stacey takes a turn. And I had what they were fighting in this is boredom. They're fighting boredom. The whole reason why they even go over to this house in the first place is because Stacey is put in charge of really caring for Charlotte. Stacey's mom is off at a job interview, and so Stacey has to entertain Charlotte.

Charlotte isn't feeling well, and then you come to find out she is sick. So what they should have done is she should have taken her seriously and been like, "Oh, you're sick. Let's put you to bed." And while Charlotte rests, Stacey can do something age appropriate for a 13 year old girl. I don't know, read a teen magazine or do whatever.

[00:39:37] Kaykay: Watch Yo! MTV Raps.

[00:39:38] Brooke: Yeah. Watch Yo! MTV Raps.

[00:39:40] Kaykay: That's really funny because I had that they were fighting sickness, decay, death, loss, and change. So you have sickness in Charlotte that they ignore.

[00:39:49] Brooke: Right.

[00:39:49] Kaykay: You have the grandfather who is sick, and Charlotte's worried that he's going to die. You have the man in the nursing home. You have the home, which like homes, especially I think in like Victorian literature, were very representative of like the soul or something.

[00:40:04] Brooke: Oh yeah. And that's one of the stories that they go to read, right? At the library, too. It's like The Little House. It's story about a tiny house that has like a whole city built up around it and like, what happens to the house. And so again it's about like, I'm here and like things have moved on and are around me, but like what happens to the thing that is still like the representative of the past?

[00:40:26] Kaykay: Yeah, exactly.

[00:40:28] Brooke: Yeah, and then you said, "and then change."

[00:40:30] Kaykay: Yeah. And basically this all could be a read of Stacey falling into a major depressive episode with psychotic features. If your depression gets bad enough, you can start to manifest psychosis. And it seems like we're getting in this territory.

[00:40:47] Brooke: Yeah. And it's so interesting because this book starts with Stacey in New York.

[00:40:52] Kaykay: Yeah.

[00:40:53] Brooke: So it opens with Stacey coming back from a weekend with her dad in New York City. Laine is over. They have bagels and cream cheese and lox and all of that, the very New York thing to do, right?

[00:41:07] Kaykay: Yet again, the cream cheese and lox makes an appearance. No bacon, egg, and cheese.

[00:41:12] Brooke: That's how you know you're not in Stoneybrook anymore. You're eating exotic foods like bagels with cream cheese and lox. I had no idea what lox was. All I knew is that I was like, "One day, I'm going to try a bagel with cream cheese and lox." Because I mean, I don't think we even had like bagel stores at this point. The bagels come around later.

[00:41:30] Kaykay: Yeah, I mean, where else would you have heard of lox except this book?

[00:41:32] Brooke: Yeah. Very exotic.

[00:41:34] Kaykay: Did you ever get your lox and were you underwhelmed?

[00:41:37] Brooke: Yeah. I don't like lox.

[00:41:38] Kaykay: Yeah. Lox is gross.

[00:41:39] Brooke: Raw fish and me, we're not friends. And I know it's smoked, it's not... whatever. It has the texture of raw fish. We're not friends.

[00:41:46] Kaykay: That's why I'd bring you a bacon, egg, and cheese. That's how I feel about you.

[00:41:50] Brooke: Aw, thanks.

[00:41:51] Kaykay: You're not getting lox, you're getting a bacon, egg, and cheese.

[00:41:53] Brooke: That's love.

[00:41:54] Kaykay: Yeah.

[00:41:55] Brooke: That's New York love.

[00:41:56] Kaykay: That's New York love.

[00:41:57] Brooke: Um, so you see her transitioning from that. And she's talking about, you know, the stuff that she does in New York and in New York, it's like she's a kid, right? Like her dad, you know, they talk about how her dad is actually like not working all weekend and like paying attention to her and they're doing things and she's like able to like go out and have fun and whatever. And then she goes back to Stoneybrook and it's like, "Hi, welcome back. You're a little mom again."

[00:42:24] Kaykay: Yup. Welcome to your life, handling things way above your maturity level. Charlotte wrangling with death and sickness.

