I feel like it’s high time that I wrote something here on the rereleases, but I’ve had a hard time deciding how I feel about them. I am kind of bummed that 2010 is shaping up to be the biggest year in BSCland since ten years ago, when the series ended, and I’m not living in a country where I can really fully participate in what’s going on. The only way I’ll be able to access any of the new books until July is if Amazon decides to put them on the Kindle (go to the pages for the books on Amazon.com and let them know you want them on the Kindle! Do it for me, and, I guess, fans who want to read the books on the subway without anyone else knowing and other BSC fans living abroad who have an ipod touch and the Kindle app), or if someone types up an ebook of them and I can find it somewhere, although I feel that the attitude of the fandom will be similar to the attitude that is taken toward the graphic novels and Main Street. They’re in print, so let’s vote with our dollars and let Scholastic know that these should continue to be published.

Anyway, now that the personal stuff is out of the way, one of the biggest controversies is how the series will be updated. We know that the clothes and hairstyles will be changed to reflect current trends–although, frankly, are trends today (leggings! oversize!) all that different, except now we’ve combined acid-wash jeans and leggings to make JEGGINGS? I’m wearing jeans with zippers on the bottom right now, a style I first was made aware of by the Club. Fresh! Also, the new outfits I’ve heard of so far (featured in the prequel) sound way more hideous. From the USA Today blog post:

Claudia was wearing willowy black pants, cinched at the waist with a drawstring, and a boldly patterned summer shirt with ties that she was adjusting around her midriff. Her
midriff would have been bare, but Claud had slithered into a lacy black tank top before she’d put on the shirt. On her feet were delicate silvery sandals, and her hair, which was looooooong and thick, was held away from her face with two silver combs.

I kind of feel like this isn’t much different from the outfits featured in the series in the late 90s, rather than something a modern 13-year-old would concoct out of thrift store finds and Forever 21. I think Modern Claud would dress like Tavi.

Another issue the reissues bring up is what they’re planning on updating besides the fashions. One thing that has never really sat right with most people in the fandom is the “We don’t care if Jessi is black! We’d like a girl if she were PURPLE and a good sitter!” Even other series of the same time, such as the Saddle Club, didn’t make such a big deal about having a character of a different race, if they reissue the series up until the point where Jessi comes into the picture. See also: Claudia being “exotic.”

Also, I’m sure they’d have to update medical stuff in regard to Stacey. Perhaps she’ll have an insulin pump decorated with glitter or something for her by Claud!

As far as Kristy and Mary Anne go… I don’t know what they’ll update for Mary Anne, because Mary Anne’s early wardrobe seemed very fifties even in the 80s and 90s. I’m having a hard time with modern readers buying the excuse that Watson and Elizabeth need to get married right away so they don’t end up living in sin.

What do you think they’ll update? What would you be sad to see go? What would make you glad?

Sometimes I feel like I go against the majority of BSC fans in regard to my personal feelings about BSC pairings. I don’t like Kristy/Cary… I prefer Mary Anne/Cary. I also don’t like Kristy/Alan… I prefer Claudia/Alan. Now, this is not because I buy into the “Kristy is a Lesbian” theory. I am quite fond of Kristy/Michel, actually.

The main reasoning between Alan and Kristy, as I’ve gathered, is that Kristy and Alan have the classic love/hate, teasing-because-I-like-you relationship. As with Kristy and Cary, sometimes I feel like hate/dislike is just that–no romantic overtones at all. Many people were quite blindsided by the Claudia/Alan storyline in Friends Forever, but once I thought about it a little more, it made a lot more sense than it seemed to at first.

Kristy and Alan seem to share of love of playing jokes on each other, but Alan has one thing that Kristy decidedly lacks: an artistic soul. It’s hidden, but it’s definitely there.

First, in Claudia and the Genius of Elm Street, Alan has an infamous scene where he shows up to Claudia’s “gallery” opening and draws disgusting pictures:

I thought she saw a painting of some candy she didn’t like. But when I turned around, I saw she was staring at a crude drawing of a dead cat next to a candy wrapper.

“What is that?” I said.

I walked toward it, and saw another wrinkled sheet of paper tacked up nearby. That one showed a terrible drawing of a grungy-looking toothless man eating a candy bar. He was smiling happily and saying “Mmm!” while the candy was flaking down his chin.

I quickly tore down the disgusting drawings. Who could have –

Then I saw Alan Gray squatting in a corner with a pad of paper and a pencil. “Hey! Cut that out!” I yelled.

Alan sprang to his feet, giving me his dumbest grin. “Go home, Alan, okay?” I said. “Don’t ruin my show.”

“Sure, Claudia,” he said. “No problem. See you.”

Alan also participates in the portrait drawing contest in Claudia Makes Up Her Mind–losing, of course. And when he is trying to romantically seduce Claudia, he makes her a pin out of sculpey and dyes a flower several different colors using the stem-splitting method. He also has an artistically-minded appreciation of anime.

Alan Gray has an artistic, sensitive soul; one that he covers up with jokes and pranks and being obnoxious. In the quote from Elm Street above, it seems like he just wants Claudia’s attention. And he’s not a jerk when she asks him to go home; he just leaves.

Kristy is not sensitive to understand Alan Gray. Once Claudia looks beyond his reputation, she gets The Real Alan.

Do you agree, or do you still like Kristy/Alan?

