Made With Real (Frozen!) Girl Scouts

[mrissa]

We just had a Girl Scout at the door! With her daddy, so I could have them come in: by themselves, the girls aren't allowed to come into strangers' houses. I know the drill. I did this myself, for six years running. It's just miserable weather for selling GS cookies. I remember how cold it would get.

This was a big thing for me. I really wanted Girl Scouts to come by last year, and they didn't, and porphyrin spoiled me by getting me the kind that get peanut butter and chocolate all over your front teeth, but that was a different kind of good, not the same.

And I have just remembered: I know Girl Scouts! In the right area, even! I just didn't know it was cookie time yet. songwind, ladysea, mnfiddledragon, marcbs, Heathah, anybody else in the area: let me know if your girls are selling, and I will buy from them. We can arrange it on e-mail or the phone or in person if we're going to see each other soon enough. (Heathah, I don't remember if Miss Siri is a Brownie this year or not. If she is, have her bring her form along when we do ice cream!)

When I started selling cookies, they were $1.75 a box. They're $3.50 this year. My most dramatic cookie moment is when we were delivering cookies and I got a nosebleed all over my white NASA jacket and we had to run to Mrs. Saul's house because we knew her and she would be home. If I was writing this as a story, I'd leave out the blood all over the NASA jacket, because this was the late winter or early spring of 1986, and the symbolism would just be too symbolic, my pure childhood dreams of etc. in the torrents of blood from the etc. etc. But that's how it happened, NASA jacket and Challenger and nosebleed all.

I wonder how many people are going, "oh, man, she's old enough to remember Challenger?" compared to "oh, man, she was young enough to be a Girl Scout for Challenger?" I was 7. I consider myself on the bottom end of a generation because of it: because any American who's too young to remember Challenger is not in the same generation as I am, even if it looks like we're roughly the same age at this point in our lives. I also think that if you can say where you were for the Kennedy assassination, even if it was "lying in my crib staring at a mobile," that's not the same generation as me, either.

What are your generational lines?

And how many of you sold Girl Scout cookies?

Comments

Generational lines

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

I was in high school when Challenger exploded. I heard it first from the lady who took our money in the cafeteria lunch line.

I remember Elvis dying...though I didn't know who he was. I remember John Lennon dying and knew he was a musician, but not who the Beatles were. I remember Reagan being shot.

My first computer game was Pong. My second was an Atari 2600. My third was the Commodore 64. I also owned a TRS-80.

I watched Hanna-Barbara cartoons, Sid and Marty Krofft shows (like the original "Land of the Lost"), the original "Superfriends", the original "Battlestar Galactica", "Welcome Back Kotter", "M*A*S*H" when the episodes were brand new, and later "The A-Team" and "Remington Steele", the latter much because I had a terrible crush on Stephanie Zimbalist.

I hated "The Breakfast Club" when it first came out and love it now.

Re: Generational lines

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I saw "The Breakfast Club" when I was in high school, significantly after it came out, because my friend Manda was appalled that I hadn't seen any Molly Ringwald movies. I couldn't get past the fact that everybody gets some in the end except the geek.

Re: Generational lines

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

That was part of the reason I hated it, since I was a geek all through high school until my last semester. (By that point I apparently changed into one of the "cool kids" and they started trying to bring me into their fold, but by then I'd long decided I wanted nothing to do with them.)

Mostly I hated it because I thought they all took themselves way too seriously and were much too dramatic for their own good. However, along with Stephanie Zimbalist, I also had crushes at the time on Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy both, so I still watched it.

Re: Generational lines

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I knew there had to be someone else out there who agreed with me on that. That, and taking a rather nice weird girl and mainstreaming her, have annoyed me for years for all that the film's wonderful otherwise.

Re: Generational lines

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The freaks and the geeks: that is what we like.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Challenger was my first real affecting event - I was 16 - although I remember Reagan being shot, and the release of the Iranian hostages. Neither of those were much of a generational marker to me, though. Nothing happening in the wider world prior to that seems to have impressed itself on my memory.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

I was 9 and definitely remember it; I guess that's as good a line as any.