[00:42:34] Brooke: Exactly. But it's like, let's not actually wrangle with those things. Instead, let's pretend they're not happening. Stacey's like, "Oh, she couldn't actually be sick if she made it through an entire school day." It's like, that's not how getting sick works. You can be sick when you get home from school. That is possible, Stacey.

Um, so instead it's like, "Oh no, that can't be right. We have to find something to occupy our time. Uh, let's go look at this house that's going to be torn down and now let's make up stories about it." That's why I said they were like, she was fighting this boredom with obsessive paranoia, frankly. It's like, "We're going to jump on like the first thing that we see that grabs our interest. That can be a distraction for us. We're going to jump right on that. And we're going to ride that train until it takes us with it."

And their confirmation bias is the thing that keeps it going. So there are things like, they get cues that, hey, maybe they're off base, where Stacey talks about how Kristy like finds a map, like an old map. And the map shows a graveyard and they're like, "Oh, it must be where this house is built. I'm looking for a map that can tell me something about the house. I found a map. Because I was looking for a map that told me something about the house, I am going to assume that this map is the map that I was looking for."

[00:43:55] Kaykay: Yeah.

[00:43:56] Brooke: And there's even like a part where Stacey actually says, so she has a moment where she's like, "Well, do we know that that's the right map?" And she says Kristy and Claudia just like glare at her. And she was like, oh, clearly they've decided that this is the map. We're just going to go with it. And so there are a little checkpoints or somebody could have been like, "Hey, let's slow down for a second. Let's check our assumptions. Let's look for facts."

You see it where Claudia and Kristy and Stacey and Charlotte are all there. Kristy says, "You know what? I showed Watson that map. He says it's just a part of Stoneybrook. It's actually a map of where the cemetery is, not the map of where this house is." So again, we know the thing that at the beginning we were like, "Are we sure that this is right?" We get confirmation that no, it's actually not true.

[00:44:44] Kaykay: It's such a great point.

[00:44:46] Brooke: And then Charlotte says, "Does it really matter if the house and the town is built on a burial ground? Everybody's still having all these weird experiences." They're not having weird experiences. They're having normal experiences that they think are weird because they've attributed it to something that isn't true.

So, you know, it's like, why let facts get in the way of the feelings that you have? We're just going to ride the feeling, because that serves our needs right now.

[00:45:12] Kaykay: Well, you're making me think of something very fundamental to human beings, which is human beings will often fail to see the dangers that they're actually facing and like a realistic danger. Or they'll fail to talk about, you know, like deaths that have happened in their family or divorces that have happened their family. But instead they'll like fixate on something magical.

So it's a perfect representation of the way that people feel drawn to, you know, like mystical stories. And those feel easier to deal with than the actual loss, or their inevitable death or decline, or the inevitable death and decline of family members. It's a lot easier to just get lost in fantastic stories. Like somehow that's safer to the human psyche than actually dealing with what's at hand.

But of course, if you don't deal with what's at hand, it leads to problems. It usually leads to mental health problems, right? Because your psyche actually wants you to look at those things and address them, sort them out, process them, you know? And it's really not going to let you rest until you do look at those things and process those things.

[00:46:25] Brooke: And the longer that you distract yourself, the longer that the panic in your psyche is stirring you up and like, the more damage it can do. I mean...

[00:46:36] Kaykay: Yeah, panic's a great word.

[00:46:38] Brooke: And I wonder if it's because focusing on being like, "Oh, this is something mystical" takes away your responsibility. It's like, "It's something that I can't control. And if I can't control it, then I can't be expected to do anything about it." It's a, it's a helplessness. You're prescribing helplessness to yourself.

[00:46:58] Kaykay: That's a great way to look at it. And also people are, are also drawn to like, they, they want to have control. And then they're drawn to being completely out of control at the same time. It's a weird duality in human beings. And so they kind of will almost like rush towards it sometimes, because rushing towards it feels safer than just waiting for it to fall on you.

Because now you have the agency of like, "I'm going to rush towards this head fucking first." Versus like, "When is this coming for me? When is this coming for me?" It's like, why people like to be scared, you know? I think.

[00:47:34] Brooke: Yeah. Well, I think it's why people like scary movies, because they know there's an ending.

