BSFC #29: Mallory and the Mystery Diary

November 1989 was serving INSPIRATION: The fall of the Berlin Wall! The Velvet Revolution! The debut of Queen Latifah! The introduction of queer icon Ursula the Sea Witch! The Baby-sitters Club's addition of literacy tutoring to their ever-expanding list of services!

Brooke and Kaykay discuss Mallory and the Mystery Diary's ode to the joys of reading and its model of educational empowerment, with digressions on Pee-wee, potatoes, and the badassery of Helen Keller.

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Transcript

[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.

[00:00:23] Kaykay: And I'm Kaykay Brady. I'm a therapist, and I am new to the books.

[00:00:28] Brooke: And this week we're going back to November of 1989, following up on all of the exciting things that were happening in October, where we've been talking about- 

[00:00:37] Kaykay: World change.

[00:00:39] Brooke: Yeah, various geopolitical events that we could learn from today. So we're going to continue that because in November, as we had mentioned in our previous episode, this is when you had the metaphorical and eventual physical fall of the Berlin Wall. In our next episode, we'll be able to discuss-

[00:01:00] Kaykay: The Berlin Wall falls? 

[00:01:01] Brooke: First, David Hasselhoff dances on top of it. So if you think I'm not talking about David Hasselhoff on top of the Berlin Wall wearing a piano scarf, you are mistaken, because that's going to be a topic of conversation.

[00:01:15] Kaykay: You know, I would not be surprised if the babysitters had to go to Germany to like save the world. The amount of things that the babysitters have to take care of in this universe? You know, that would not be surprising to me at all. 

[00:01:27] Brooke: Yeah, Super Special Number 6, Back in the USSR. Baby-sitters in the USSR. Yeah. So, we'll see. I mean, Kristy, I would trust Kristy. Kristy and Dawn together, I think could solve most of the world's problems. 

[00:01:43] Kaykay: I totally agree. And you know, Kristy probably knows how to wield a sledgehammer very well. You know, that wall is not easily coming down. You might need to, you know, push Kristy up to the front. 

[00:01:54] Brooke: Yeah. You gotta get lesbians involved in any demolition process. That's gonna make it so much better. 

[00:01:58] Kaykay: Lesbians to the front! Lesbians to the front! That's what you say. 

[00:02:03] Brooke: Yeah. Hell yeah. I'm sure there were lesbians that were involved in the lead up to this because I mean, there are usually lesbians involved in all things good that happen, movements wise, in this world. Well, it's been my experience. I just want to give a little bit of a background on how this happened, because again, I think that there are parallels to what we're seeing today for what worked in other situations and what lessons we might be able to apply to our own. So the Berlin Wall metaphorically falls on November 9th. What actually ends up happening is gates opened up. People were able to move from East Berlin into West Berlin and just walk through and not have to go through a visa process, et cetera. 

The whole story behind this is really interesting, but the background is there was this huge protest in Berlin on November 4th. So five days before this happens, right? Called the Alexanderplatz protest, named for where it took place. This was organized by an association of theater workers who were horrified by police assaults on peaceful protesters that took place during celebrations of the 40th anniversary of East Germany the previous month. You can draw parallels to that and what we saw in June of 2020, with the various civil rights protests that were taking place in the US, and how they were met by a lot of force. These theater workers saw this happen and they were horrified by what they saw, and then they meet one week later to organize this demonstration. And half a million people, at least, showed up. And these people were carrying banners of the slogans from the Monday demonstrations that we've talked about. So obviously, you know, these Monday demonstrations were making waves. They knew about it. They're like, yeah, we're on this. And so they started bearing those same slogans. So saying, this is what we want as well. The slogans were, "We are the people," "Civil rights not only on paper," another one was, "No lies, new people," and "Independent labor union." These were the themes of what they were calling for. 

And this was three hours long and it was televised. So people across Germany were seeing this, and it just was a massive groundswell for people saying like, "We've had enough, we don't have our rights. We don't have a say in what happens." And you just get them continuing to put on this pressure. So this was really brought together by a labor movement, and it shows the key role of the trade unions in changing what was happening with oppressive regimes across the Eastern Bloc at that time. So the Solidarity movement in Poland was a trade union led by a shipyard electrician, Lech Walesa, who ended up winning parliamentary seats in summer of '89. People in Germany are like, "Look, Poland is actually starting to get some democratic representation. People are getting elected and are getting actual power. We want that too." So that morale boost spread. 

Students in Czechoslovakia later that month led the Velvet Revolution, started on November 17th, 1989, in Prague. 15,000 protestors that day were kettled and attacked by riot police, and then the students and the theaters went on strike. The actors, instead of going on stage, they just read proclamations calling for a general strike, and they kept showing up every day. By November 20th, 1989, half a million people were showing up to protest in Prague. November 27th, they have a nationwide two-hour general strike, just two hours, not even the full day. All the workers across Czechoslovakia were like, we're shutting it down for two hours. And the next day, Communist Party announces the end of the one-party state. November 30th, they officially remove communist monopoly on power from the Czech constitution, and playwright Vaclav Havel becomes president in the next month. 

November '89 was this amazing coalition of artists and students and laborers coming together to take their power back from those who had stripped it from them. It wasn't violent. They were just out there; they just weren't taking it. And they just made their demands known. Their demands were utterly reasonable, saying we should have a say in how we live our lives, and they didn't give up. They actually got what they wanted because they recognized the power that they had, and they utilized it. So I think this is a time for us to all know that this has been done and successful in the very recent past, and there might be we can take from that going forward. 

[00:06:43] Kaykay: Fuck yeah. You know, it is a time where I think people do need to feel hope, and they need to see models that worked. 

[00:06:49] Brooke: Right. 

[00:06:50] Kaykay: You know, it's such a good time to be talking about this, because I think it feels like a stuck time for a lot of people. So it's so lovely to hear movement and change and action. All non-violently.

[00:07:01] Brooke: They were non-violent in the face of state violence, but they were not passive. 

[00:07:06] Kaykay: There's a big space between passive and violent.

[00:07:09] Brooke: Absolutely. So if you come out in full force, if you've got the people force, and you keep that people force, even in the face of whatever you see, you don't necessarily need the physical force that the state uses, and thinking about the state might be using that physical force because they don't have the people force. 

[00:07:25] Kaykay: Yeah, of course.

[00:07:26] Brooke: So I found that to be really inspirational. If anybody listening to this as interested in learning more and seeing the lessons that we can learn from the events of 1989 in Europe, look up the Velvet Revolution, look up the Monday protests, look up Alexanderplatz, look up Solidarity movement in Poland. You might find it to be a nice little dose of hope. Obviously just reading it alone won't change things, but reading it and getting the sort of insights that you need in order to figure out how to change things is, I think, a good use of everyone's time.

[00:08:01] Kaykay: And also, I want to say, Velvet Revolution, incredible drag name. 

[00:08:06] Brooke: I mean, I'm thinking about, the decor in my house is very boring to me. A velvet revolution may be coming to my home interiors.

[00:08:14] Kaykay: I totally support that. So that's the first thing I wanted to say. Second thing, I see like history podcasts for you. Have you ever heard, there's a podcast called Hardcore History, and the guy just goes for like three hours on a topic, so fucking fascinating, and you could listen to it forever. I mean, I think, you know, it's a heavy lift to do like a three-hour history podcast, but I see that for you.