And I sold Girl Scout cookies. I wonder how much the girls are getting now per box...I think our troop got a quarter per box.

[stillsostrange.livejournal.com]

I was 6 for the Challenger. I remember watching the news and being very annoyed with a newscaster whose eulogizing sounded trite and false.

I sold GS cookies, though I didn't stay past Brownie level. Selling cookies and learning to fold flags properly didn't interest me as much as hiking and camping and playing with knots.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

How long did it take them to teach you to fold a flag? We had about five minutes of it total at camp in the summer. Otherwise we learned to make pie crust from scratch and did science experiments and all kinds of stuff.

We were definitely, definitely not a camping troop of Girl Scouts.

[ellarien]

I was in grad school at the time of the Challenger tragedy; I remember hearing the news on the radio as I was preparing dinner in my tiny bedsit, but that must have been a few hours after the fact. I'd say that anyone who doesn't remember a time without home computers is definitely a younger generation than me. In the other direction, maybe the Kennedy assassination is a boundary, but the first thing that came to mind was 'anyone whose doctoral dissertation preparation involved a typewriter.' (If carbon paper was involved, that's a 2-generation gap.)

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

I was 11 when Challenger happened. Home from school (teacher inservice) heard about it on the radio, ran downstairs to tell my mom, she didn't believe me so put on the television, where we watched--horrifed--for hours and hours.

I like Girl Scout Cookies, but I think you know my opinion on the selling of them. *grin*

[pameladean]

When I sold Girl Scout cookies, they cost fifty cents a box.

I hated selling them, almost more than anything else I've ever felt obliged to do. Well, than any other habitual action, anyway.

David and I had only recently moved into our first Minnepolis house when Challenger blew up. We didn't have a TV set. A stunned friend who had set his VCR to record the launch, gotten up at noon, and happily played the tape, called and told me about it. I went outside and got the morning paper, even though I knew perfectly well that the story would not be in it.

P.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

I don't remember Challenger; I was three and a half at the time, and even though I think I was starting my space phase and have an engineer for a mother, it's just not one of those things that affected my life in the slightest. When I was in the space phase it was one of those things that was just...history, like the first man and woman in space.

This reminds me of the always/never thing you did a while back. The space program has never been vibrant and progessive in my lifetime, and it has always been dying. Sometimes that makes me sad.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The Novel Gazing entry Leah is talking about is here (http://www.marissalingen.com/072704.html), just some things off the top of my head that have "always" or "never" been true in my memory.

As sad as it is to always have had a dying space program, I think that having the turning point when you're 7 years old and just barely old enough to see it happening is pretty sad, too.

But space as history: yes. This is what my mom didn't understand when I was a teenager, because I was into science and into SF but not at all interested in watching TV specials on the space program. I was finally able to articulate for her when I was in college (and less adamantly against space program related books and documentaries) that it was not at all a cheerful thing for a physics and SF geek to have human space travel be a history lesson.

And the next Boomer-or-older who whines on a con panel about how people of my generation and younger just don't care about space the way they is gonna get it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Er. That's the way they did

Challenger

[dendrophilous.livejournal.com]

I was 10. I walked home from school with my brother. My mom was home, instead of at work, sitting in the living room crying. "The space shuttle blew up," she said.

Suddenly part of normal daily life had turned dangerous, and a few split seconds affected hundreds of people. I have vague memories of the nervousness in the community, would there still be a space program, will we still have jobs?

This November my nephews wanted to see their father's school, and he showed them the memorial we planted that spring. The younger one told me later "They went up into the sky, but the shuttle exploded." They won't remember Columbia. The older nephew used to say he wants "to fly in Grampa's rocketship." I hope there will still be rocketships.