[00:47:39] Kaykay: Right.

[00:47:40] Brooke: You know, it's like, "I'll allow myself to be scared in this contained space that I know doesn't actually pose a real threat to me. There's no real tangible threat to me, so I will feel the feeling of being under threat, because I know that there is a catharsis where I will no longer be under threat." And so it's like a way to resolve that tension.

[00:48:04] Kaykay: Yeah, and it's contained. It's safe.

[00:48:06] Brooke: Yeah. And like, you can dictate what the threat is. And so I think that's what we're seeing, sort of tying back to what we were talking about like at the beginning and throughout this, while you're seeing things like a lot of the hysteria that you see right now around things like, I hate even using it, but this is the term that they're using, "critical race theory," which is not critical race theory, what they're talking about, whatsoever.

Because it's like, let's talk about that because that means that the threat is other, it's externalized and it's an easy problem to solve. "We'll just ban these books. There's no trans kids in my family, so I'll say that trans kids are the problem and we need to ban trans kids, cause that doesn't directly impact me so then I'll be okay. Well, problem solved." And it's like, no, you're not addressing what the actual problems are. You're making up fake problems.

[00:48:56] Kaykay: Yeah, it's always easier to, you know, create a boogeyman than to like actually deal with your problems.

[00:49:02] Brooke: A boogeyman that's external to you, right? "Let's ban books in Florida," as opposed to addressing the very real threat that climate change poses to our communities in Florida. "Let's ban trans kids from being able to be validated for who they are," as opposed to addressing inequality in the world that we really live in.

"I am also subjected to the forces that are making us all unequal. The real situation, if we're looking at income inequality, if we're looking at like true power structures, I don't have the power that I wish to have in reality. So I'm going to make up a false reality where I inherently have the power that I wish to have. And it's just these people, who are already subservient to me in reality, that are causing my pain.

I will go make up fake problems and quote unquote, 'solve' them. Even if I'm quote unquote 'solving' them in ways that hurt real people, I don't immediately see how doing that is hurting me, and that seems easier than being like, 'Okay, what do we need to do to actually make our society sustainable for the rest of my life, and for those who come after me?' That seems like too big of a problem to solve, so I'll do this instead."

[00:50:23] Kaykay: Definitely. I think also, bringing it back to horror movies, there's more horror movies lately that deal with this sort of human vulnerability, psychological vulnerability of like creating an external boogeyman versus, you know, addressing that, which is actually real and scary.

Like The Babadook, for example. There've been all these-- and like most of them are women writers by the way, which I think is very interesting. But this new class of horror movie that's like really about humans' inability to deal with grief. So for example, like thinking about climate change, there's a lot of grief in that.

[00:50:58] Brooke: Tremendous, yeah.

[00:50:58] Kaykay: There's existential grief in that, and it is so painful to turn your attention to that grief. It's much easier to have an external boogeyman, which is literally in the movie. It's like, there's a boogeyman called the Babadook, and the husband has died and the mother and the son are not dealing with the loss and the grief. And so this Babadook external force starts coming to get them. I don't know, it feels very reminiscent of everything we're talking about.

[00:51:25] Brooke: Yeah. Like you can't escape it. Like the pain is coming for you. You can't escape the fact that the pain, it's either here or it's coming for you. How do you go through life knowing that?

[00:51:35] Kaykay: And the more you try to escape it, the worse it gets.

[00:51:37] Brooke: Exactly.

[00:51:38] Kaykay: Right? The more your life actually falls apart, the more you run from it.

[00:51:42] Brooke: Right. I think you're really picking up on some of the messages that I didn't see as much of, how like the death, sort of the lingering threat that Charlotte must be feeling with her grandpa being sick and her parents being gone and her not being able to be there. So she's feeling isolated and alone and afraid. And I think you've got Stacey feeling, you know, to an extent isolated and alone, in that when she's in Stoneybrook, she's really not living that part of her life that she loves from New York.

[00:52:15] Kaykay: And she always has the like medical threat hanging over her.

[00:52:18] Brooke: Right. And that comes up too in this. That's such a good point, because I thought it was interesting that Stacey is the one that goes to the doctor with Charlotte. She's 13 years old taking like an eight year old girl to the doctor.

