BSC TV Series Episode # 7: Dawn and the Dream Boy

Memory Reaction

I never saw this episode as a kid.

Revisited Reaction

Dawn has a crush on this boy at school, Jamie Anderson, but doesn’t really know him.  Mary Anne sort of knows him because he coaches Jackie Rodowski’s soccer team, so Mary Anne offers to talk Dawn up to him when she’s picking up Jackie (coincidentally happening the next day).  She does this, and in the process mentions that she and Dawn are sisters.  The next day at school Mary Anne introduces Dawn to Jamie, then leaves to go to class.  Jamie asks Dawn if she’s going to the big soccer game coming up, then asks for her phone number.  Dawn’s super excited.

Later, Dawn and Mary Anne are at home talking about Jamie.  Carol yells “telephone” from off screen and Dawn rushes to pick it up.  It’s Jamie.  He asks her to go to the game and she says yes. However, when Jamie comes to pick her up we find out that he THOUGHT he had been talking to Mary Anne on the phone and that the date was with her.  Dawn’s understandable embarrassed, but also pissed at Mary Anne.  Mary Anne tries to nicely point out it’s not her fault, but Dawn keeps refusing to talk to her, so Mary Anne gets pissed herself.  They keep fighting, and this causes a scene when the BSC’s decorating for a school dance.  Kristy intervenes and makes them talk to each other.  Dawn realizes she was wrong to think Mary Anne would do something like that, but Mary Anne still ends up apologizing to her.

Anyway, the BSC all goes to the dance as a group, but Jamie ends up asking Dawn to dance.  It sort of looks like Mary Anne joins them in a little dancing threesome, but she could also be dancing with someone else. The guys on this show all look alike.  In fact, all the girls get asked to dance.  Because that’s the only way to have a happy ending, I guess.

High/Lowlights

• Dawn has bangs.  For some reason I never pictured her like that, I pictured them just as long as the rest of her hair.  I can’t remember what was on the book covers.

• Mallory says that her cousin calls guys and pretends she’s calling them back.  Like actually just say has a message from them as an excuse to call.  Interesting.

• When did Mary Anne get bold enough to talk to a guy she barely knows about Dawn?

• Jamie’s supposedly coaches Jackie’s junior team, but at practice there’s only three people.  I know very little about soccer, but I know you need more people than that.

• Having someone say the line “you’re blushing” doesn’t work on a TV show when the actress isn’t actually blushing.

• Dawn wears a big pink hair barrette in her hair when she has a red shirt on. Red and pink? Who does she think she is? Claudia?

• They don’t specifically say, but I guess this Jamie kid is new. Otherwise he would have known Mary Anne and Dawn were step-sisters and that Mary Anne had a boyfriend.  I always got the feeling that everyone knew everyone in Stoneybrook.

• Dawn asks an unnamed client how long she’ll be gone because she wants to be home for an important call.  First, wouldn’t she already know how long the job was for? Second, way to be unprofessional.

• Dawn worries that she looks terrible before her soccer game date.  She does, but it’s not her fault fashion was so bad back then. 

• Wow, the actress playing Dawn is awful.  When she realizes the guy thought he was asking out Mary Ann her line readings made me cringe.

• Kristy calls the food in the school cafeteria gross.  Yay, points for book continuity.  Except only a few, because in the books she always bought it anyway, here she has a bag lunch.

• Dawn and Mary Anne do that annoying telephone game cause they won’t talk to each other.  Like they’ll be right next to each other, but ask someone else to ask the other person a question, so we have to hear everything 2-3 times.

• Kristy has a mature way of mediating the fight.  I’m serious.  She says they both get to tell their whole stories then the rest of them get to talk about it. 

• Why does Mary Anne apologize? Ugh.  She did nothing wrong.

• The BSC volunteered to be the decorating committee for a school dance, which makes sense, but it’s weird because Jackie Rodowski is there when they are setting up. I thought it might be because they had a sitting job and brought him along, but they also bring this other girl, Emma, who also “wanted to help.”  I don’t remember any kids named Emma.  There’s no reason for little kids to be helping them with middle school stuff.

• At the end when they show the girls dancing, Mal’s dancing with red head and Jessi with black guy. That seems….weird.  

BSC TV Series Episode # 6: Claudia and the Missing Jewels

Memory Reaction

This episode has a special place in my memory.  I think I’ve mentioned before that when I was a kid I had a BSC-themed birthday party.  One of the games we played was this BSC version of those mystery games where everyone plays a part and then tries to guess the killer (or in this case thief).  My mom used the “mystery” in this video as a set up for it and wrote a whole script for us to act out.  So that it would be fair, she changed the person who took the earrings.   We acted out a bunch of scenes, guessed who did it, then read the conclusion.  We even gave out sunglasses to my friends so they could wear them to match the “disguises” the girls wore in the video.

Revisited Reaction

Claudia’s selling some jewelry she made at a craft show/flea market.  A woman who owns a store shows up and says she wants to buy a bunch to sell in her store.  She gives Claudia a $50 down payment for the order of 6 earrings. Claudia brings the finished earrings to Kristy’s house when she has a sitting job for Karen. Kristy’s around later and they look at the earrings with Karen, then they leave them in a box on Kristy’s dresser.  A couple days later the girls are ready to bring the earrings to Miss Olga (the store owner), when they find the box empty.  Rather than ask the other people in the house who was messing with her stuff, Kristy does the logical thing….she calls a BSC meeting.