["Grampa" has worked at Johnson Space Center since before I was born; one of the Challenger astronauts was an assistant coach on my community soccer team; nearly everyone's parents worked for NASA or a contractor]

[scalzi.livejournal.com]

Just old enough to have been alive for the first moon landing, although I usually prefer to say that I'm just old enough to have been alive before the Beatles broke up.

[leaina.livejournal.com]

I was in college when Challenger exploded. It was only luck (if you call it that) that I heard about it the same day, as that was a time when I was reading no newspaper and watching almost no TV. I overheard some other students talking about it before class.

I was not a Girl Scout for very long, and I never got to sell cookies--I was on Okinawa at the time, and for whatever reason (expense of shipping, or risk of spoilage, I don't know), we sold calendars rather than cookies. Even at the time (age 8 or so), I realized just how lame that was. We didn't go door to door, but took shifts at a table outside the commissary (on-base grocery store).

[keightyb.livejournal.com]

When I started, they were 1.25 a box. :( And I'm doubly sad that I haven't had the opportunity to purchase my regulation 3-4 boxes of Thin Mints yet.

I also remember the Challenger... we were watching it at school, in the media room. I remember that everyone was horsing around and then it started and we were hushed, and then the librarian turned off the tv really quickly and we went back to the room. 3rd grade.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

Bri, Kritter, and Beana are all girl scouts and are all selling cookies.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Have them phone me, or bring them by, or whatever you like. I'll buy some.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

I was in middle school when Challenger happened. We used to watch shuttle launches from school - on a clear day you could see the pillar of the exhaust smoke, and a bit of flame going up. I missed the actual Challenger launch because I was at band practice, but I remember coming outside just a few minutes after, and seeing the column of smoke, with that odd little plume going off to one side.

Someone told me that the shuttle had blown up, and I didn't believe them. We all went out to the parking lot and clustered around teachers' cars so we could listen to their radios. I don't have a clear memory of how I felt when I finally knew that it was true, that the shuttle had exploded. I have a very clear memory of seeing that column of smoke in the sky, and thinking, "How did that happen?"

On a happier note, I sold Girl Scout cookies, when I was a brownie. One year my mom was cookie chairperson or whatever, and our dining room was full of boxes of cookies.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My mom was a Scout leader for six years, so she never had to be cookie chair. But I remember helping haul boxes into other people's houses.

[sdn.livejournal.com]

i was a girl scout for eight years. i sold cookies. now, i buy cookies from EVERYONE who brings an order form into the office. i estimate i spent $100/each cookie year at least. i give the cookies to authors, and dole them out to colleagues as departmental antidepressants.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'll buy cookies from any GS who comes to the door, too. At least one box. They freeze well. (The cookies, not the Scouts.)

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

I remember Challenger. I was six. First grade. They wouldn't tell us what happened at school, because they didn't want us to get so upset that they'd have to close, so I didn't find out until I got home.

Since my parents had always had me watch the news for any shuttle launches, this was a big moment for me. A huge, terrible moment.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

They wouldn't tell us, either. They had us watching TV, but the reception was broken, and the teacher kept trying to fix it, and then the school secretary came and whispered in her ear and they took us back to class again without saying a word.

And they never said another word about it. They hyped Christa McAuliffe to us for months and then pretended it had never happened.

Bastards.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

We watched the launch live. Even in 3rd grade, there was stunned silence. I remember feeling all grown up because I skipped lunch and recess to eat in the classroom, so I could continue to watch the news.

I don't know if they would have pretended it didn't happen, if they could have. But we saw it happen.

I think I was marginally aware of Reagan getting shot, but it wasn't a marker for me. I don't remember where I was was when I heard about that.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's not that I think they would have denied it; most of us watched it on the news that afternoon or evening anyway. But they never mentioned it. It was not to be discussed. And while over-the-top fakey ritual mourning probably would have turned my stomach, I thought it deserved something.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Challenger's not the event that defines a generation around then for me, it would never have occurred to me that it could when the end of the Cold War's just a couple of years later. I was 16 when the Berlin Wall came down, and that's old enough to have known the world was going to end in the thermonuclear version of World War III; and people five years younger than me just don't seem to have that perspective, that having a future at all is an unexpected gift. [ Which I think also lends a different tone to the way I feel about some of the ways in which that has been stolen in the past five years or so. ]

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm in that five-years-younger range, from what you've said about the Berlin Wall, and I knew the world in general and my world in specific was going to end in nuclear war. I did.