[00:52:30] Kaykay: It's fucked. Oh my God, don't get me started. Ugh!

[00:52:32] Brooke: Stacey's mom isn't going in.

[00:52:34] Kaykay: "Oh, you've got this Stacey. You deal with the existential dread of this 13 year old and her real medical illnesses. I'm going to go shopping."

[00:52:41] Brooke: Ah, 1990. Um, so Charlotte's on, you know, has to take penicillin, and she doesn't like the taste of it and she just refuses to take it. And Stacey is trying to get her to take it, and then she realizes, okay, rather than me being like, "No, you have to take this," she's like, "Hey Charlotte, let me show you what I have to do." And so she shows her how she checks her blood sugar.

This is like the most description we've seen for like how Stacey, you know, we've gotten descriptions of how she's fainted and sort of the ramifications of what happens if she doesn't properly maintain her blood sugar, but we don't see the process of what she does to make sure. Like the testing process, this is the first time that we see that.

She shows her, she's like, "This is what I have to do." So there is this sort of bonding in the sickness that they have. And when Charlotte sees that Stacey has to, you know, prick herself and test her blood and then give herself injections, et cetera, then Charlotte's like, "Okay, I guess I can take a few drops of this nasty tasting medicine, that's fine."

But yeah, the way that like, sickness and death just pervades this book. Until you sit down and really start talking about it, it's kind of like, "It's just a mystery." It's like, it's, it's a lot more than that, actually. It's a lot more than that. It always is, right?

[00:54:02] Kaykay: Yeah. I liked the subtlety of this in that book and they didn't make it explicit. I'm not even sure the author would have been aware of it, really. It's an open question to me how much the author was understanding this explicit connection, because it is something that's, um, just so very like deep part of our psyches, that often you don't see what comes out.

[00:54:23] Brooke: You know, as we're talking through this, I think she definitely did a good job of like imbuing meaning into the mystery. This author will actually go on to be the primary author of The Baby-sitters Club Mystery series.

[00:54:37] Kaykay: Ooh, all right!

[00:54:39] Brooke: That's the main role that she ends up playing in this book series, is she writes the majority of the mysteries, as well as, she'll write some more books in the, in the main series. But I feel pretty strongly that they had assigned out books to a variety of ghost writers that were probably all being written at the same time.

Because this doesn't refer to anything that happened in book 34, like Stacey and Mary Anne just came back from Sea City. There is absolutely no reference of anything that happened there whatsoever. Also, you get Claudia going to the library and Claudia is like, "I don't know how to do research at the library." And it's like, two books ago you were using microfiche. I would guess that this was being written simultaneously as Claudia and the Great Search.

[00:55:32] Kaykay: Man, they're really shittin' these out!

[00:55:34] Brooke: Cause they're trying to find like permanent ghost writers for the series, because Ann M's gonna take a pretty significant step back soon. So I bet you, this is at the point where they're just like, "We gotta..."

[00:55:46] Kaykay: "We gotta hustle, fam."

[00:55:47] Brooke: Yeah. I suspect that these are all auditions that were happening at the same time, and we're just going to see these unfold. It makes me wonder how many books in the series we're going to get where they seem like they're kind of isolated. Like, they're not building upon something that has recently happened.

[00:56:02] Kaykay: Ah, interesting theory.

[00:56:04] Brooke: Yeah, it did a good job at referencing things that had happened in previous books. Like, that felt very different to me from the last book is I felt like Ellen Miles knows these characters. And I felt like Mary Lou Kennedy did not. Like these were brand new people to her, and Ellen Miles is like, "No, I get it." Like even the description of the clothes that Stacey wore, as opposed to the last one where it's like, "Stacey was wild, she was wearing--"

[00:56:29] Kaykay: "Khakis."

[00:56:31] Brooke: Yeah, "she was wearing like a leopard print shirt tucked into khakis with a belt," you know? And it's like, ooh, how crazy!

[00:56:38] Kaykay: What the fuck was Mary Lou wearing?