[00:08:36] Brooke: Yeah, a lot of hours went into the last however many minutes I've been speaking just to, you know, make sure I get a good overview, but it was so fun and inspiring and exciting. And I think that it's one of the things in this debate that it's not even a debate. It's not a debate about how we talk about our history. It's a debate about whether we talk about our history, right? And it's so wild to me that people think that we can't tell the truth about our past and frankly, our present, because that will be demoralizing somehow. And it's like, it's invigorating to find out how people dealt with unbelievable odds and overcame them, and where they didn't and why, like, it's really inspiring to find that out. That's how you get to good solutions to figure out how you move forward, when you find out what we've done in the past that didn't work and that was wrong. Like, that's a good thing. 

[00:09:35] Kaykay: Yeah, and it also makes you feel less alone in today's struggles, you know, to be like, wow, a lot has happened in this world. It's a touchstone through time in this really comforting way. 

[00:09:47] Brooke: Definitely. 

[00:09:48] Kaykay: Which is huge right now, because I think there is like a real sense of maybe isolation and aloneness.

[00:09:54] Brooke: Right. Or feeling like it's never been this bad. And so it makes you feel very like bleak and hopeless, but if you learn about when there have been times where we have faced significant uphill battles, and some have been won. Not all of them, but some have. And so if you find out where people succeeded and why, that's how you can actually make a better future. You can only do that if you learn from history. And if you are just reading propaganda, you're not learning from history. You don't know anything. Better to know nothing than to believe that we are this shining city on a hill, and that American exceptionalism is a thing that's real. In any case, lots of exciting, optimistic, cool things happening in November of 1989. 

[00:10:41] Kaykay: And how did that translate into American popular culture? 

[00:10:44] Brooke: I actually have a really good transition here, because in American popular culture, November 1989 was the release of Queen Latifah's debut album, All Hail the Queen.

[00:10:55] Kaykay: Yes.

[00:10:57] Brooke: Which includes the feminist anthem "Ladies First" with Monie Love. "Ladies First"'s music video is political as hell in the best way. It starts off with a picture of Harriet Tubman. It has protest footage all throughout. It has Queen Latifah standing over a giant map of Africa, and it has- 

[00:11:20] Kaykay: Oh yeah, I remember. 

[00:11:21] Brooke: Where it has these big, old chess pieces, and she's taking these like white, dominating chess pieces and moving them off the board and replacing them with black power chess pieces. It's so good. It holds up. It'll be on our playlist for this month even though it just came out. It wasn't like a huge hit in November ‘89. It becomes a hit in 1990. But still it just the video itself and its footage of what was going on in South Africa and how we've talked about how the movement against apartheid was really, really picking up steam in South Africa in 1989, and it speaks directly to that in this music video. So that was exciting. The number ones that month, far less exciting, Roxette and Milli Vanilli and Bad English. 

[00:12:05] Kaykay: What Roxette song? 

[00:12:06] Brooke: "Listen to Your Heart." 

[00:12:07] Kaykay: I was going to say. 

[00:12:08] Brooke: If it was like "The Look" or something, I would be like "exciting," but, ehh, you know. But a couple of songs that have held up in pop culture over time had their top charting moments in November of ‘89. Tina Turner's "The Best," so "Simply the Best."

[00:12:24] Kaykay: I'll still bop when that comes on. 

[00:12:26] Brooke: Oh yeah. It's foundational to a couple of TV shows that I love so much, the UK version of The Office and Schitt's Creek. So you gotta give it a shout out for that. And then "Love Shack" hit number three. 

[00:12:38] Kaykay: I was so obsessed with this song. I loved it. I watched the video so many times. 

[00:12:43] Brooke: You know, RuPaul's in the video. 

[00:12:44] Kaykay: I do. I remember seeing RuPaul and just being like, this is interesting.

[00:12:50] Brooke: So the sort of cultural debut of RuPaul to a broader audience in the B-52's "Love Shack" hit number three in November of 1989. There was a lot of movies that are sort of cultural touchstones that came out too.The number ones were Look Who's Talking, still. And then Harlem Nights, which was a movie starring Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor. 

[00:13:12] Kaykay: I remember it. I don't think I ever saw it. 

[00:13:14] Brooke: Yeah, it's funny- 

[00:13:15] Kaykay: It must not have been on HBO.

[00:13:16] Brooke: You see the two headliners and you're like, Oh, this seems like it would be a classic. And then Back to the Future Part II, aka an eerie predictor of our future. 

[00:13:26] Kaykay: Oh, right. Cause Biff is president or something? he just running a company, I can't remember. 

[00:13:31] Brooke: Biff is like, Lord of the Universe, basically. Biff is very Trump, and I’m telling you, part of it is, he gets out and he sees the Chicago Cubs have won the World Series. And it’s set in 2015, and then Biff is like, dominant. The Chicago Cubs win the fucking World Series in 2016, and then just a few days later, Donald Trump gets elected. So I think that we are in a parallel universe that was opened up when the Chicago Cubs won the World Series, as predicted in Back to the Future, Part II, and we all need to have a conversation about that. 

[00:14:04] Kaykay: We got into the wrong parallel universe, you know, I'm sure multiple universes got split off and we just got on the shit train. 

[00:14:10] Brooke: I know, I hope the alternate version of myself is having a wonderful time in the other universe. 

[00:14:15] Kaykay: I hope in the other universe, Queen Latifah's president. 

[00:14:17] Brooke: Oh yeah, definitely. And made "Ladies First" her anthem for her campaign. 

[00:14:22] Kaykay: I hope that now, you know, in the DMV, that's all you hear, is Queen Latifah music. 

[00:14:26] Brooke: Yes. But then on November 17th, this was a big release day. Steel Magnolias came out. 

[00:14:34] Kaykay: Aww.

[00:14:35] Brooke: Two kids movies came out. One was All Dogs Go to Heaven. I think we might need to have a viewing party of All Dogs Go to Heaven, because I haven't seen it, but I read the Wikipedia entry for it, and dude, it's fucking wild. It is fucking wild. Burt Reynolds plays a dog named Charlie B. Barkin, and he is like a hustler who gets murdered when he's drunk. And that's just like the beginning of it. 

[00:15:08] Kaykay: What?

[00:15:09] Brooke: It's fucking wild. I'm reading it. and I thought I was having like, is this a fever dream? This is like the plot of a movie for kids? What? 

[00:15:18] Kaykay: No. So I'm guessing this didn't do so well.

[00:15:21] Brooke: It's apparently one of the biggest home videos of all time. 

[00:15:25] Kaykay: I see.

[00:15:26] Brooke: So, the other movie that came out that day that was aimed at kids that wasn't predicted to be as big as it was, was The Little Mermaid. 

[00:15:35] Kaykay: Oh yeah. Little Mermaid is the shit.

[00:15:39] Brooke: This was the return of Disney to like their original animation dominance. Little Mermaid really kicked that off. 

[00:15:46] Kaykay: Yeah. It was a real, uh, game changer and I think it did start paving the way to, you know, it was cool to watch animations at every age. It felt like Little Mermaid was starting to crack that door open a little bit. 

