The Baby-Sitters Club #15: Little Miss Stoneybrook…and Dawn

Dawn is feeling kind of bad because Kristy arranges for a special induction to the BSC for Mallory and Jessi. She knows that they weren’t the best of friends when she first joined, but it still kind of hurts a little. It doesn’t help when Dr. Johansson calls and asks for Claudia specifically because Charlotte misses Stacey. Then Mrs. Pike calls and asks just for Dawn; she needs someone to help Margo and Claire enter the Little Miss Stoneybrook contest.

At first Dawn thinks it will be fun and easy, but she quickly learns she was wrong. Neither girl is really talented and both are kind of hard to control. Then Kristy sits for Karen and encourages her to enter the pageant. Mary Anne sits for Myriah Perkins, who wants to enter too. Then Claudia sits for Charlotte and convinces her to enter too.

Before long, the members of the BSC are barely talking. Margo decides to peel a banana with her feet, while reciting a poem and Claire is going to sing the Popeye song. All the girls learn their plans, but then clam up and won’t share anything about their girls. Claudia and Charlotte even drop by unexpectedly, trying to spy on them.

It all leads up to the big day of the pageant. Margo spots Sabrina Bouvier right off the bat because with a name like that, she has to be the girl with all the makeup. Karen messes up her interview, then Claire does and then Margo. Charlotte runs off stage in tears during the talent portion and makes her parents take her home. Myriah ends up placing second, while Sabrina wins.

The B-plot involves Jeff feeling home sick and still acting out in school. He finally announces that he wants to go home and Sharon promises to think about it. She must think about it pretty fast because by the end of the week, they’ve agreed to let him go back for six months. Two weeks later, he hops a flight and heads back to California.

*Sabrina totally sounds like one of those girls from the reality shows now. I love how all the girls point out that she isn’t very talented, wears too much makeup and seems fake, but “somehow” wins. Have they never watched a pageant before?

*I’m not going to point out how Dawn says 5,000 times in the book that she would never, ever leave her mom behind and do something selfish like move back to California.

*Why would Claudia even attempt to enter Charlotte in the pageant? Everything we know about her, says she wouldn’t do it.

*Jessi and Mallory are kind of stuck up. They take the Liz Wakefield role of they know better than anyone else and pageants are completely wrong.

*Claire calls Dawn at the end and asks for help entering a modeling contest at the local department school. For some reason, I wish they had wrote that book!