But I didn't exactly believe in the fall of E. European communism as an antidote to that. I knew it was big, but I didn't...trust it, is I guess what I'm saying. Especially since the US was at war again so soon after. Sure, it was a little war with a little country, but it reinforced the notion that we weren't really safe even when we wanted to think we were.

This generation

[betty-m.livejournal.com]

My, I always felt like the odd woman out, being a part of the tail end of the boomers with an older sister. Then I figured out that I was really the female black version of Kevin in "The Wonder Years".

Now . . . where was I when:

JFK was killed -- in my mother's bed waiting for her to come back from taking my sister to Jr. H.S. I was five. From the funeral I remember mostly the riderless horse following the casket and John John's salute. I was 5 years old.

I remember the "Daisy" commercial (was that 1964)? And the take cover drills in school. And the nuclear nightmares as a child. Bay of Pigs and Missile crisis kinda went over my head.

So the next 40 years have been almost a blur. Very surrealistic.

Sold my share of cookies for four years.

I've witnessed two riots from my front porch -- both in L.A.-- 1965 & 1992.

I watched RFK get shot on TV (and Lee Harvey Oswald) (an RR) (and the Kent State Students) (and the Wilmington 10).

I watched a Vietcong infiltrator be executed on Huntley Brinkley News (NBC).

I listened to the "Been to the Mountaintop" sermon with my parents on a reel to reel tape machine a few days after MLK was shot. (His last sermon seemed to be a premonition).

Challenger? I never realized that was such a cultural touchstone. I was in grad school. Ironic that the first Black astronaut gets blown up on a spaceship. At least that's what we thought then.

Wattstax? 1971 and 1972 (I was there). Saw the smoke from the SLA shootout on my way to a Marvin Gaye concert (first I went to without parental or sibling supervision).

I could go on, but I won't.

Re: This generation

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure Challenger is as much a touchstone for a generation of people or Americans as it is for a generation of geeks. Sometimes subcultures latch onto things much, much harder, and I think this is one of those times.

[careswen.livejournal.com]

Re: Challenger. I was 9. We watched it live in school. I don't remember much, other than crying, while there was chaos around me in the classroom.

Re: Cookies. I was a GS for 7 years, and I sold a lotta damn cookies. My mom was the cookie chair most of those years. I still have the kookaburra doll I won one year.

I always buy cookies, or whatever else kids are selling for school/activities. Seven years in GS, seven in band -- I did a lot of fundraisers in my time, and depended on a lot of generous adults. So I feel like I karmically owe the next generation.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Kookaburras. I am so bitter that I no longer get to eat kookaburras. Stupid coconut-containing replacement-cookies. Bah.

[ckd]

I remember Lennon and Reagan being shot. Challenger was senior year of HS; we weren't watching, but a PA announcement was made. My AP English teacher really ticked me off by telling us to get back to our readings.

I never sold Girl Scout cookies, being rather disqualified for membership.

[luned.livejournal.com]

I had just turned 8 when Challenger exploded. I was in second grade. We had it on TV during class. My teacher was in such shock that she left the TV running for the rest of the day, although I was the only person who just sat there, both paying attention to the lesson and the shocked broadcasters. I came home and turned on the TV and watched the coverage all night, because I was also in a state of shock. I was one of those kids who wanted to be an astronaut, even though I already knew I didn't meet the vision requirement. Complete space junkie. I had the name of every astronaut in the U.S. space program ever memorized.