[00:15:58] Brooke: Yeah. 

[00:15:58] Kaykay: I loved it. You know, Ursula is clearly a drag queen, sort of an evil drag queen, and I live for Ursula. I did, you know, find Ariel to be a little bit of a dud. 

[00:16:09] Brooke: Oh, such a dud. Like, really? You want to trade away your voice for a man? Metaphor. What the fuck? 

[00:16:18] Kaykay: It's barely a fucking metaphor. I guess it passed for a metaphor back then. 

[00:16:22] Brooke: Seriously. Do you remember the controversy about the cover of the VHS, where there was like a penis that was drawn on it? 

[00:16:30] Kaykay: Oh, yeah. I vaguely something about this. You like, went to go get the VHS and like, looked for the penis? 

[00:16:36] Brooke: Right, on the cover. 

[00:16:37] Kaykay: You know, we didn't have phones. 

[00:16:39] Brooke: We were very bored. 

[00:16:42] Kaykay: We were just looking at movie covers, looking for penises. That's you know, that's all we were doing. 

[00:16:46] Brooke: We happened to find one the cover of The Little Mermaid. 

[00:16:49] Kaykay: We didn't have YouPorn, nothing like that.

[00:16:51] Brooke: We didn't. We didn't have anything You related. There was no YouTube, which leads me into a TV show that debuted in November of 1989, America's Funniest Home Videos. So RIP to another mensch. As I saw this, I'm like, I'm so glad that America's Funniest Home Videos didn't come out in like, September of 1989. It's bad enough that I feel like, did we kill off Betty White and Desmond Tutu by mentioning them? If we killed off Bob Saget by mentioning him, like, we'd have to end this podcast. 

[00:17:24] Kaykay: You'd never forgive yourself. 

[00:17:25] Brooke: No, because somebody tweeted and I, this was so good, I retweeted it from our Twitter page. This user on Twitter, @itsonlyzack, tweeted, "You kids will never understand how Bob Saget used to basically host YouTube on TV, and we had to wait for one half hour on a Sunday night to all watch it together."

[00:17:42] Kaykay: What a good description. 

[00:17:44] Brooke: Spot on. 

[00:17:44] Kaykay: That's exactly what it was.

[00:17:46] Brooke: Yeah. It was 30 minutes of kids hitting a wiffle ball into their dad's balls. Every week. 

[00:17:52] Kaykay: And then even funnier stuff, pet stuff, animal stuff I really got behind. It was the earliest sort of like dogs doing fun, hilarious things, and cats doing fun, hilarious things.

[00:18:02] Brooke: Right. It combined YouTube with a game show, how the audience got to vote for like, who won the award at the end for like the funniest video.

[00:18:11] Kaykay: It was good clean fun. 

[00:18:13] Brooke: That was the thing too. Like, everybody thought that Bob Saget was super clean, because he hosted America's Funniest Home Videos and then also played like, gentle dad on Full House. And then his stand-up comedy was just pure blue. 

[00:18:27] Kaykay: Foul.

[00:18:28] Brooke: So blue. He was just like the bluest comic. You could kind of see him over time, on America's Funniest Home Videos, being like, "My soul is being sucked out of my body." 

[00:18:38] Kaykay: "Please, God, make it end." Well, it's such an interesting, uh, thought about the way that, you know, entertainments, they don't always get to set the agenda of what they get involved in and what becomes successful for them. It's like, he looked like America's dad, so he got cast as that role and maybe inside he was something totally different.

[00:18:57] Brooke: It seems like inside, he was that too. He seems like a truly like genuinely good-hearted person. Like, really, really good people can also be extremely dirty joke tellers. 

[00:19:08] Kaykay: Yeah. And in fact, I was reading an article about how people that curse a lot are actually more trustworthy. 

[00:19:14] Brooke: Yeah, cause we're not hiding anything, motherfuckers. 

[00:19:16] Kaykay: Yeah. Mother fucking fuck this! Uh, yeah. And also it's making me think, what a transition this is going to be into the book about seeing beyond, you know, what's presented on the surface to, to you. Bob Saget, dude! 

[00:19:32] Brooke: Look at you, serving up my transition. 

[00:19:35] Kaykay: Oh, did I steal your transition?

[00:19:37] Brooke: No! No, you made a perfect transition, and I want to thank you for that. So let's talk about the 29th Baby-sitters Club book, Mallory and the Mystery Diary, that was released in November of 1989. So it's time for some back cover copy. And I quote, "Mallory and Claudia are helping Stacey unpack from her move back to Stoneybrook when they find an antique trunk in the McGill's attic. Stacey doesn't want the dusty thing, so she gives the trunk to Mallory who finds an old diary in the bottom of it. The diary once belonged to Sophie, a girl who lived in Stacey's house in the 1890s. As Mallory reads deep into Sophie's diary, she discovers a mystery. There may be ghosts that haunt Stacey's house! The babysitters have one big mystery on their hands to solve, because Stacey's house isn't big enough for her, her mom, and a family of ghosts!" End quote. I actually kind of beg to differ with that. She has a four-bedroom house and there are two people living in it, so I think that it is big enough to accommodate some ghosts. But to your point about how this book gets into what you see underneath the surface and how things aren't always what they seem, tell me a little bit more about how you saw that theme playing out in this book. 

[00:20:54] Kaykay: So that theme is made very explicit. And I would say it's probably the most explicit big picture theme or one of the most explicit big picture themes we've been given in a Baby-sitters Club book. So the mystery involves a portrait, there's a portrait that's missing and maybe somebody's stolen it. And then they discover that what they actually did is just painted over it. 

[00:21:15] Brooke: So you're talking about the mystery that is mentioned in the diary that she finds. So the diary is dated 1894. And it is a young girl named Sophie, her diary. And so she's talking about how her grandfather has basically accused her father of stealing the portrait of his dead wife, her mom. 

[00:21:41] Kaykay: And it's ruined his good name town!

[00:21:43] Brooke: Right, Jared. It's Jared again! All of these Jareds running around Stoneybrook. They got to figure out, is that the same Jared? 

[00:21:50] Kaykay: How little fucking drama do you need in a town to have your reputation ruined over possibly stealing a portrait?

[00:21:57] Brooke: Well, it seems like this is some class anxiety going on here. What we find out is that Sophie's grandfather, her mother who dies in childbirth's father, is Old Hickory. Who was this rich guy, they basically have the Scooby-Doo moment in the graveyard at his tombstone. That's when they get in the whole thing with the other girls and it's about Logan and it's stupid and they should all, like, everyone should just dump Logan at the gravesite and then just go home. So that's Old Hickory, and he seems like he's kind of like a Mr. Potter, from It's A Wonderful Life, you know? Like, the rich dude in town. And Sophie's dad, Jared, the common 1800s name, Jared. Um, I just can't get over that. It's so funny to me for some reason, um, comes from a not as refined background. So it seems like Old Hickory did not approve of his daughter marrying Jared, and then like blames him for his daughter getting pregnant. "She had a hard time giving birth to Sophie, and so she shouldn't have another kid." And it's like, well yeah, it's the late 1800s, contraception options are limited. P.S., make abortion safe and legal, Old Hickory. So that's the thing, and then ultimately- 

[00:23:17] Kaykay: I'm so grateful that you stepped in to describe that plot, because I read the book, but I found the plot very glaze inducing.