[00:56:40] Brooke: Right. And this, you get on page 2, which talks about how she's sophisticated. She looks very sophisticated on the train. And she says, "I had dressed for my train ride in a white jumpsuit layered over a blue tank top. I had on white push-down socks with blue hearts all over them." The push-down socks.

[00:56:58] Kaykay: Snaps.

[00:56:58] Brooke: "A wide blue patent leather belt, and a wild necklace made of all kinds of plastic sea creatures in a rainbow of colors."

[00:57:05] Kaykay: That's a toot. That's a toot.

[00:57:10] Brooke: That is a RuPaul's Drag Race Fashion Photo RuView reference for those who may not be aware. You toot or you boot the looks, and Stacey just got tooted.

[00:57:20] Kaykay: That's a full toot.

[00:57:21] Brooke: Full toot. Mary Lou's look?

[00:57:23] Kaykay: Boot.

[00:57:23] Brooke: That's a boot. That's Stacey's mom's outfit. Stacey's not wearing her mom's clothes, don't get it twisted.

[00:57:29] Kaykay: "Stacy's mom..."

[00:57:30] Brooke: "Is not wearing the right clothes for Stacey to wear, I swear to God." Yeah, it was nice to at least be back in a world where--

[00:57:39] Kaykay: Good job, Ellen Miles.

[00:57:40] Brooke: Yeah. Good job for doing your research. Except I have to say one thing, Ellen Miles. "Gary Rockman"? Come on now. That's the name of Stacey's favorite actor? Gary Rockman. I'm like, you are not writing for an episode of The Flintstones, okay? Gary Rockman is like a top celebrity for like Fred and Wilma. Not for Stacey McGill.

[00:58:06] Kaykay: Gary Rockman!

[00:58:07] Brooke: That's not the correct, no, that's not correct. But a lot of other things in this were on point.

[00:58:14] Kaykay: I mean, not everybody can be so genius as Ann M is to have a baby named Tony, you know? Her name game is on point.

[00:58:23] Brooke: And sell it! You have to know how to sell it. Right, you have to know how to sell "Baby Tony." Gary Rockman was not sold to me. I don't believe it. What did you have for Most Nineties Moments?

[00:58:34] Kaykay: I had three things. I think one, or maybe even two I've referenced before, but I'll just go for it. One was Triscuits, the crackers.

[00:58:44] Brooke: They still exist.

[00:58:45] Kaykay: Right, but I just feel like they were a real thing in the nineties.

[00:58:48] Brooke: Okay.

[00:58:49] Kaykay: Maybe just in my house.

[00:58:50] Brooke: Maybe. Yeah, I didn't get an affinity for Triscuits until like solid 2000s. So I think he could just be, when did you go through a Triscuits phase. Kaykay, you went through yours in the nineties.

[00:59:02] Kaykay: Definitely the nineties, yeah. Even though I'm like super allergic to gluten and I remember them giving me heartburn. Somehow I had it in my mind that they were healthy, you know.

[00:59:09] Brooke: Oh yeah.

[00:59:10] Kaykay: Probably because of the nineties' like whole grain, low fat--

[00:59:13] Brooke: Whole wheat.

[00:59:14] Kaykay: Whole wheat. So I had Triscuits, Highlights magazines in doctor's offices, and the name song. The like "Stacey Stacey bo Basey, banana" -- that shit was like, that was, that was wild in the eighties and nineties. People loved that shit.

[00:59:29] Brooke: That's like how Kristy has her siblings entertain themselves.

[00:59:34] Kaykay: Just sing the name song forever.

[00:59:36] Brooke: Forever. And I'm like, I don't know how long I could put up with that without walking into traffic. I mean, I'm sorry. It's like, no.

[00:59:43] Kaykay: Oh man. I was a camp counselor. It's, it's intense. You know how I replaced this as a camp counselor? I, uh, instead of singing that I used to sing "Cold Rock a Party." I would use the camp kid's name, so I would be like, "John rocks the party that rocks the body." And they loved it. And that was much more stomachable.

[01:00:02] Brooke: Yeah. Just get 'em singing MC Lyte, you know? That's far superior to the name game. Yeah, brilliant. I love that.

[01:00:11] Kaykay: What did you have for Nineties?

