“Officially, I was babysitting for her, but unofficially we were McGill and Johanssen, Private Investigators.” BSC Mystery #10: Stacey and the Mystery Money (1993)

Happy new year, everyone? (Yes, that’s a question, not a statement.) Did you miss me during my little unplanned hiatus? Don’t worry; it was just a temporary thing, and barring any additional weirdness, things should go back to normal. Except…this is me we’re talking about here, and weird is practically my middle name. In any case, I’ll be continuing on with the blog although there might be a few more gaps here and there.

So this mystery starts off pretty normal and winds off in the Twilight Zone a little. Counterfeiters are taking Stoneybrook by storm, and Stacey inadvertently passes a fake $10 bill. She gets hauled into the police station and the BSC decides to try to catch the counterfeiters. (This has to be the dumbest decision in the history of the world, but it is the BSC.) Meanwhile, Stacey’s got this crush on a boy at school named Terry Hoyt. All these clues start developing that Terry’s dad might be involved in the counterfeiting. Instead, he turns out to be Secret Service, investigating the counterfeiters. With help from Stacey, the BSC and Charlotte and Becca, they catch the counterfeiters. Terry, because he likes Stacey so much, tells her his secret identity, a secret she “has to take to her grave with her.” Or, just until the Friends Forever series….

Interesting Tidbits

Laura’s random math time: I just did a few calculations. More than a quarter (28%) of the BSC mystery books have the word ‘mystery’ in the title. They couldn’t have been more creative than that? I wonder what the percentage of BSC books, total, would be, that could be considered mysteries (and how many of those have ‘mystery’ in the title.) Hmmm….I might get back to you with that. (Yes, I am a nerd…why do you ask?)

The cover: Stacey looks fashionable now. Make her a little taller and she’d look just like my coworker. Meanwhile, Charlotte’s outfit looks charmingly dated, and you can actually read where it says ‘Betty’ on the clerks name tag.

Janine comes into Claudia’s room to borrow magic markers. When Claudia asks her what colors she needs, Janine launches into a whole long, science-y spiel, trying to figure that out. Why didn’t she either figure it out in advance or just ask to borrow all the colors, which is what Claudia eventually suggests?

I love when Stacey gets all condescending about the shopping opportunities in Stoneybrook. Paraphrase of her comments here: Bellair’s isn’t nearly as good as Bloomingdale’s, but what do you expect in hicksville? It’s a nice little store, though.

During Charlotte and Stacey’s shopping extravaganza, Charlotte decides to spend her money on…a troll doll. I used to have a whole collection of those, but now they freak me out.

Ewww. Stacey’s looking for earrings to go with her purple jumpsuit. I guess it really doesn’t matter what you wear with a purple jumpsuit, does it? You’re still going to be wearing a purple jumpsuit.

We don’t call the cops when people try to give us counterfeit money at my store. We just turn it down and ask for another method of payment. Generally, it’s not worth the hassle.

Charlotte actually gets so upset at the thought that Stacey might be arrested over the counterfeit bill that she demands to be arrested too. She puts her wrists out to get handcuffed.

This made me laugh, even though I’d feel like doing the same thing at Stacey’s age (or even my age): when her mom shows up at the police station, Stacey shouts “Mommy!” and runs into her arms. I think it’s just the image of ‘sophisticated’ Stacey calling her mom Mommy that makes it funny.

Ew. Charlie is checking out Tasha Hoyt and thinks she’s cute. But she’s a lot younger than he is and the whole thing just seems wrong. It’s bad enough Sam wants to date someone Kristy’s age.

Kristy judges the fact that the Hoyts aren’t fully unpacked after three weeks of being moved in. Honestly, with three kids and a lot of stuff, it wouldn’t be unsurprising. (We had Christmas at Tessie’s, and she’d been in her house for five weeks. We had to keep unpacking things in her kitchen so she could make dinner.)

Is there a more fun character name in the BSC-verse than Mr. Zizmore? I always have the urge to say it out loud. It’s got Zizz! (bonus points to anyone except my mother who gets that reference.)

They have an emergency meeting to deal with the counterfeiters. You know it’s big, because even Shannon shows up!

