A SITTER OF BABIES: As depicted, non-evilly, by Norman Rockwell

If you’d somehow failed to notice that babysitters have a bad rep, this Salon.com interview with Miriam Forman-Brunell about her new social history, Babysitter: An American History, is a splendid reminder.

Forman-Brunell is a woman who has clearly spent days watching and re-watching When a Stranger Calls, the 1979 horror movie that she says represents a certain culmination of an urban myth known as “The Babysitter and the Maniac”:

[In this legend], the children are upstairs usually asleep, and the babysitter gets a phone call asking her if she’s checked the children. She gets that phone call three times. After the third time she calls up the police to trace the call. He calls back and they call her to tell her that the man is in the house and that she has to get out of the house immediately. What usually happens is that she runs upstairs and finds the kids have already been murdered.

…That story gets circulated very widely, from coast to coast during the 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Kids actually contribute to the spread of it at summer camps and they share it as a true story. And finally by the end of the 1970s it gets made into a movie, “When a Stranger Calls” [starring Carol Kane as the babysitter]…

When I saw this film, I was quite impressed both by Carol Kane ability to bug out her gigantic eyes to convey fear. Lacking Forman-Brunell’s awareness of babysitter urban myths, I was also blown away by the originality of the twist. The Call, you see, was not just any call….

Sgt. Sacker: Jill, this is sergeant Sacker. Listen to me. We’ve traced the call… it’s coming from inside the house. Now a squad car’s coming over there right now, just get out of that house!

From inside the house! This made quite an impression on me. Partly because my brother, sister, and I did not have a bug-eyed babysitter who might conceivably drift off and let a killer infiltrate our Pleasantview split-level. The stalwart Judy, a future doctor, was a formidable teen who popped popcorn in a iron skillet and rarely, if ever, chatted with seductive strangers on our wall-mounted phone. Many years later, after ensuring that we did not get murdered, she married a man named Wyman. And still dropped by every Christmas with a box of Black Magic chocolates.

You know, I never questioned the the idea of chocolates called Black Magic until now. Maybe Judy was not so benign after all?

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BRUNI: As troubled blob.

And a violently needy one. By Bruni’s account, adapted from his forthcoming memoir Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater, if denied a third hamburger or a 144th cookie, he would work himself into a tormented tantrum and throw up —more or less on his mother.

…I’ve always wondered, in retrospect and not entirely in jest, if what she had witnessed was the beginning of a cunning strategy, an intuitive design for gluttonous living. Maybe I was making room for more burger. Look, Ma, empty stomach!

Though traditional bulimics are a tad more furtive about their purging, Bruni clearly realized that his piece would generate more buzz (and web-traffic) with the headline “I Was a Baby Bulimic” instead of “I Was a Kid With Bizarre Eating Issues.”

Calculation aside, the story (and companion audio-slide show) is fascinating. According to to Mediabistro, Bruni is quitting his Times’ post to promote his book so if you were hoping to see him projectile vomit at The Four Seasons while gorging himself critically on grilled octopus with minted eggplant, sorry, you’re out of luck.

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VISION QUEST: Stefanie's book

So when someone like the truly hilarious Stefanie Wilder-Taylor* can turn parenthood into two such volumes, Sippy Cups Are Not For Chardonnay and Naptime is the New Happy Hour, the conventional wisdom is: Keep churning out similar books whose titles allude to boozing—like Kindergarten Rhymes with Scotch-on-the-Rocksergarten—and try to cash in.

Stefanie didn’t take that route. Instead she wrote It’s Not Me, It’s You, a casually outrageous memoir of her wild-child, pre-marriage 20s and 30s. It basically challenges her fans to deal with her rougher edges and get past the notion that moms aren’t allowed to have a racy back-story or scandalous thoughts. Stefanie recounts distinctly un-maternal tales: her erstwhile fascination with strippers’ breasts, her unwitting misadventures with crack cocaine, and her bittersweet attempt to reunite with her estranged dad, a brilliant stand-up comic who’d devolved into a brilliant pothead.

