"Uh, guys," I said to the thundering herd. "I don't think I'm cut out for this." "No, you're fine!" Jessi insisted.

But before Jessi could show me another way to look like a klutz, my clock radio clicked to five-thirty.

"Okay, enough," Kristy harrumphed. "This meeting of the Baby-sitters Club will come to order!" Panting for breath, we all sat down.

"The first order of business," Kristy said, "is Claudia's problem. Okay. You've had a tap lesson. Now, Shannon and I would be happy to give you a drama lesson." Drama lesson?

"Whoa," I protested. "Can't we just, like, talk about it?" "You bet," Kristy replied. "Shannon, you have the floor first." Thank you, Kristy Thomas, talk-show host.

Shannon, by the way, is one of our two associate members (the other is Logan). Associates aren't required to attend meetings, but Shannon's been helping out since Stacey left. Shannon goes to a private school called Stoney- brook Day. (The rest of us go to Stoneybrook Middle School.) She's in tons of extracurricular activities there, including drama club.

"Well, we started You Can't Take It With 'You," Shannon said. "Right now we're just blocking, though." "Not the football kind," Kristy remarked.

Duh.

"No. Blocking is mapping out all the movements. Entrances, exits. Stuff like that has to be precise. It's like choreography, sort of." "I remember seeing some of that in Peter Pan rehearsals. Is it hard?" I asked.

"A little. All your moves happen on specific lines of the dialogue. You mark down all the moves in your script. You memorize your cue lines. Then, after you've memorized your own lines, you've memorized the blocking, too." Right. Sure. Gee, that sounded easy.

I might as well join the math club.

"What happens if you forget your lines during a performance?" I asked.