Oh, Kristy. The first thing she thinks of when Stacey tells her how awful the whole experience at the police department? She hopes their clients don’t find out, because it would give the club a bad image. Sometimes, I think Kristy is just put in the club so she can say insensitive and blunt things.

Oh, and then Jessi has to bring up the missing ring from the first mystery book, because Stacey’s not feeling bad enough already.

Alan’s lurking in the library while MA, Kristy and Stacey are researching counterfeiting. When they’re trying to figure out why he’s there, Kristy thinks he’s probably just looking up dirty words in the dictionary.

Jessi wants to see what happens if she just copies her money on the photocopier, but Stacey freaks out and stops her. I remember rolling my eyes about that as a kid, and I do so even more now. No one would arrest Jessi for copying a dollar bill on the photocopier as long as she didn’t try to pass it as real, and even then she’d probably just get yelled at. The police and Secret Service don’t have time to deal with small time bungling like that.

Ha ha! When Dawn, Claudia and Stacey show up at the police department to talk about counterfeiting, the desk officer recognizes Dawn from the dog-napping case and calls her Nancy Drew.

Charlotte gets Becca into the whole BSC detective thing because she wants to clear Stacey’s name. (No matter how many times people tell her that Stacey wasn’t actually arrested, she doesn’t seem to believe it.) She decides they need to stake out copiers in order to see who’s copying money. Even Jessi knows that a counterfeiter wouldn’t use a public copy machine.

Stacey’s English teacher Mr. Fiske actually becomes a suspect because he happened to be shopping in Bellair’s at the same time Stacey got the fake bill and happened to be looking at a copy machine at the office supply store when Jessi and her mini-detectives staked it out.

Stacey starts to get suspicious of Terry because he introduces himself to her mother as Terry James Hoyt and to Logan and Mary Anne as Terry John Hoyt. If you had a fake identity that you had to relearn on a regular basis, would you introduce yourself by full name ever? Most people don’t do that anyway. It’s not like Claudia goes around introducing herself as Claudia Lynn Kishi all the time.

Dawn wants to take a cooking class about ‘new ways to cook tofu.’ Mary Anne gets all grossed out, but really. Tofu has no flavor. You WANT to find sauces and marinades and casseroles and stuff to put it in.

Kristy begins to suspect the Hoyts of counterfeiting. Her evidence: they move all the time. They’re really secretive about what their dad does. She saw a school ID with Terry’s twin sister Tasha’s photo and the name “Tina Harris” on it. Their house isn’t unpacked all the way. There’s a closet in their house that Georgie didn’t want her to open.

Finally, I can use the quote I’ve been thinking of the entire time I’ve been reading this book: “This mystery is getting really mysterious.” –Fred from Scooby Doo

Claudia spelling, yo. First, let’s get right to the point before I even address the rest of this notebook entry (in which just about every other word is spelled wrong.) She spells Stacey as Stasey. That’s her flippin’ best friend! I don’t care if she spells everything else in her notebook entry wrong, she should at least get that one right.

Anyway, the rest of the spelling: begining, Fisk (Fiske), susspishions, befour, contrafeeting (I had to look at that one several times before I realized she was trying for counterfeiting. I could understand counterfitting, counterfeeting, or counterfetting, but I don’t understand this.) Also, Charlatte, deffinitly, detectiv.

Charlotte and Claud first start out trying to copy money larger than life, just to see how hard it is. After that they make their own fake money. Claudia’s is from the land of Total Coolness and Charlotte’s is from Johanssenland. They talk about how boring U.S. money is by comparison. Wonder how they’d feel about the new $100 bills, the ones many of my customers call ‘Monopoly money.’ They’re full of anti-counterfeiting features and also colored for those with low vision.

When the BSC tails Mr. Fiske (who was also at the office supply store when Claudia and Charlotte went spying again), Claud offers to take notes, but Stacey says, “What if the rest of us want to be able to read them?” So Jessi takes notes instead.