It was worse for me, however, when our family visited Kennedy Space Center that June. We saw the suddenly abandoned launch sites, on a very subdued tour that stressed the nature preserve on the land more than the space program, history or otherwise. My mother, for some silly reason, bought me an inflatable shuttle toy. I was in tears when it developed a hole a couple of days later. (Yes, this is also the sort of thing that would sound dreadfully contrived in a novel.)

Can't say much about Girl Scouts. Wasn't allowed in. No gifted children with mental illness allowed. I'm still irritated about it. (But considering what a crap time my friends have had with their daughters in Girl Scouts, mainly the enforced stereotypical femininity structures in their troops, I'd probably not have fit much in there anyway.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Individual Scout leaders make or break a troop or program. It's really that simple. There are all sorts of things Girl Scouts can do that don't focus on stereotypes of women or femininity at all, and there's absolutely no reason a gifted kid with mental illness shouldn't be a Girl Scout in general. But individual leaders can screw things up something awful.

[carbonel]

When I started selling Girl Scout cookies, they were $.50 per box. Then they went up to $1.00 per box; I don't remember if there was an in-between step. A few years later, they doubled the price to $2.00 per box, and almost doubled the size of the box. I loved selling Girl Scout cookies. We didn't quite have a competition in our scout troop, but you got a certain amount of respect for being one of the better sellers. There were very strict rules about what day and time you could start, and I was quite scornful of the girls who would cheat and start early. I ranged far afield to get orders, which always came back to bite me when it came time to deliver the cookies and collect the money. (I gather it's a pay-when-you-order setup now, but it didn't used to be.) I would borrow my brother's wagon to deliver the cookies, unless I could talk my mother into driving me.

Back then, it was discouraged to take the order form to work for parents to shill for the children (now I gather it's encouraged), but my father was president of his business, so he brought my form in and got a bunch of orders for me that way.

My mother was my Girl Scout leader, but I don't think that was why I was so into the cookie thing. It may have been that it was one of the very few things that I knew I was good at.

I was 29 when the Challenger went down. I was working at a (since failed) intreprenuerial division of Honeywell called Honeywell High-Tech Trading. I was listening to public radio, so I heard right away when it happened. They were showing the TV on the large screen in the cafeteria, and we shuffled down to watch the feed and hope against hope (at first) that there might be survivors. There are two things I remember most vividly. The first was that there was only one view of the disaster. I kept waiting for them to show another perspective. It wasn't until later that I learned that everyone was so blase about shuttle flights that the only coverage was from the NASA feed. The other was waiting for the detested President Reagan to make his speech, and thinking that he couldn't possibly say the right words. But amazingly, he did. Peggy Noonan or whoever it was deserves kudos for that speech.

When the Columbia went down two years ago, I couldn't get my family to understand how much it hurt. I was in town for my grandfather's funeral, and even with the death of the Israeli astronaut, they just didn't have any real connection. I don't remember it being that way with the Challenger.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We didn't have a competition, either, but it was definitely good to be one of the top sellers. Especially if you didn't use your parents' work connections too heavily.

We lived at the edge of a neighborhood, and in my first few years of selling cookies, I kept finding that girls whose houses were more central had gotten to people before I had. So in my third grade year I started going to the business complex across the street from our house. That worked well.

I remember having one realtor look at me sternly over his glasses, as he was poised to order cookies, and demand, "Little girl, do you know Jesus?" At the age of eight, I was sarcastic enough to want to tell him, "Oh yes, he was just over last night. Heck of a nice guy." I was also pragmatic enough not to say it.

This year I ordered cookies and did not give the kiddo money right away, so I think it must be variable.

I don't know how my other relatives reacted to Challenger. I know I made my mom cry and hold me too tight when I hadn't heard the news yet (our classroom's TV was broken) and announced that I was going to space someday. I know that my folks and grands made a big point of going to Cape Canaveral when we were in Florida, and if they hadn't delayed the launch, we would have been at the launch. I wonder how many times my mom imagined dealing with me in that situation, that day.