[00:23:25] Brooke: There was not really a mystery there. Ultimately the daughter's portrait goes missing and people accuse, they think that the dad stole it. And so the dad is basically shunned from society and has to resort to like chopping firewood for a living.

[00:23:44] Kaykay: I know, it's what I was saying. It's a reach, you know, like they didn't have bigger things to worry about in the 1800s. They sure fucking did, man. 

[00:23:52] Brooke: Right. 

[00:23:53] Kaykay: As evidenced by people dying in childbirth.

[00:23:55] Brooke: Right, but they find a confession from Old Hickory in the same trunk as the diary, where he says that he's actually the one. He had the picture painted over, because he couldn't bear to look at a picture of his late daughter. And when people asked him where the picture went, he just kind of shrugged and they assumed it was Jared, so they shunned him, and he never corrected them. And so basically like he left his surviving grandchildren destitute because he didn't want to say, "Oh, it was hard for me to look at a picture." Basically, he didn't go to therapy, and so his grandchildren starved for the rest of their life. There's a metaphor there. But yeah, the whole mystery subplot did not land for me, all. 

[00:24:48] Kaykay: That's a very good way to put it. It did not land at all. It was really tedious, but there's this very explicit metaphor made through it, which is the covering over of the painting, I believe that's called palimpsest. 

[00:25:02] Brooke: Ooh, look at you! You went to boarding school. This is proof. 

[00:25:06] Kaykay: No, this is actually like, six months attempt at grad school, because Salman Rushdie uses palimpsest all the time, and I was reading him a lot in grad school. 

[00:25:15] Brooke: Ah. 

[00:25:15] Kaykay: So a palimpsest is anything where you have like a primary source that gets covered over by a secondary source, and literature uses it a lot to have a metaphor about history, trying to kind of come touch you. You know, like it's often used in those kinds of literary situations where, you know, someone's past is like knocking on the door and affecting them and they can't see it, you know? And so in this book, they use the palimpsest as a very explicit, things are not as they seem on the surface, there's always more behind it. And then they have this parallel plot going on with Buddy, where he's been sort of put in the lower reading class and Mallory has to help him become a better reader. And I wasn't totally sure how those plots come together in it, and it felt a little ham-fisted, but, uh, there's some attempt to like connect to the palimpsest metaphor of like, see more than is in front of your eyes, in what's happening with Buddy.

[00:26:11] Brooke: Yeah. And it's Charlotte, Charlotte Johanssen, who is the one that brings up the whole, like, "things aren't always as they seem." She's into reading mysteries, and so, you know, learned that from what she was reading, and so was like, "You guys should apply it to that!" And then Stacey's like, "Let's look for this painting in our house and see if we can see if there's something underneath it," et cetera. I kind of struggled with that too, where I'm like, how does this subplot match up? Ultimately, where I stepped back and I was like, oh, this book is really about, it's like an ode to reading. On page 43, as Mallory starts reading this diary, she said, "As I read, I thought how lucky I was. I mean, just to be reading, when you read, you can sit in your room and travel back and forth in time, or to other countries, or to made-up lands or to outer space, and all without moving a muscle, except to turn pages."

That really resonated with me because that's how I see reading. I mean, reading is time travel, it's teleportation. It gives you the chance to experience the impossible. I can't even imagine how empty my life would be without reading, because that's what it is to me.

And then Mallory goes and she's trying to help Buddy read. And the first time it doesn't go well, because she's like, "We're going to sit at your desk, and we're going to go do flashcards. It's going to be rote. It's going to be just like school." And Buddy is like, "Oh my God, fuck this."

She goes back home, and she says she thinks about why she likes to read. She goes, "Because it's fun. Because it means something." And that his flashcards, workbook pages were not fun. They didn't mean much. The stories in the reader weren't fun. And so she says, how can I change that?

Ultimately, I think this book is really a commentary on what was going on in literacy education at the time. In the eighties, there was this swing back to what is called whole language literacy learning. There are sort of like two camps. It's actually called the Reading Wars, and it's like still going on in literacy education.

There's one theory that is like, you do systemic phonics. So basically you are learning to read by looking at the individual components, like looking at actual letters and sounds, and then piecing them all together. So you're sort of looking at things in isolation and then sort of at the micro level and then taking it up to the macro level. 

[00:28:31] Kaykay: Like flashcards.

[00:28:32] Brooke: Exactly, like flashcards, like skill and drill, right? Whereas whole language is the opposite. So it's macro to micro. You need to see things in context. It's not just about combining individual letters to make a word it's like, if you've got the whole thing, making sense from context cues, et cetera. There was like a history of going back and forth and back and forth with this. And it was back in the whole language in the eighties. There was actually an Encyclopedia Brown curriculum that was developed in 1986. She actually uses Encyclopedia Brown to help get Buddy invested in reading. And so it was all about using mysteries and then using like deductive reasoning, you can write your own reports, you can basically put together an investigations log with Encyclopedia Brown. 

You see Mallory do something very similar where she's like, I need to focus on the motivation. I need to take it out of like, "Reading is something you have to do. You just have to do it. You have to do it because we want you to do it. You have to do it this way. You have to just be very scientific and break it down and build it up." And we see that that's not working for Buddy.

And so she comes back to him and she's like, "Okay, I brought you a bunch of comic books. Pick the one that you want. Now we're going to draw, you're going to write your own comic." It's this flipping of the script and taking a completely different approach to teaching reading that helps Buddy learn to love to read, sort of see how it opens those doors for him. In that way, it kind of felt like the sort of mystery diary was modeling that same approach of like, if you want to figure out a mystery, you're going to continue to read, and you're going to find context clues because you are looking for clues, and that's going to keep you invested and it's going to push you through the end. So it's tapping into that motivation. I think that's what she was going for. I just don't think that the execution of the mystery itself really landed, but I think the philosophy behind it is pretty solid. 

[00:30:40] Kaykay: Yeah, I think another way I was thinking of it is like the power of story. It's sort of an ode to reading and the power of story. So, you know, cause that's also what a comic brings, is like a much better sense of the story, especially for someone who might learn visually really well. You're really creating an immersive story that is going to engage you in it, where like a flashcard is literally, you know, lines on a white piece of paper. So it's the power of story with the comics and then it's the power of story with the mystery. Because he gets so, Buddy gets so engaged in the story of Sophie, even though it's so fucking boring. 

[00:31:19] Brooke: It really is quite boring. 

[00:31:22] Kaykay: A 45-year-old woman was like trying to jump out a window reading this, and a 12-year-old is so engaged. No, Buddy's not even twelve! 

[00:31:30] Brooke: No, he's like seven or eight, or something. Yeah. 

[00:31:32] Kaykay: Okay, seven or eight, right. Come on now! But I get it. I get it. I'm suspending my disbelief. Yeah, so it's that power of story to, you know, really make someone want to read and own their reading, own their own mind in that way. And I thought that was cool. I liked the kind of parallel mystery of it, where there's a mystery going on of Sophie and the portrait. And it's sort of like Mallory has her own mystery of how does she open Buddy up? And you really saw, or I thought you really saw, maybe Ann M.'s experience as a teacher, where it can be very challenging to do that. And then also something that resonated with me so hard as a therapist is the power of meeting kids, where they are. Do you want to be right, or do you want to be effective? The important thing is to be effective. And the only way that you can really be effective with lots of different kinds of kids, now, some kids are going to do whatever you throw in front of them and they're going to be good at it. And they're going to just slog through, right? Or they might even enjoy the flashcards. But a huge number of kids, it's not going to work for them. So, you know, the power of meeting somebody where they are, and touching on their interests, touching on the way their mind works.