Stacey contemplates what goes on in the faculty lounge. Apparently, the only images she has to go on are the original vision of the place smelling like potpourri and being full of comfortable chairs and pretty wallpaper, based upon the word ‘lounge.’ Later, the door opens and Jessi smells coffee and cigarettes, which changes the image to something more accurate. (Take a high school cafeteria and clean it up a bit and you have most faculty lounges/lunch rooms.) But I sincerely doubt most schools would allow teachers to smoke in the building in the nineties.

Mr. Fiske keeps being ‘suspicious.’ He digs around in his desk and pulls out…counterfeit money? No! A red pencil, which he uses to…color counterfeit money? NO! Grade papers. (Claudia suggests he’s grading Stacey’s paper because he’s making a LOT of red marks. This makes me smile.)

Oh, and then Stacey nearly follows him into the men’s room.

I know this was quite a ways back up, but ever since Claudia wrote Charlatte, I’ve been trying to spell Charlotte that way. And I keep reading it as Char-latte, like the coffee drink.

Claudia spent a couple pages wondering, back when she and Charlotte were spying, how much it hurts to get a tattoo on your ear and whether she could get away with a temporary ear tattoo after seeing a guy with a “blue moon and star tattoo” on his ear. It’s not until Stacey and Char happen to be in the right spot at the right time and see a guy dropping a shit-ton of counterfeit cash that anyone actually goes back and rereads all the entries in the notebook Charlotte makes Jessi buy. They realize that Becca had already made an entry on the same guy. Who, of course, is actually the counterfeiter.

It’s around this time that Terry admits his dad is SS and trying to catch the counterfeiters.

I might have to go back and see how many times I’ve used counterfeit or some version thereof in this post. (Answer: 23, if you include my misspellings of it but not Claudia’s.)

Bonus math time: Leaving out the ‘special editions,’ ‘portrait collections’, Friends Forever series and random books like the complete guide and postcard book, I have counted 186 BSC books. (If you’re counting with me, that leaves the original series, mysteries, super specials and super mysteries.) Of these, I counted that 45 are mysteries: 36 from the mysteries series, 4 super mysteries, and 5 BSC books that are mysterious. There might be more of the last, but I counted fast. This is 24% of the 186 books. Of these, 16 have mystery in the name, which is 36% of the mystery books.

New characters:

Terry (aka David Hawthorne), Tasha and Georgie Hoyt (13, 13 and 7)—35, 35 and 29

Outfits

Charlotte: pink skirt, frilly white blouse

Stacey: white miniskirt, blue and white striped sweater; Date outfits: red jumpsuit (“too flashy”); floral sundress (“too summery”); purple sweater, bleached jeans with bows at the ankles (“too casual”); black sweater dress (“too hot and dressy”); white sweater, blue and white polka dot leggings, white hair bow (apparently perfect)

Claudia: tie dyed pajamas

Terry: chinos and tan sweater

Coming soon: #67: Get Lost, Dawn (or Dawn’s Big Move. Whatever)

BTW, if anyone has been following my fanfic and wondering if I’m ever going to finish February…well, I have five pages. This is impressive only because, until this morning, I had one page. Don’t despair of me; once I finish February, the story should just flow.  About two thirds of April and May are already written, and I know what will be happening in the rest of the story (including March, which includes more Dawn…I’m so much nicer to her in fanfic than I am in my head or in this blog! Ha ha!)

"I have stolen a man's suitcase with a murder victim inside it, the mob is about to close in, I'm making my European debut looking like a cover model for Parenting magazine, and you're making fun of me!" BONUS BOOK! BSC Super Special #15 Baby-sitters' European Vacation (1998)