[01:00:13] Brooke: Um, I also had the name game and obviously all of the like horror movies that we've referenced. Again, those were on regular cable that would have just been on. Like when you weren't in school, horror movies were on for your viewing.

[01:00:28] Kaykay: For your terror.

[01:00:30] Brooke: Yeah.

[01:00:30] Kaykay: And existential dread.

[01:00:32] Brooke: Seriously. I had, eating SpaghettiOs out of a can. Like, there's something about that that just takes me back. Like there's a chapter where the Pike kids call it their smorgasbord, and it's basically just like, eat whatever the fuck you want in the house, just go find something. I can't deal with it, go eat.

[01:00:46] Kaykay: Yeah, intuitive eating. I love it.

[01:00:47] Brooke: Some of the kids want to eat SpaghettiOs, but they specify, "I don't want them heated up. I just want to eat them straight out of a can." And there's something about that where it's like today I can't imagine that happening, but in the nineties? Abso-fucking-lutely!

[01:01:02] Kaykay: Yeah, that's quality dining in the nineties.

[01:01:05] Brooke: Absolutely. And then cappuccino. So Stacey mentioned that one of the things that she loves about New York is that she gets to have sips of her dad's cappuccino. And she describes what a cappuccino is. This would have needed to have been described in 1990.

[01:01:24] Kaykay: Yes, because Starbucks did not exist. The commodification of gourmet coffee had not happened yet.

[01:01:31] Brooke: Definitely not.

[01:01:31] Kaykay: I mean, my parents were digging on Folgers crystals, for sure.

[01:01:35] Brooke: Yeah. That's what you saw like on TV and stuff, it was always like instant coffee granules is basically the kind of things that you would see advertised. Like Taster's Choice, you know.

[01:01:46] Kaykay: "The international collection."

[01:01:52] Brooke: Yeah. Fancy coffees were not a thing yet, but were soon to become one. And so I felt like that description of what cappuccino is, right at the beginning of the book, that rocketed me back. I was like, oh, we're at the precipice. This is early nineties right here, for sure. So I enjoyed that.

[01:02:10] Kaykay: Definitely something you would have gotten in New York City because of the incredibly huge Italian population. You know, you always could have gotten a good cappuccino on the Lower East Side anywhere.

[01:02:21] Brooke: And you would not anywhere where, you know, most kids were reading this book.

[01:02:26] Kaykay: Exactly.

[01:02:27] Brooke: I guarantee you, Stoneybrook did not have much in the way of cappuccinos in 1990. The progress we have made since those days is now, you can get a cappuccino everywhere.

[01:02:38] Kaykay: Yeah. Coffee progress, I can really get behind.

[01:02:41] Brooke: Yes. So just like this book started outside of Stoneybrook and went into Stoneybrook, we were going to leave Stoneybrook again for our next book. Because Kaykay, we have another Super Special coming up.

[01:02:56] Kaykay: Oh shit. I was just wondering, I was like, we haven't had one of these dang Super Specials in a minute! Where are they at?

[01:03:03] Brooke: It's Baby-sitters' Island Adventure. Meaning Dawn and Claudia get shipwrecked.

[01:03:12] Kaykay: Like what, on the Long Island Ferry? I don't understand.

[01:03:18] Brooke: Well, you're going to find out in our next episode where we're going from frickin Pet Sematary to Castaway. Yeah. I'm excited to find out--

[01:03:34] Kaykay: Oh, this is exciting!

[01:03:36] Brooke: Whether or not the Super Special redeems the Super Special, or is a continuation in our experience with the Super Specials.

[01:03:45] Kaykay: Is part of the long tradition of painful Super Specials that we complain about.

[01:03:53] Brooke: Yeah. So it's gonna be exciting. Maybe there will be more hallucinations. Again, just like Castaway, right? They're gonna like pick out a volleyball and make it the new alternate member.

[01:04:04] Kaykay: Is this gonna be like a whole spinoff? Like a Gilligan's Island spinoff?

[01:04:07] Brooke: We'll find out. But until then...

[01:04:10] Kaykay: Just keep sittin'! [THEME SONG] "I'll drink a bottle Hennessy up on yourself. So just let me introduce myself. My name is Humpty."