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

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.