I just got this in via interlibrary loan; I first requested it six months ago. Therefore, despite the fact that Logan does not go on this particular ridiculous vacation (and doesn't even get a chapter, despite being in the story), I just had to read and blog it. You have no idea how ridiculously happy receiving this book made me.
The main idea of this one should be obvious: some of the girls are going on another school trip, to London and Paris. They're going with a group of Canadian students, as in, the two groups travel completely together. The rest of the club stays home and works at a day camp. As with other super specials, each girl has her own story. Let's start with the girls who went on the trip:
Kristy: meets one of the Canadian students, Michel, and hates him on sight. The two of them get lost together in Paris. Of course, they end up having a romance, because someone had to, and Kristy hadn't had one in a SS yet. Or something.
Stacey: is upset that her mom is one of the chaperones. She also gets the wrong suitcase and ends up meeting the owner in Paris, where she learns all about D-Day.
Mallory: meets her mother's cousin, who is a British author. She starts writing a book and ignores all the sights of Paris. She also finds out she's distantly related to Shakespeare.
Abby: meets Victoria from #102, and gets to accompany her to meet the Queen. However, she's disappointed that she doesn't actually get to meet the Queen herself, and then she steps on a royal's toes. Literally.
Jessi: the dance troupe she almost joined is performing in London, so she arranges tickets. When one of the dancers hurts herself, Jessi gets thrown into one of the numbers. (I almost forgot to include her, which shows how thrilling this story was. It was over by half-way through the book.)
Back in Stoneybrook:
Claudia: Janine ends up working as a head counselor at the camp where Claudia, Dawn, MA and Logan are working. She's particularly hard on Claudia. Eventually Claudia finds out the other head counselor, Janine's ex, is being just as tough on Janine as Janine is on her, and she felt Claudia was the safest place to vent.
Dawn: spends a day filling in at the camp for special needs kids where Janine was supposed to work. Susan, from #32 Kristy and the Secret of Susan, is among the campers.
Mary Anne: doesn't really have her own story. She just deals with Cokie being an ass (nothing new there.)
Interesting tidbits
Becca's jealous of Jessi, so she's been going around using a British accent and watching Pepe Le Pew cartoons.
Jessi splits the difference and says that Mallory has reddish-brown hair.
Kristy's hair is described as shoulder-length, yet they always illustrate her as having longer hair.
Jessi caught the Caps Bug. She said that Claudia's parents approve of Creativity but not of Bad Nutrition.
This is actually about right: "...because she's, well, Abby. Dedicated to the art of saying weird things and making people laugh." This is after Abby answers the phone by saying, "No job too small, no kid too big!"
Speaking of Abby, I had to transcribe this from her notebook entry:
Checklist for meeting the Queen
1. Avoid scaring her: brush hair
2. Check between teeth for unsightly bits of lunch
3. De-gooberize nose in advance
4. Shake hands gently to avoid breaking elderly fingers
5. Do not kiss her on lips
6. Ask about Elvis only if the opportunity presents itself....
Claudia speaks with her mouth full, and Stacey actually turns to her and says, "Swallow, please," so that she can be understood.
Abby suggests that Elvis was in the Civil War and then asks Kristy if cricket stadiums are like flea markets. (Kristy responds to the latter by throwing a dinner roll at her.)
The group toasts at their party with "champagne." Jessi toasts MA, Claudia and Dawn (who are not going on the trip) and Logan, who is also at the event and not going on the trip, adds, "Uh, hello?"
Jessi says this is the first time she's left the country. Dawn says she's been to France before, and Stacey took a trip with her parents to Ireland as a child.
Alan Gray gets in trouble at customs because he was, big surprise, acting like an idiot.
I about died laughing at this part. Stacey and Kristy are sharing a motel room in London, and when Stacey opens her suitcase, not only is it not hers, but it also contains a canister of cremains. Ew! Stacey's mom makes her go wash her hands after she picks up the cremains. Kristy finds the whole thing amusing.
Stacey assumes the cremains are of a murder victim. Because all serial killers carry their victims in their suitcases.
Even though Claudia is not on the trip, we get to see her fabulous spelling. Eczotic, allready, untill, counsler, didnt', yestrday, hed, recroot, geuss. She also uses hear for here and their for there. Unlike a lot of her spellings, these actually kind of make sense.
Janine makes Claudia, Dawn, Mary Anne check the playground equipment. She then proceeds to check inside the mouth of a fiberglass t-rex. Claudia suggests she's checking for half-eaten chunks of fiberglass triceratops.
The six eighth grade camp counselors are Mary Anne, Dawn, Claudia, Logan, a guy named Bruce that Claudia thinks is cute, and Cokie.
