"Other days I just want to crawl into my shell like a teenage, mutant, injured turtle." BSC #71: Claudia and the Perfect Boy (1994)

Sorry this has been so late in coming. I am still having trouble with vertigo, and then my six week old nephew passed away. I am looking at the BSC, even this god-awful story, as an escape. So here I am again.

In this simple plot, Claudia gets a job on the school newspaper, writing a personals column. She decides to help herself to some of the eligible bachelors, but none of them is quite what she’s imagining. So instead, Stacey makes up a man and lures Claud in with it. It’s really as pathetic as it sounds.

In the subplot, Marnie Barrett is revealed to allergic to Pow the dog, so the Pikes, who don’t have enough critters in their home, take him in.

Interesting tidbits

Before I even begin. A) There is no such thing as a perfect boy. B) Claudia is thirteen! Kids at that age go out with people for two weeks, two months, not life. She needs to get over the idea of trying to find a perfect boy and just be happy with herself.

Mary Anne and Logan are apparently Claudia’s romance role models. They are so sappy they make me want to barf, so this makes me even more nauseous.

Claudia’s requirements for a perfect boy (her spelling intact): hansome, mussels (not too many, not to few), taller then me, funny (extreamly), atheletic, sensative, easy to talk to (a good lisner), intresting (lots to say), artistic, good dreser, good spellar (willing to corect mine), not criticul, crazey about me. Auto correct meant I had to go back and fix several of those to the bad spelling.

Ooh, this one has Kristy wearing a sweatshirt instead of a turtleneck! Madness!!!

Mary Anne actually thinks that Mrs. Barrett could have forgotten that Marnie is allergic to chocolate.

Heh. Claudia finds the idea of a mother with a boyfriend—even a single/divorced woman like Mrs. Barrett—weird. Especially because she’s scatterbrained (okay, I’ll buy that and old—because she’s “over thirty”. I’m offended on the behalf of all single people over that age, including me.

Claudia suggests that a woman using the personals ad has the personality of Homer Simpson. D’oh!

Okay, let’s talk about a personals column in a middle school paper. We weren’t allowed to have a personals column in my high school paper for legal reasons, and we were a Tinker school, meaning it was in our paper charter that we could not be censored by the school administration. No way would most schools do anything that could lead to a law suit. They especially wouldn’t print the students’ home addresses the way Claudia does.

Buddy, describing the Dewitts: “They’re not a s big toadheads as I first thought.”

Oh, lordy. After Mrs. Barrett tells the kids Pow has to find a new home, they all cry. Then she starts crying, so of course, Mary Anne starts crying too.

Claudia and Stacey think spell check will fix all her spelling problems. Riiiiiiight….

How can the (weekly) middle school paper get by with one computer? My (monthly) high school paper had three, and even that wasn’t enough.

Suzi says her room looks like a prison cell, and she knows that because Shredder had one on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Claudia replies to an ad with many of her requirements. Here’s her spelling errors: skool, gess, fashun, peepul, mystury. She also uses no for know (twice), hare for hair, and grate for great (twice). She makes a second try with the following spelling: pashionate, laffter, freinds, sumone, nuthing, sincerly. She also uses mite for might.

Claudia’s first choice for a date turns out to be Alan Gray, which is funny after last week’s book.

Ahh. The newspaper staff actually cuts and pastes the newspaper. Just a couple years after this, (1997), we did everything with the words by computer. By 1998, we even had exclusively digital photos.

Gag. MA writes a personal letter to Logan that’s too saccharine for me to even repeat. Trust me. If I post it, you (and I) will be in a diabetic coma. Humorously, her “call me” line gets switched with an ad stating the girl wants to dump her dud boyfriend, so Logan stops talking to MA for a while.

You all are quite lucky: my flight was just delayed for the third time, so I will probably get the whole thing posted before I ever get on the plane that was supposed to leave over an hour ago.

Kristy tries to give Claudia fashion advice for her date. Yup.

Claudia’s second date attempt, a guy who calls himself Rock, says he didn’t know Claudia was a “Japanese chick.” How does he know she’s Japanese as opposed to another Asian background?

Rock’s real first name is Richard, as is his fathers. Yet he has an older brother named Russ. Don’t most families with juniors name the first son after the dad? (I actually have an aunt who named her younger son after both of his grandfathers, which means he has the same first name as his grandfather and father.)

More Claudia spelling: wunder and hapening. She also uses new for knew.

The fake guy Stacey creates for Claudia allegedly looks like Jason Priestly.

Outfits

Claudia: pink socks, gold stretch pants (horrors!), gold turtleneck, pink sweater (Replace stretch pants with jeans and she sounds like Kristy), blue jewelry; brown suede pants, yellow button down, Native American earrings, silver jewelry, bangles, brown and yellow vest

Next week: We’ll actually start August two weeks late. I think I will probably start with a Kristy mystery.