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

[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.