Mallory gets to see a family tree for her mother's side of the family, and you learn a few of the nerdy nit-picky facts I love. Mrs. Pike's maiden name is Bennett, and Dee (which Stacey's mom calls her in an earlier book) is short for Diana. In this book, Mallory's dad is Jonathan. One of Mrs. Pike's brothers is named Jordan, and her father's name is Adam.
Alan acts like an idiot at the Tate Gallery, and Kristy announces to everyone who can hear her that he's not a member of their group.
The other chaperone, Mr. Dougherty, is worse than Alan, if that's possible. He keeps trying to talk with a British accent, gets lost in the Tate Gallery (and a couple other places) and acts like a kid in a candy store.
There are several references to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
YES! There's actually a picture of Cokie in the book! Claudia and MA are soaked by rain and she refers to them as the BSC wet t-shirt contest.
Cokie only got onto the camp staff because her mother is a member of the board of education, which sponsored the camp.
Among the campers are the Hobarts, Papadakises, Dewitt and Barrett kids, Kuhns, Kormans, and the Arnold twins.
Kristy and Stacey are half-arguing about Michel, with Abby throwing in comments for fun. It's like reading several conversations at the same time. Stacey suggests Kristy must really hate Michel, Kristy asks her what she means, Stacey goes back to her book and ignores Kristy, and Abby suggests Stacey will get sick reading and walking at the same time. (This is a skill Stacey must have picked up from Janine. It is also one that I myself am very good at.)
Mallory calls Abby a philistine, and no one else knows what it means.
We get a Robert chapter, and it's mercifully short. A girl named Jacqui has been trying to get in his pants throughout the whole book, and he ends up yelling at her to leave him alone. After that, he's mentioned again a whopping once more in the book (by Jessi, no less). There is one weird bit. Jacqui says, "Stacey has, like, totally deaded you." Is that a real term people actually ever used?
Susan has gotten a hug machine--I totally want one of those. It envelops the body in deep pressure for a short period of time. It's kind of like lying under the mattress of a bed while someone puts weights on top of it. Doesn't sound good to most people, but for those with sensory integration issues, it's amazing.
Kristy apparently enjoys throwing food--this time, she throws a crumpet at Stacey. (BTW, I <3 crumpets!) Later, she dumps a pastry in Michel's lap and leaves a white powdery stain on his crotch.
There's a photo of the girls in England. Stacey's writing something, with Mallory and Jessi looking on. Kristy looks disgusted and Abby looks like she's laughing at her.
That "thing" Stacey is writing is some math, determining how Mallory is related to Shakespeare. She determines that he's Mallory's seventeen greats grandfather, and that each person has 131,072 seventeen greats grandparents.
Kristy and Michel fight like a couple five year olds. Kristy asks Stacey to stay between them at all times. Stacey's response? "Just kiss him and put both of you out of your misery."
Abby calls Westminster Abbey her namesake.
Abby is freaking out about not looking like an idiot when she goes to see the Queen. She says there are starlings nesting in her hair and that her face is covered in zits. I think this is only about the second time in the series zits have been mentioned, other than when they say Claudia rarely gets them. Later, Abby says she doesn't know how to greet the queen. When told to just be natural, she says, "Yo, what's up, my lady?"
More Claudia spelling: Im', leve, minut, Coky, exept, didnt', newmonia, thats, mam, eye-eye (instead of aye-aye). And she uses to instead of too.
Janine calls Claudia a laggard. When Claud asks what that is, Dawn replies, "I don't know. Some kind of drink?" Claudia calls it a delayed reaction insult, because she doesn't get insulted until later. (It's Mary Anne who tells her the meaning.)
Mr. Dougherty goes missing again right as they're supposed to leave England for France. Mallory says he's at Virginia Woolf's house, and Ms. McGill goes nuts: "What's he doing there? Virginia Woolf is dead!"
I read through the whole book before I realized that Stacey's mom is always referred to as Ms. McGill. Makes sense--Ms. started as a way of indicating that one was no longer married to the person whose surname she had taken. (Personally, I've always preferred to be called Ms. rather than Miss, and I've never been married.) I've never really thought too much about it, though.
Abby raids the newspapers before leaving, to see if the picture of her was printed. Stacey asks where the shot of her attacking the prince is.
Stacey refers to the Chunnel as new. Seems odd now.
Kristy's writing about the wonderful food of Paris, and Abby interrupts her to add in snails and frogs' legs.
Kristy totally embarrasses Michel when they're lost together. He plays a prank on her and she ends up yelling at him in front of a crowd of people about how much she hates him. It's pretty bad because even if Kristy doesn't actually like him before this point, you can tell from the start that Michel was teasing her because he had a thing for her. He asks her to pretend they're friends, since he can speak French and she can't. By the end of their four hours together, she's rested her head on his shoulder and let him put his arm around her.