It’s a brave, funny book. Comedy depends on honesty—for something to be funny, the truth must be in there, somewhere. But while comics like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin were recklessly candid, and Margaret Cho and Kathy Griffin push the confessional edge, most “mommy humorists” are honest only up to a certain, decorous, wholesome, ultimately boring point.

I particularly liked the chapter about Stefanie’s attempts to be a Big Sister, and the loathsome, lonely child with whom she’s paired. It’s funny, sad, compassionate, infuriating, did I mention funny, and very, very real.

*Full disclosure: Stefanie “blurbed” The Perfect Baby Handbook, and has given me great advice. And, irrelevantly, is pretty hot. And, no, that’s not her on the cover of her book.

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PARIS: Star-crossed

April 3, according to author Gary Goldschneider, a Dutch stargazer and Yale-educated psychoanalyst, is “The Day of the Fulcrum.” If we take his word for it, Paris is fun-loving and good natured, but also “manages to be at the center of things,” and likes to order her environment and control those around her. Consequently, she detests being ignored!

Also, he specifies, as an April 3 creature, Michael Jackson’s daughter will get fat and develop crippling headaches.

Lucky Paris! Your future as an obese, migraine-afflicted, control freak who likes to be mobbed by the paparazzi awaits you.

It could be worse. This cruelly irresistible book claims that babies born on October 4th are incorrigible, headstrong, and foolhardy while July 22nd infants (“The Day of Occupational Fluctuations”) are unlucky and stressed-out.

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I.Q. PROTECTION: Buy now!

Want to scare parents? Claim that their children’s brains start disintegrating every July, unless the kids are pried away from computers, televisions—and (presumably) diving boards and climb-able trees—and forced to read the 13 children’s books that New York Times’ op-ed columnist, Nicholas D. Kristof, vaguely remembers from his boyhood, or has read to his own kids. He’s horrified by this inevitable cerebral rot:

I was aghast to learn that American children drop in I.Q. each summer vacation — because they aren’t in school or exercising their brains.

Unsurprisingly, his totally unmethodical list, titled “The Best Kids’ Books Ever,” currently tops the “most emailed” story ranking on the Times’ website, as in “Oh my god, Gerald, our offspring’s brains are in jeopardy. Please pick up all 397 titles in the Hardy Boys series—including the graphic novels Abracadeath and Dude Ranch O’ Death! on your way home from the office.”

Yes, bizarrely, lazily, Kristof feels the Hardy Boys belong in the pantheon of children’s literature*:

Yes, I hear the snickers. But I devoured them myself and have known so many kids for whom these were the books that got them excited about reading. The first in the series is weak, but “House on the Cliff” is a good opener.

if Kristof’s list had been called: “Crappy Books that Get Children Reading, Which is a Good Thing in the Grander Scheme of Things,” fine. But I’ve read The House on the Cliff. Recently. I went through a masochistic phase where I wanted to understand the historic appeal of formulaic children’s mysteries, from Judy Bolton to Trixie Belden. (For a fascinating, insider look into just how soullessly the Hardy books, along with The Bobbsey Twins and the [more defensible, proto-feminist] Nancy Drew series, were churned out, read Leslie Garis’ devastating memoir, The House of Happy Endings.)

And if you really want to give your kids a persuasive reason to avoid stupidity, have them read the transcript of Sarah Palin’s resignation speech.

*Kristof, whose middle name is Donabet, also likes Charlotte’s Web. If you have several spare hours, check out the 2000-plus reader comments his hit-and-miss list inspired.

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PERCEPTIVE: If not dressed appropriately for yoga class.

Lepore’s immediate target is the current bestseller Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace by Ayelet Waldman—the book that triggered a million mommy-blog posts in the dramedy vein (“Oh, thank you for inspiring me to confess my own failings over the next 4,000 words! I’m bad, too! LOL!”), followed by an inevitable backlash (“Hold on, isn’t this outpouring of amusing self-condemnation a bit narcissistic? Is anyone looking after the kids?”).

Lepore, a professor of American History at Harvard who seems almost bored by her own perceptiveness, pinpoints the paradox in Waldman’s book:

[She] insists that how any woman rears her kids is nobody’s never-you-mind. “Let’s all commit ourselves to the basic civility of minding our own business,” she writes. This puts a reader in a tight spot: can I or can I not skip the chapter in “Bad Mother” wherein our author confides her regret over her breasts’ lost buoyancy?