It's so funny, you know, I always use this term, slow is fast. And when you're working with other people, slow truly is fast. Because when you slow down and you really sort of contemplate the person in front of you, you learn sort of, how does this person get motivated? How does this person tick? How can I reach this person? And then it goes really fast. But if you try to go fast in the sense of, "I'm going to cram this down your throat, and I know, I am the expert, I know how to do this, and you are going to listen to me," it actually goes really slow. And in fact, sometimes it doesn't go at all. So I thought it was just a beautiful representation of that concept and really spoke to me.

[00:33:29] Brooke: Totally, because then it's like, now you have erected a barrier between yourself and this person. 

[00:33:35] Kaykay: And a power struggle.

[00:33:36] Brooke: Right. So not only did you not get where you want to go, but now you have to overcome this barrier that you have set up. 

[00:33:43] Kaykay: That you've created. 

[00:33:43] Brooke: Right. Which makes it so much harder. I mean, ultimately that's what I had for what they were fighting. I had that they were fighting sort of being stuck within established norms. Mallory is like, "I'm 11 and I'm really bored." And she feels like she doesn't really have any power. She says a lot like, "Oh, if I was 13, everything would be great." Basically she wants to be one of the babysitters, like a full member of the Baby-sitters Club. She wants to feel like an equal to them. And in a way, her willingness to be the new literacy tutor provider of the Baby-sitters Club- 

[00:34:17] Kaykay: Slash, therapist, by the way.

[00:34:19] Brooke: Right. The Baby-sitters Club is a well-rounded organization. They provide childcare, they provide cater waitering...

[00:34:27] Kaykay: Top-notch tutoring that, you know, you should frankly be paying like $200 an hour. They provide therapy. 

[00:34:33] Brooke: Fold your laundry, they do it all. 

[00:34:36] Kaykay: They basically solve all the problems in your life that capitalism has created.

[00:34:38] Brooke: Right. And speaking of problems that capitalism has created, they do it all for sub minimum wage. 

[00:34:43] Kaykay: I was going say for what, how much did they make in an hour? Oh, it makes weep. 

[00:34:48] Brooke: So there's that, but Buddy is also stuck because he's being forced to learn to read in a way that doesn't work for him. And there's absolutely no reason for kids to learn to read that way. When you make reading a slog, when you make it not fun, when you take away the readers agency in what they're reading and what they choose to read and what they're interested in, you make it a chore, you make it something that they feel bad about.

So she fights that by sort of following that lesson of looking behind the obvious, using your imagination or ingenuity, and tries different things and experiments until she finds something that works for her, and she finds something that works for Buddy. And it is that like, "Hey Buddy, do you like comic books?" And he just lights the fuck up. And it's like, great, we're going to go with that. And that opens the door. So that is removing that barrier. The flashcards, sitting at a desk, there is one way to do something. If you are someone who that doesn't work for, then you feel left out and you get left behind. 

You have to make it possible for people to make their own path. You have to give people room to make choices. That agency is so important. I mean, that's something that speaking of the literacy debate at that time, did you ever have like SSR? Do you remember like silent sustained reading, was that something in your classroom? 

[00:36:10] Kaykay: Probably, until I went to private school and then, you know, private school is a whole different beast. You're doing very different things; you're not doing any of the standardized public school stuff in private school. 

[00:36:19] Brooke: Right. You're like, learning tax evasion. You're- 

[00:36:23] Kaykay: You're learning how to invest in off-shore accounts. You know, you're sitting in like a circle of 10 kids. I can't remember what that method is called, where you, you know, you don't sit in a classroom stacked. You're in a circle and you're all talking, and you better have done the reading cause you're all talking.

[00:36:40] Brooke: Right. 

[00:36:40] Kaykay: I say bitterly, guess. You better have fucking done the reading, you gonna get called out! 

[00:36:47] Brooke: Man. 

[00:36:48] Kaykay: So I don't know, what was silent sustained reading?

[00:36:50] Brooke: So silent sustained reading was like, let's give kids time during the day to read what they want to read. That's when the kids got choice. And I remember we had a box of books that were allowed for silent sustained reading, you would go up and you would pick the one that you wanted and then you would just read, and you didn't have to like report back or anything like that. It was just the act of reading. And that was literally my favorite time in school. 

My husband is a teacher and he's actually teaching literacy to future teachers right now. And one of the things that we talk about is the importance of letting kids make reading something that is fun for them, giving them that agency. Relevance and agency and engagement are all so important. You know, let people choose what they want to do. They're going to choose that based on what seems relevant to them at that time, and then keep them engaged. Those three things, if those three things happen, people are going to continue in that practice. 

That was my experience. I didn't learn to read in school. I don't even remember how I learned to read, but I was reading when I was very, very young. And so by the time I got to school, while literacy is being taught, I just got to read what I was reading, because I was already there. I never liked anything that I was told to read in school. The books that I was told to read in school were just like, ugh, just, it was a slog, right? I was fortunate enough that I had already developed a love of reading, and I already saw reading the way that Mallory sees it, where reading was where I could travel to different places, reading was where I could travel to different times. I could use my imagination. I saw the reading that I had to do in school as a box that I had to check until I could get back to what reading truly was.

I think that for kids whose first connection with reading happens in school, and it happens in a very prescriptive way, that's where they get the idea that reading is hard, and reading isn't fun. And that's a real loss. And you see Mallory, because Mallory knows what reading can be, she's the one that's able to figure out how to reach Buddy. Cause she knows sort of the magic of reading and is able to convey that to him. 

[00:38:55] Kaykay: Yeah, it's a real gift that she wants to give to him. You know, you can almost sense that she feels sad that it's not there. It's funny. I think of reading like, Helen Keller talked about how, she described what it was like before she had language, because you know, for the first 15 years of her life or something, she literally had no language. And she couldn't hear and she couldn't see, so she was just kind of living inside herself. And she basically described that when language came into her life, it was like life opened up and her brain changed, and she literally kind of blossomed into something she wasn't before. And that's kind of how I see reading. It's like something opens up in your mind that you weren't before, and it feels as fundamental as someone being able to use language. And I can totally see Mallory's desire to want to share that gift with Buddy, because it's so beautiful and so amazing. And she knows that there's a way to get him to engage in that, but he just, you know, he can't do it in the current context that he's in. 

[00:40:00] Brooke: Right. 

[00:40:00] Kaykay: This why they should be paid $300 an hour. 

[00:40:02] Brooke: Oh my God, at least, yeah. I mean, yeah, I think that's a really great point about Helen Keller, who I was, did you go through like a Helen Keller, like obsessed with Helen Keller phase when you were a kid? 

[00:40:12] Kaykay: I did! When I was a kid, I absolutely did.