Mary Anne is a big wuss. She volunteers to help Logan with softball at camp, but Cokie gets the job because Jerry picks her. Janine starts a fight over it, and Mary Anne backs down. (Even though Logan is motioning at her, basically saying NOOOO!) After she catches that, Cokie quits, but Janine convinces her not to go, and she ends up having fun after all. Janine with balls = way better than mean Janine.
In the picture of Mallory writing, her hair is straight, and she's wearing huge glasses and CLOGS. I've always thought that if any BSC member should wear clogs, it should be Dawn. Don't ask me why...or even why I've ever thought about that before.
Mallory's story character is Mariel, and she lives in Stoneyfield.
Abby and Kristy went to Centre Georges Pompidou, which is an inside-out art museum...and spent pretty much the entire visit riding up and down the elevator.
Abby brushes her teeth before going into the Parisian sewers...her logic is that the sewer smells bad enough without her monster breath. Her biggest surprise at the sewers is that Kristy's all grumpy, and it's because Michel joined the rest of the group at Euro Disney instead of coming with her. Kristy refuses to admit that she likes him, but that night, she kisses him.
Is this supposed to make us think good things? "The night air had a faint flowery smell mixed with the pollution."
You finally get to see the photo of Abby and the prince in the epilogue. The prince looks vaguely like a young George Clooney and he's holding his foot. Abby looks shocked.
There aren't really any outfits in this one. The closest you get is that Stacey has to wear her mom's clothes until she gets her suitcase back. She's mortified and Kristy, of course, makes fun of her. Also, the photos show some attire, but other than Stacey and Abby, just about everyone is wearing shorts or jeans in every photo. Here's the photo clothing:
Stacey and Robert at the ticket desk of the airport. Stacey's wearing a dress with spaghetti straps. Robert's wearing...do you really care what Robert's wearing? Jeans and a t-shirt.
Claudia and Janine on the playground: Janine is in dark shorts and a dark polo shirt. Her glasses are so thick you can't see her eyes. Claudia has jeans and a t-shirt.
Claudia, Mary Anne and Cokie in front of a Coke machine. (I find this humorous, as I keep trying to type Cokie as Coke anyway.): Both MA and Cokie are wearing t-shirts and shorts. Cokie's shirt is dark, and she's got dark, curly hair, sort of like Abby's. MA's wearing a white shirt. Claudia's in jeans and t-shirt again, but the shirt does look sort of artsy. Not in a crazy, normal Claudia way, just artsy. (Also, Mary Anne appears to have bigger boobs than Claudia does.)
Jessi and Tanisha (one of the dancers): they're in dance attire. Duh.
Dawn and Susan: Dawn is wearing a t-shirt with a sun on it, jean shorts and sandals. Susan is notable for looking very similar to her other appearance, on the cover of #32. She's wearing a polo shirt and playing the piano.
The five girls at the table, as described above: Kristy's wearing an oversized t-shirt; Mallory's shirt is more fitted. Stacey's wearing a v-neck dress. Jessi's wearing a polo shirt and Abby's also wearing a dress, but it looks like a t-shirt dress (she's wearing something similar in one of the photos in SS #12.)
Stacey and Mr. Anderson, the man with the cremains (he dumps them into the water at the beach he and his friend stormed at Normandy): Stacey, who looks about 30, is wearing a sweater or sweatshirt with a collar and khakis.
Kristy and Michel at the Eiffel Tower: Kristy's wearing an oversized t-shirt and a baseball cap; Michel has on an oversized polo shirt, dark colored jeans, and a baseball cap. Kristy looks super-cute, with dimples.
Mallory writing when she should be sight-seeing: of course, I mentioned the clogs. She's also wearing a sleeveless polo and either a skirt or very short shorts.
Abby and the prince: he's wearing a suit; she's dressed up in a floral dress and sandals. She must have a very heavy tread to hurt his foot; it's not as if she were wearing Docs or something.
BTW, Abby's attire inside the book is MUCH better than what she's wearing on the cover. The cover shows the five girls in London with one of the Palace Guards. Jessi is wearing a green shirt and jeans. Mallory's wearing a red and white striped shirt with a blue collar with what I think is brown overalls. It kinda looks like a brown burlap sack. (Since I got the book through ILL, there's a paper on the cover I can't remove, so I have to peak underneath it. Makes it a little hard to see.) Either it's a huge overall skirt, or it's really baggy overall pants. Stacey's wearing a cute little blue and green striped dress. Kristy is wearing a t-shirt with the Union Jack on it--of course. She's also the one who wore the Statue of Liberty headwear when they were in NYC, so this is not surprising. I think she's wearing jeans, but there's a sticker declaring the book to be property of the Davenport, IA, library over her lower half. And....Abby is wearing a Pepto-Bismol pink shirt that would look better at home on a three year old, with a pair of horrid green pants. I think the green would best be called spinach green, or Oscar the Grouch green. Add in the fact that the shirt is cut at a weird length, and she looks like she has absolutely no fashion sense.

