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

[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.