One of the complaints about Friends Forever is that people don’t like the fight between Claudia or Stacey, especially since they were fighting over a boy who seems pretty boring and non-descript. One of the great friendships of children’s literature, and they let some guy whose distinguishing characteristic is a leather shoelace worn around his wrist come between them?

While rereading Claudia and the Friendship Feud recently, a question popped into my mind. Who did I side with: Claudia or Stacey? It’s a hard question. Claudia feels that Stacey stole her boyfriend, except that he never was her boyfriend. Stacey feels that since Jeremy admitted that he had no feelings for Claudia, but that he did have feelings for Stacey, that she should be free to go for him.

On the one hand, it goes against “girl code” that a friend would go after a guy she knew you liked. On the other, it would be selfish of Claudia to stand in the way of Stacey’s happiness when there was, according to Jeremy, no chance that he would develop feelings to Claudia (although this proved not to be true later).

The best answer I can come up with to this question is that there is no black-and-white, true answer. Stacey was wrong to go after a guy Claudia liked, BUT it is also not really fair, in my opinion, to expect Stacey to not go after someone she liked–and who liked her back–just because Claudia said she liked him first. Is there no other boy at Stoneybrook Middle School? And I don’t like how Claudia sees it as “Stacey stole my boyfriend” when HE WAS NEVER HER BOYFRIEND.

Opinions? Who do you side with?

Until I was about sixteen, I lived in my own head a lot, daydreaming about what I wanted to happen in my life. The BSC don’t seem to do that much, except in Chapter 2s where one of girls is riding their bicycle on the way to a meeting and thinking really, really hard about their friends and almost crashes into a telephone pole.

I suppose my tendency to drift into a fantasy world, especially when I was thirteen, was because I had no friends. Perhaps my tendency to fantasize had more to do with that than age. Perhaps the lack of daydreaming in the BSC (except for thinking about their awesome friends) has to do with their active social lives organizing carnivals for children and having sort-of boyfriends.

But then when I really think about it, it’s Claudia and Stacey, the coolest (arguably) members of the BSC, who daydream the most. My favorite fantasy sequence in BSC, the one that inspired this whole post, is the one in Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls where Claudia imagines a situation where she and Trevor are on a field trip to a place with a garden maze, and they find a secret door in the garden and it turns into a winter wonderland and it is very romantic. It is exactly the kind of stupid thing I would have imagined at that age. I also like it because it seems like it would lead into a very strange magical pornographic film.

Stacey usually dreams about future careers and money, so hers aren’t as funny. Stacey in a red convertible! Stacey the famous movie director!

Do I just have a selective memory? Did the other girls daydream more frequently than I remember? Was I just a loser nerd with no friends? (Yes.)

I think that if Claudia were a real person alive today, she would totally have an Etsy shop. And it might be this one.

(via Fops and Dandies)

A more meaningful update will go up later today, but for now I just want to relate that word from my outsourced sources has lead me to believe that tomorrow major headway will be done on the super secret awesome Stoneybrookite project. So, keep watching for it…

Five minutes earlier, Lynn’s parents had finally left. My uncle Russ practically had to shove my aunt Peaches out the door. “What if she starts running a fever?” Peaches asked, clutching Lynn as if she couldn’t bear to turn her over to me. “What if she falls out of her crib?”

“Claudia knows what to do,” said my mother soothingly, putting an arm around Peaches. (They’re sisters.) “She can handle any situation that comes up. Remember, she’s a professional baby-sitter.”

I nodded. “That’s right,” I said. “Lynn will be in the care of a full-fledged founding member of the BSC.” I grinned proudly. I didn’t have to explain to Peaches and Russ about the BSC. They know those initials stand for Babysitters Club, and they know what the club is all about. You can’t find better, more experienced sitters anywhere.

“Not to mention the BSC member’s sibling and parents,” added my older sister, Janine. “Well be here too.”

Thank you, Janine, for remembering that someone besides Claudia has the capacity to take care of a baby. Did John and Rioko forget that they successfully reared two children to adolescence? Or were they just trying to give Claudia something to feel good about? This passage in Claudia and the Terrible Truth has always annoyed me. So often, the BSC were treated as if they knew more about children than actual parents. Sorry, but just because you organize carnivals doesn’t mean you know everything there is to know about children and are the most expert at childrearing in the world.

I’m not going to comment on how weird this video is–the fact that someone spent 30,000$ so that their spawn could have his very own art collection. I just wish that the mom had known that all of this could have been had for like five bucks in the Kishi garage.

So I am back from the land in which Ann currently resides and the area that is the model for Camden Falls. I realized that Ann is really rich and an author who doesn’t need to commute, plus she doesn’t have kids who are in school or anything. Therefore, she has the option of finding her dream town and making it her home. She did. There was nary a Target or a strip mall in sight. Only quaint little shops and restaurants. My question: why did she place Camden Falls in MA and not the Hudson River Valley? I have never been to Massachusetts, so perhaps there is an area in Massachusetts which quite resembles the Hudson Valley. But still. Ann, why not represent?

I found this pic of Woodstock Wine and Liquors that illustrates what a Camden Falls store must look like:

Anyway, I have two extremely exciting blog posts planned. One is an expose of the Stamford, CT area. The other is a review of the second Main Street book, which I just purchased tonight. I know, I know, I’m writing a lot about Main Street, but I feel like it’s relevant because it’s a series written by Ann. So yeah, full post tomorrow.

Also, Claudia renamed herself Amy Secrest and started selling her jewelry online. Thanks broken_angel99 for posting this on the bsc livejournal!