[00:40:14] Brooke: Oh, my God. So like I was so into Helen Keller. I wanted to read everything about her. It was just so fricking fascinating to me, like the determination that she had? I mean, Helen Keller was just so fricking inspiring to me. We've got other friends that were super into Helen Keller too. Do we need to start a Helen Keller fan club? Because we all love Helen Keller.

[00:40:36] Kaykay: We need t-shirts. We all love Helen Keller. 

[00:40:38] Brooke: Helen Keller rules, man. Also, fervent socialist. That woman was political, look that up. Yeah, just the way that language and reading, like you said, it just opens you up and it's almost like it's like a key. In your head, you have your own thoughts, you have your emotions. Language is what allows you to communicate those thoughts and emotions to others. And that sounds so basic and so obvious, but yet I think oftentimes it's not. You don't really recognize how foundational the experience of reading and writing and communicating is to the society that you're in. To your ability to like move about in the world and form relationships and bonds with other people.

So if somebody is not fluent in reading or writing or whatever, it limits their ability to form those bonds. I think if we sort of incorporated that, like the social aspect of reading and the way that it empowers the individual. Cause it's like, if you can't read well, you have to rely on what is said to you.

You have to rely on what other people, it makes it much more difficult for you to be able to validate the veracity of things that are said to you. I mean, I am right now as we speak connecting the decline in reading to the decline of discourse that we see, in the decline in understanding the world around us that we see. 

[00:42:05] Kaykay: No question about it. 

[00:42:06] Brooke: You know? 

[00:42:06] Kaykay: No question about it. I think you're also, you're talking about the interpersonal ness of how we learn too. And that's been in the last, I don't know, 20 or 30 years where child development has been understood in a much more deep way in that basically children learn interpersonally, and it not only increases their ability to communicate interpersonally, but they learn best with someone who they trust and someone who is going to understand them, because the learning is a connection too. 

[00:42:34] Brooke: Right, an exchange. It's not one way. 

[00:42:37] Kaykay: Exactly, and your brain is not just a computer, you know, computing X's and O's. It's the interpersonalness that brings your brain to deeper levels. And you really see it in this book, right? Because Mallory is using her ability to understand Buddy, and wish to connect with Buddy, to see him as a human being and to connect with him as a human being.

[00:42:56] Brooke: Yeah. And that's what we get with the act of reading, too. Like, we're reading, these are words that are coming from Ann M.'s brain, right? So basically, we get that sort of interpersonal connection with the author. You know, as an editor, you also get that too. We're there, too. Quietly there, but we're there to help you get into the brain of the author.

[00:43:16] Kaykay: Yeah, and maybe understand more explicitly what the author doesn't yet understand explicitly, you know, because it's a lot easier to see someone else's mind than to see your own. So an editor can be really helpful in saying, oh, actually this theme is there, and the author might not even know. 

[00:43:32] Brooke: We're the bridge between the author and the reader. Ultimately the goal is to make that bridge as open and direct as possible. That is an exchange. And every time you have an exchange with another person, it changes you at some level. So the more that you read, I mean, it's empathy, right? The act of reading, the more that you read, the more that you've learned about other things outside of your own situation, the better you understand the world that you're in, if you have the skills that are required to evaluate that information critically. And if you feel like this is something that you are choosing to do, it makes you really powerful in the world. I think that's something that, you know, Mallory talks about motivation, and how it's about motivating Buddy to read, tapping into what will make him excited to read. And I think if we emphasize the power and the doors that it unlocks, from the beginning, and over and over and over again through education, the way that education truly empowers you. As opposed to, this is something that you have to do in order to like, get somewhere. Instead of it being like, you have to get tested so we can give you a grade, so we can assess you. You know, a focus on education as individual empowerment, over education as like a process of judgment. 

[00:44:48] Kaykay: Yeah. And also a tool of creation versus a tool of obedience or, what's the word when you follow everyone? You know, comply.

[00:44:57] Brooke: That was the reason why I'm, the feeling of ambivalence I had about this particular book is the mystery is less than engaging, but the way that we see Mallory inspire a love of reading in a child and the way that she's like willing to do what it takes to convey something that she loves to somebody else, that part was super engaging for me. So this book was like simultaneously extremely engaging and the plot was not, but like the interpersonal relations that we see really was. 

[00:45:31] Kaykay: I had the same experience where I was really rolling my eyes over the mystery plot, but I found the sections with Buddy to be really engaging. And then when Buddy came into the mystery plot, I could be engaged a little bit more. 

[00:45:42] Brooke: Right. 

[00:45:42] Kaykay: I could feel the weight of Nancy Drew. I really felt as if the author had Nancy Drew in her mind so much that it almost like suffocated something in that part of the plot, because it did feel like an AI wrote a Nancy Drew book or something. Do you know mean?

[00:46:02] Brooke: Yeah, I also was like, I wonder if they were trying to like tie in somehow the American Girl series by making it historical. The American Girl series was really big at the time. Sophie is giving Samantha Parkington to me. 

[00:46:17] Kaykay: I, you know, probably no surprise that this middle-aged lesbian had no interest in American Girl dolls.

[00:46:24] Brooke: Oh man. Samantha was an orphan in Edwardian times in Westchester. 

[00:46:31] Kaykay: Perfectly fitting for this. Westchester versus Connecticut, but very close.

[00:46:35] Brooke: Yeah. So this is why I was like-

[00:46:36] Kaykay: Did she play softball? 

[00:46:37] Brooke: I definitely remember her playing with a hoop. Is that the Edwardian equivalent of softball? Give a young child a hoop? 

[00:46:45] Kaykay: Don't give 'em the hoops! They gonna turn gay. Don't give 'em the hoops!

[00:46:50] Brooke: That's why we always say, "Don't give 'em a hoop." 

[00:46:51] Kaykay: You know, that old adage. 

[00:46:53] Brooke: You know what happens. "Don't give a child hoop, it will turn them gay." That old saying. 

[00:46:58] Kaykay: That old chestnut.

[00:47:00] Brooke: Yeah, it seemed like there were like, so there was Nancy Drew, there was like Encyclopedia Brown, again is directly referenced in this. Shades of the American Girl phenomenon that was going on at the time. There's a seance that takes place that's very like Beetlejuice. Kristy dresses as Madame Serena from Teen Witch. 

[00:47:20] Kaykay: And her name is Madame Kristin. I believe Kristy is about a thousand times more creative than that. 

[00:47:26] Brooke: But here's the thing. Why does she do it? She does it because she's there because she wants chips. The whole thing is, they're like, "Oh, we can have a seance, we'll have chips." And Kristy's like, "Dope! I'll be the channeler." She shows up and she's just like, "Ooh, I am the ghost." And then she's like, "Psych! Where's the chips?" and then it's over. 

[00:47:46] Kaykay: It reminds me of the first time I had latkes in school, I went home and asked if we could be Jewish. So I can really relate. I love food that much.

[00:47:55] Brooke: You had that potato connection, right? 

[00:47:58] Kaykay: "Someday we'll find it, the potato connection…" 

[00:48:02] Brooke: "The latkes..." 

[00:48:03] Kaykay: You spoke my language. You spoke my cultural language. You know, that's so funny. I never put that together that latkes are potatoes.

[00:48:12] Brooke: You're like, "There's a new way of making potatoes? I am changing religions!"