Lepore then shifts, with far more zeal, into her real mission: Tracing the self-conscious obsessiveness of today’s parents back to the 1926 launch of Parents’ magazine. Her dot-connecting is overlong, but brilliant and fascinating. You may want to be an inattentive parent long enough to read it. This bit, naturally, particularly intrigued me:

Middle-class mothers and fathers turned out to be a very well-defined consumer group, easily gulled into buying almost anything that might remedy their parental deficiencies. In 1938, Parents’ peddled a correspondence course: “Add Science to Love and Be a ‘Perfect Mother.’ ”

PS. Just how bad a mother is Waldman, a former lawyer? Her book’s Amazon sales ranking is unintentionally hilarious:

#1 in Books > Entertainment > Humor > Lawyers & Criminals

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MEEK: Shall inherit earth

On how God provides between $25,000 and $75,000 for every hour that she allegedly exploits children on TV: “[Jon and I] do talk a lot about God’s blessings and provision. That’s a constant conversation in our house, one that started a long time ago when we didn’t have enough of something and God provided it. I’ve always made a point to say, “Oh my goodness, look what Jesus gave us.”

On why being a Christian absolves her of any responsibility for her unconvincing attempts to be gentle and Christlike: “I feel like it took me having sextuplets to realize I’m not in control. Honestly, if I’d never had the kids, I’m sure I never would have learned to rely on God.”

On how much God thinks Jon sucks: “I’m trying to trust God to have the right response to Jon. I’m still hard on him at times, but I think I’m softening.”

On why she absolutely must go ahead with the rumored Kate Gosselin sunglasses line, even though she can’t stand the thought of exposing her family to further scrutiny: “It’s just all about letting God be in control and trusting his plan for our lives…at this point in my life, I don’t want to do anything that’s outside his plan, even if that means giving up something I really want or love.”

On why she and God and Jon will someday look back at all this, while sharing a plate of buffalo chicken wings at TGIF, and laugh and laugh: “I can honestly say Jon is my best friend. He’s the only one who, besides God, has been there with me and shared this crazy ride.”

On whether or not the Almighty supports the notion of a Sixth Season: “I don’t know. You’d have to ask God. We don’t ever know where we’re going to be and what we’re going to be doing. I don’t have a grand plan anymore. I’m okay to be wherever God wants us.”

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Today: Let’s take a look at some of the early illo concepts for the cover. Stage one: The illustrator, Kagan Mcleod emailed me some rough ideas, including this depiction of an equestrian perfect-baby making a break for it, leaving his anxious, jodphur’d parents in the dust. I quite liked this, but worried that it was over-emphasizing Baby’s sportsmanship at the expense of his intellect.

Next: In stage two, we started to zero in on the idea of a triumphant baby. My first idea was an infant straddling his parents’ heads, only slightly squishing their skulls. I loved this preliminary sketch (below.) Harper Collins didn’t. They wanted to limit the cast of characters to the baby himself so that parents who don’t identify with dented skulls could project themselves into the scene.

Finally, after trying and rejecting several other ideas (a baby standing on a giant cut diamond the size of a medicine ball), we ended up with this: a simple thumbs-up gesture and an imposing (if tiny) shadow…

Today: A challenge. Chapter One includes a guide to setting up a “basic nursery.” Can you spot at least 10 differences between the first and the final versions of the accompanying illustration? Here’s version number one:

And here’s the finished version, after I decluttered the concept and worked with illustrator Kagan McLeod to refine the renderings of certain elements. Can you spot what’s changed?

The exhibition, featuring 30 photographs of similarly eery Charlie McCarthy kids, recently captivated Milan. In their statement, the photographers (whose real names are Romina Raffaelli and Stefano Marinui) pulled no punches, defining their focus as:

Children we ask too much of, to be perfect, like dolls. Children who have become the sons and daughters of…pretense and image…who are inevitably losing their naturalness.

The point, they’ve said (in mellifluous Italian words that often end in “i”) is to remind people that “the best present we can give to children is to let them be children.” And to keep them away from Winkler+Noah.

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