Okay, Okay...

I got all perturbed reading the last book and freaking out over names and zip codes. So I went through my other super specials, because I knew that in at least one case, they did the "full postcard" format of SS #2. So I pulled out California Girls (SS #5) and dug through that one. The zip codes and addresses are all still the same. And, most of the first names are the same too--only one different is Jessi's parents, but she just addresses that to the Ramseys.

Because I am a ridiculous, here are the addresses for just about anyone who receives a letter in these two books. I also added the names of the moms, when available:

Watson and Elizabeth Brewer:

1210 McLelland Rd
Stoneybrook, CT 06800

John and Miyoshi Kishi

58 Bradford Ct
Stoneybrook, CT 06800

John and ??? Ramsey*

612 Fawcett Ave
Stoneybrook, CT 06800

Richard Spier (pre-marriage to Sharon)/Ben Hobart

59 Bradford Ct
Stoneybrook, CT 06800

Jack Schafer and Carol Olson**

22 Buena Vista
Palo City, CA 92800

Laine Cummings***

The Dakota
72nd and Central Park West
New York, NY 10000

Daniel and Dee Pike

31 Slate St
Stoneybrook, CT 06800

Lyman Bruno

689 Burnt Hill Rd
Stoneybrook, CT 06800

Sharon Schafer/Richard and Sharon Spier

177 Burnt Hill Rd
Stoneybrook, CT 06800

Henry and Grace Walker

14 West 81st St. Apt 18E
New York, NY 10000

Bart Taylor

65 Edgerstoun Dr
Stoneybrook, CT 06800

Granny and Pop-Pop Porter

747 Bertrand Dr
Stoneybrook, CT 06800

Ashley Wyeth

12 Reilly Ln
Stoneybrook, CT 06800

Edward and Maureen McGill (pre-divorce)

14 West 81st St. Apt 12E
New York, NY 10000

Keisha Ramsey

8320 Wagner Ln
Oakley, NJ 07400

Maureen McGill (post-divorce)

89 Elm St
Stoneybrook, CT 06800

Edward McGill (post-divorce)

321 E 65th St Apt 2F
New York, NY 10000

*Anyone know Jessi's mom's first name? Aunt Cecelia or Jessi's dad must use it at some point, right?

**Carol keeps her last name, as is firmly established in California Diaries. Their daughter Gracie's full name is Elizabeth Grace Schafer Olson.

***I wonder if this is how one would really address mail to someone in The Dakota, or if it has an actual street address.