[00:48:16] Kaykay: "I'm not Catholic anymore. I'm going to CCD?!"

[00:48:20] Brooke: "When I could be eating latkes?!" 

[00:48:21] Kaykay: "And they're eating fried potatoes? We need to rethink this, mother." 

[00:48:24] Brooke: Right, it doesn't add up. You were like, "Yes, mom..." 

[00:48:27] Kaykay: Doesn't add up!

[00:48:28] Brooke: You're like, "Yes, mom, I understand that this is the faith that you were raised in. However, have you ever had a latke?"

[00:48:38] Kaykay: That's exactly what I said.

[00:48:39] Brooke: You were like, these two things are on the scale and they look equivalent to me, and I'm favoring the latke. So... 

[00:48:49] Kaykay: Exactly. I'm glad you understand.

[00:48:51] Brooke: Make your own path, Kaykay. That's the lesson of this. If you want to pay homage to the potato pancake by putting your faith in God in it, I think you should be allowed to do that, and not have to go to CCD one Saturday a month. I think it's fair. 

[00:49:08] Kaykay: I agree with you. I'm so glad for your support.

[00:49:10] Brooke: It's never too late. Never too late. 

[00:49:13] Kaykay: My religion is... 

[00:49:14] Brooke: Potatoes! 

[00:49:16] Kaykay: My religion is simple, potatoes. Yeah. There's a famous, famous quote that's like, "My religion is simple, kindness." My religion is simple, potatoes.

[00:49:25] Brooke: Potatoes. You just have a potato on your mantle. You wear a potato around your neck, like, keep it close to your heart as a reminder at all times.

[00:49:33] Kaykay: I love it.

[00:49:34] Brooke: I can see this actually, because it is universal. Who doesn't love a potato? Find me a culture that doesn't embrace the potato when they are presented with the potato.

[00:49:43] Kaykay: Right, when they're presented. 

[00:49:44] Brooke: So that is the gospel for us to spread. It's like we're missionaries for potatoes. 

[00:49:50] Kaykay: The gospel of potatoes.

[00:49:50] Brooke: Right, right. We're just introducing potatoes to cultures that haven't yet seen a potato. And that's our version of missionary work. 

[00:49:59] Kaykay: I love it. 

[00:49:59] Brooke: I think it's a win-win.

[00:50:00] Kaykay: Potatoes are very calming. If you're ever like super hyphy... 

[00:50:03] Brooke: Eat a potato! 

[00:50:04] Kaykay: Just eat a potato. You just calm right down and you're like, you know what? Things aren't that bad.

[00:50:09] Brooke: Yeah, it's kind of hard to be too upset when you're eating potatoes. 

[00:50:14] Kaykay: When you're full of potato. You might be upset while you're eating it, but after you chill right out.

[00:50:23] Brooke: Yeah. You just take a nap, man. Oh, I love the Church of Potato. I love it.

[00:50:28] Kaykay: The Church of Potato!

[00:50:31] Brooke: Oh man. We gotta make that a thing. 

[00:50:33] Kaykay: So that's, you know, speaking of capitalism, that's how you make the big money, religion. Hello, Scientology. I mean, it makes more sense than Scientology. At least we have some science behind the blood sugar.

[00:50:43] Brooke: For real, I hope Ore-Ida isn't listening, because we're putting our stamp on this. Ore-Ida, you don't get to take the Church of Potato. You are the Church of Potato from a capitalistic standpoint; Baby-sitters Fight Club is going to be the Church of the Potato from the spiritual standpoint. 

[00:50:58] Kaykay: From the whole person standpoint.

[00:51:00] Brooke: Exactly. They're trying to get you to nourish their bottom line by nourishing your hunger and we're taking the potato and we just want to nourish your soul with the potato, with what the potato represents. What can the potato do for you? Not, what can your belief in the potato do for us? We want it to empower you. 

[00:51:20] Kaykay: Yeah. I mean, I challenge anyone, if you're in a bad mood, get a baked potato, put a huge pat of Kerrygold on it. I challenge you to still be in a mood. I challenge you!

[00:51:28] Brooke: I dare you. 

[00:51:29] Kaykay: I dare you to try! You won't succeed.

[00:51:34] Brooke: Oh man. 

[00:51:36] Kaykay: How did we get on potatoes?

[00:51:38] Brooke: Um, we are human beings, that exist in this plane, that have taste buds and stomachs. 

[00:51:44] Kaykay: And souls. 

[00:51:46] Brooke: That's how we got on the potato. 

[00:51:47] Kaykay: Oh I know, we were talking about chips. We were talking about Kristy, she goes through the whole seance to get chips. 

[00:51:53] Brooke: Yeah, exactly. 

[00:51:54] Kaykay: Which is also potato. So she knows.

[00:51:56] Brooke: She knows, she gets it. Of course she gets it. Of course. Come on. 

[00:52:00] Kaykay: Did you have any, uh, favorite eighties moments?

[00:52:04] Brooke: My favorite eighties moment was Pee-wee's Playhouse. 

[00:52:07] Kaykay: Yeah, me too!

[00:52:08] Brooke: Kristy puts on Pee-wee's Playhouse for her siblings as she's babysitting them. And they talk about how Emily Michelle is like language delayed, which I don't see. She is two years old and she just fucking got here. The fact that she can like ask for a cookie and "up" and "down" and all that seems totally fine to me, but what do I know? 

[00:52:28] Kaykay: Plus she's just had a trauma.

[00:52:30] Brooke: Right, she's like learning a new language and everything. I mean, Emily Michelle is more fluent in English at two years old than I am in Vietnamese. So good on Emily Michelle, she's much more bilingual than I am. But I do think that that is possibly the best way for Emily Michelle to learn English, Pee-wee's Playhouse. 

[00:52:49] Kaykay: It's Pee-wee's Playhouse. 

[00:52:51] Brooke: Yeah. I mean the Word of the Day alone. 

[00:52:53] Kaykay: Hopefully the Christmas special. 

[00:52:54] Brooke: Who doesn't want scream real loud every time they hear the word potato? I do. So shout out to Pee-wee's Playhouse for making an appearance. 

[00:53:02] Kaykay: I had the same, just a lot of joy in my heart thinking of Pee-wee's Playhouse. I know we've talked about Pee-wee's Playhouse before, we've talked about the Christmas special. 

[00:53:09] Brooke: We can't talk enough about it. Pee-wee's Playhouse is the potato of 80s children's television. 

[00:53:15] Kaykay: Of children's, yes. 

[00:53:16] Brooke: It really is. 

[00:53:17] Kaykay: Subversive, amazing, entertaining, hilarious. 

[00:53:21] Brooke: Holds up, gets better as it ages, truly. So I was squarely in the demographic of Pee-wee's Playhouse. Like, I was square demo. Did you feel like you were still, you weren't too cool to watch Pee-wee's Playhouse at the time?

[00:53:34] Kaykay: When did Pee-wee's come out? 

[00:53:35] Brooke: The children's TV show started in 1986. 

[00:53:38] Kaykay: Yeah, so I was like the perfect age for Pee-wee when it came out. Both me and my sister. And my sister was four years older than me, and she too loved Pee-wee. I mean, it really spoke across generations. 