Kristy says that the only people around when she left the earrings in the box were Karen and Julie. Julie is some kind of maid that Kristy’s family has hired to help out.  Kristy hates her for no real reason that I can see.  But we did see Julie looking at the earrings when she was putting away laundry in Kristy’s room, so we are clearly supposed to suspect her.  Anyway, the girls follow Julie around town all day, and eventually see that she’s wearing Claudia’s earrings.  At home, Kristy wants to confront Julie, but Karen tells her she’s gone for the day.  Then Karen tells Kristy she wants to show her a “treasure tree.”  Kristy’s annoyed and says she doesn’t have time for that.  Karen looks sad.  I actually feel bad for her, even if she’s really annoying in this episode.  Kristy snaps at her a lot.

Eventually, Kristy does confront Julie who tells her that Karen gave her the earrings for her birthday.  When Kristy talks to Karen, Karen tells her she was going to give them back and tried to tell Kristy, but she kept ignoring her.  Kristy apologizes for not having time for her, but does tell her how wrong it was to take things.  Karen then brings Kristy to her treasure tree and returns the rest of the earrings.  Later Kristy and the rest of the BSC throw Julie a birthday party to make up for accusing her of being a thief.

High/Lowlights

• When they are setting Claudia’s table up at the flea market, I was admiring how pretty the top was.  It had this nice star pattern on it.  And then they just cover it up with two different table clothes.  Such a waste.

• Claudia’s earrings are kind of ugly, but I guess they might have been fashionable in the early 1990s.

• Miss Olga describes a “village shop” where she wants to sell the earrings.  That seems like a weird thing to say if the shop is just in Stoneybrook.

• I don’t totally get what Julie’s job is supposed to be.  Apparently they still need a baby-sitter when she’s in the house, so she’s not a nanny.  Kristy also tells us she doesn’t cook.  We only see her do laundry, but I guess she’s some kind of maid?

• Miss Olga gives Claudia a $50 down payment without discussing actual total cost.  That seems unprofessional.

• The girls are at Claudia’s and Kristy answers the phone “Baby-Sitters Club.”  Then later she calls the meeting to order. Why answer the phone like that if it wasn’t 5:30 yet?

• We see the outside of Kristy’s house. It definitely looks big, but I wouldn’t call it a mansion.  Definitely not like I pictured it.

• It’s really weird that so many scenes take place in Kristy’s house and the only other people we see are Karen and Julie.  Ten people live in that place. This show clearly had a low budget.

• Kristy snaps at Karen because Karen’s being loud when Kristy’s doing homework.  Karen explains to Julie that Kristy’s in a bad mood and thinks she talks too much.  Julie’s all, I don’t believe in bad moods and there’s nothing wrong with talking if you have something to say.  Now, I get that she wanted Karen to feel better, but how do you not believe in bad moods? People have different moods, some of them are going to be bad.  And maybe tell Karen it’s okay to talk, but maybe consider your surroundings.

• I really like that they have Karen wearing pink glasses, because that’s a very specific thing I remember from the Little Sister books.

• Claudia does let Karen try on a pair of earrings.  So…are these clip-ons? Or does Karen have pierced ears?  If they are clip-ons, I am surprised someone would want to sell them in a store.   And I’m surprised if Karen has pierced ears, because even though I had pierced ears at her age, the BSC always acted like you needed to be really old to do that.

• Claudia’s baby-sitting for Karen.  Kristy’s home, but had to do a book report and couldn’t sit.  Claudia and Karen are sitting on a bed paying Go Fish, in what I assumed was Karen’s room.  But when Kristy shows up later we see that it’s her room.  So, why would Claudia and Karen be hanging out in Kristy’s room without her?  There’s a zillion other rooms in that house.

• Kristy makes a point of saying Julie and Karen were the only ones in the house the last time she saw the earrings.  But since this was several days before she noticed they were gone, I’m not sure why that matters.

• There’s this weird moment where Jessi and Mallory check out this girl walking past them.  They are talking on a pay phone in their lovely sunglasses disguise.  This girl walks by and they both pull off their glasses to gawk at her.  I feel like I must be missing something.

• Mary Anne, Dawn, and Stacey are following Julie, and decide to “shoot” to see who has to get close to her for something.  I was wondering how they did that with three people, but apparently there is a way to do that.  I also never knew there was a name for that “game,” but Wikipedia tells me it’s called Morra.  I do wonder why they never called who got odds/even, even if they were playing the multi-person version they would have needed to do that when they got down to two people.

• If Kristy really thought Julie stole the earrings, why not mention it to her parents?  Also, if something disappeared from my room, I would assume my brother or parents moved it.  And Kristy has a lot more siblings than I do, I don’t get why she wouldn’t consider that one of them took it.  Or that Julie moved it accidentally.

• In case you were wondering, in my birthday party version of this mystery, the culprit was Charlotte. She thought that the earrings were Stacey’s and that selling them meant she wouldn’t have time to baby-sit anymore.  Then when she found out she was wrong, she gave the earrings to Jamie because he was worried about Claudia not having time to sit.  And he gave the earrings to Julie for her birthday, because she worked at his house too.  Jamie wasn’t even in this episode, and Charlotte barely was, so I must have actually explained who the character was to my mother for her to write all that.  It was really dedicated of her. (And for the record, I didn’t actually remember all that about the plot, I had to go looking in my mom’s old photo albums where she stuck a copy of the script.  I just remember everyone wearing sunglasses while we read it).