[00:53:49] Brooke: It's so great.

[00:53:49] Kaykay: So hundred percent, I consider myself a Pee-wee kid.

[00:53:52] Brooke: And always will be. I think if you grow up with Pee-wee's Playhouse and if you felt, like to me, it felt like it spoke to me. It felt like it was made for me. Because it was weird. You know? 

[00:54:02] Kaykay: It was weird and clever and funny and stupid, which is how I felt. I felt all those things. 

[00:54:09] Brooke: Yeah. I think it was the only show that I remember watching where I was like, it surprised me. Like you didn't know where it was going to go. You could just get hit with like random absurdity in a way that you did not get, like kids TV shows were very formulaic, and most of them still are, and this was the opposite of formulaic. It was fricking bonkers. It was the best.

[00:54:31] Kaykay: It was so creative. 

[00:54:32] Brooke: So good.

[00:54:33] Kaykay: Yeah, I was watching the Christmas special, and I was watching the time where he goes into a photo booth, which is a video phone and speaks to, uh, who was it? The lesbian icon? 

[00:54:45] Brooke: Dinah Shore. 

[00:54:46] Kaykay: Dinah Shore. So he goes into a phone booth and has a Zoom call with Dinah Shore, before any of us could imagine any of this existing.

[00:54:55] Brooke: And Oprah Winfrey and Joan Rivers. 

[00:54:58] Kaykay: Yeah. You know, that was the kind of creative thing that was just endlessly smart and fun, and then you look and you're like, oh, that's actually really prescient. 

[00:55:07] Brooke: Yeah. 

[00:55:07] Kaykay: He saw the future of Zoom.

[00:55:09] Brooke: Totally. I mean, I am hoping one day we'll be able to connect the dots, lalalala, as humans, just transported into connect the dots. 

[00:55:18] Kaykay: "Connect the dots! Lalalala! Lalalala!"

[00:55:24] Brooke: I don't know why I love that so much, but I do.

[00:55:25] Kaykay: I hope my neighbors heard that.

[00:55:26] Brooke: If you were my neighbor and I heard that, I would immediately make you a cake.

[00:55:30] Kaykay: Yes, cake, a potato.

[00:55:32] Brooke: A potato cake. You can make cakes with mashed potatoes, you know. 

[00:55:35] Kaykay: I love the potato, but that might be where it ends for me. 

[00:55:38] Brooke: I may need to bring you a donut, there is a place in San Francisco that makes donuts with mashed potatoes, and they are fucking phenomenal. I think I might change your mind. It's a church of the potato. It's like the Holy Trinity of the potato. We believe in the potato at the savory, the sweet and the bland. All aspects of the potato.

[00:55:57] Kaykay: Yeah. I mean, I can rock a knish. Hell yeah. 

[00:55:59] Brooke: Yeah. 

[00:56:00] Kaykay: All right. So you had Pee-wee's for 80s, do you have any other 80s?

[00:56:03] Brooke: That was my big one. Did you have anything else? 

[00:56:05] Kaykay: I had kids being bored, very 80s. They talk about being bored a lot. And it's like, well, of course they're bored. They don't have phones, they don't have computers, they don't have tablets. And, you know, Sesame Street was only on at a certain time of day, so TV was useless to you, most of the day.

[00:56:21] Brooke: Unless it was Saturday, then it was for you. In the morning, Saturday morning. 

[00:56:24] Kaykay: Then it was your jam. 

[00:56:25] Brooke: Yeah. It was like, the world revolves around children for like four hours a week. 

[00:56:29] Kaykay: Did you ever wake up too early and have to watch Davey and Goliath?

[00:56:32] Brooke: Oh no. I never woke up too early. I've never woken up too early in my life. 

[00:56:37] Kaykay: Okay. So you are lucky. You would have had to watch a strange Christian Claymation of a horse and a boy called Davey and Goliath. I see a picture of Davey and Goliath, I feel tired. Cause I know I've woke up too early and I'm like sitting in my onesie like, when do the good cartoons come on? All right. So kids being bored. And then I also thought to myself, none of this diary shit happens if there are cell phones. Kids are just not bored enough to create this weirdness, and try to create mysteries that don't exist. They're on Instagram so they don't have to be bored. And then the last thing I had for 80s was want ads in the newspaper. 

[00:57:15] Brooke: Stacey's mom is looking for a job in the newspaper, after they've moved into this four-bedroom house that she's got set up. So 80s. "Sure! You can buy a house without a job, no problem." 

[00:57:27] Kaykay: Right? Seriously. "You're white, come on in."

[00:57:30] Brooke: Ugh! Speaking of white, the next book is perhaps one of the whitest scenarios that forms the basis of a Baby-sitters Club book. 

[00:57:41] Kaykay: Wow. What could be the whitest scenario? My wheels are turning.

[00:57:45] Brooke: Both from like a structural standpoint and also from like a visual standpoint, because we have another Super Special already. 

[00:57:52] Kaykay: What?

[00:57:53] Brooke: Baby-sitters Winter Vacation. So they are surrounded by whiteness, but they are going to a lodge in, I believe it's Vermont. 

[00:58:03] Kaykay: That's very white. And I hope I resonate, you know, because I came from the Bronx and was not a wealthy person, I never skied until I went on a ski trip when I was away at private school. And what an experience that was. I was like, what are these fucking white people doing? What the hell is this? So I'm really forward to this one.

[00:58:23] Brooke: Hurtling their bodies downhill at high speed. 

[00:58:26] Kaykay: Yeah! I mean, I dunno, just the whole thing. I was like, what is this now? But the first time I went skiing, I went to a lodge up in Vermont. I went to Stratton with all of my super rich classmates who'd been skiing since they were like zygotes. I wore jeans. It was amazing. 

[00:58:45] Brooke: Did you really? 

[00:58:46] Kaykay: Yeah! I didn't know. And like, my parents didn't know. 

[00:58:49] Brooke: How wet was your ass? 

[00:58:51] Kaykay: I was so wet. 

[00:58:53] Brooke: Such a wet ass. 

[00:58:53] Kaykay: I was miserable. I mean, that's the thing, is like, you need to have so much money for the gear. You know, if you're a kid from the Bronx, you don't know that. I mean, jeans seem to work in other sports. Why not? And my parents didn't know, you know. They were like, "Well, we've never been skiing. Wear your nice jeans."

[00:59:09] Brooke: Oh man. I am so excited for the stories that are going to come out. I mean, we already know, wet ass. The possibilities are endless with the Kaykay stories that we'll get. 

[00:59:19] Kaykay: I mean, you definitely know what kind of day I had. 

[00:59:22] Brooke: I do. 

[00:59:22] Kaykay: When you know that my ass is wet within the first 30 seconds, and I'm surrounded by super wealthy kids, who've been skiing their lives 

[00:59:30] Brooke: You're like, my ass got wet and it stayed wet.

[00:59:32] Kaykay: You know the general tenor. Yeah.

[00:59:35] Brooke: Oh man. Well, I can't wait for more wet ass stories when we talk about Baby-sitters Winter Vacation in our next episode, Kaykay. 

[00:59:42] Kaykay: Yeah!

[00:59:44] Brooke: But until then... 

[00:59:46] Kaykay: Just! Keep! Sittin'!