(Do Not Sip Your Coffee While Reading This. - promoted by Youffraita)
I was a failed Girl Scout.
This does not mean that I was drummed out of the Scouts for moral turpitude, embezzlement of cookie money, or failure to sing High Up, High On the Mountain in a pleasing manner. I had my little green uniform and my little green sash, and no one was prouder of the Sign of the Star than I was. My first merit badges were in needlework, which shouldn't surprise anyone, and cooking, which should given that I'm about as interested in the finer points of preparing meals as I am in diesel engines.
No, my failure came about thanks to a nasty cold I acquired in the late winter of my first year as a Scout. This was back in the old days, when Scouts were actually supposed to go door to door selling cookies, not sit outside grocery stores selling boxes of Tagalongs (then called Peanut Butter Patties) or hand off sign-up sheets to their parents so Mommy and Daddy's co-workers can get their Thin Mint fix for the year. Everyone in my troop was given a territory, a cheat sheet touting the good works that would be financed by the sale of each and every box, and instructions to sell forty-five boxes of cookies so we'd make our yearly quota.
All this was well and good, and I was more than prepared to wear out my Mary Janes tromping the mean streets of Middleburg Heights, Ohio. I'd actually sold three boxes of cookies to my piano teacher and was all set to inflict my winsome green-clad self on the neighbors until I started coughing, sneezing, and running an impressive fever. My pediatrician forbade me to go outside to do anything, let alone sell cookies, for fear that I'd contact pneumonia, bronchitis, or some other interesting lung disease, and I spent what should have been the prime sale weeks watching TV and trying to figure out why anyone would be stupid enough to watch Winky Dink, let alone actually draw a bridge so he and his friends could escape the bad guys.
Homebound I was, and miserable knowing that I'd let down the troop. If it hadn't been for my father buying the remaining forty-two boxes of Girl Scout cookies, and my mother freezing most of them, I would have been inconsolable. As it was, we enjoyed a steady diet of Girl Scout cookies well into July, and I must say that Thin Mints taste just fine with Baskin-Robbins French Vanilla.
Fortunately we moved to Virginia the next year, and I don't remember any cookie quotas at my new troop. They did, however, hike and camp out a lot more than my troop in Ohio, and one of the reasons I ended up with a massive tonsil infection and spent much of Christmas 1970 convalescing may have been all the hours I spent wading through pristine Appalachian streams, eating bargain basement hot dogs, and similarly enjoying the alleged delights of Scouting.
I also nearly cut off my thumb attempting to whittle, but that is neither here nor there.
Alas, I dropped out before becoming a Cadet, which meant that I missed the joys of wearing an ugly white blouse and a beanie that would have looked stupid on Winky Dink. I also missed the revolution in Scouting that took place thanks to the women's movement, the one that junked those hideous uniforms in favor of slacks, useless crafts involving felt and glitter in favor of scientific experiments, and feminized woodcraft in favor of a return to the original intent of Scouting.
This isn't a surprise to anyone who's actually been a Girl Scout, or knows anything about the Girl Scouts' founder, Juliette Gordon Low. Juliette Gordon, best known as Daisy, was the great-granddaughter of a white girl who had been adopted by the Seneca chief Cornplanter. In many ways she was the ideal Scout: intelligent, spirited, and strong, her hobbies including hunting, enjoying the great outdoors, and metalsmithing so she could build the gates to her country house in England. Her non-Scouting accomplishments including organizing a hospital for war wounded during the Spanish-American War, as well as a successful lawsuit against her husband's estate after Mr. Low died and attempted to leave his entire estate to his mistress.
Daisy, who had severe hearing problems thanks to a freak accident on her wedding day, founded the Girl Scouts of America after meeting Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, and bonding with him over their shared enthusiasm for blacksmithing. Daisy intended the Girl Scouts to be a means by which girls could leave the family circle and develop qualities of leadership, self-reliance, and good old American resourcefulness through outdoor activities, community activities. Her aim was to produce girls with backbone and a strong sense of duty, not the gentle, fainting ornaments of Edwardian fiction.
To this day the Girl Scouts are staffed, run, and intended solely for girls and women, regardless of the body one was born with. The Girl Scouts are a rare and refreshing national organization that simultaneously promotes wholesome American values while making sure that its youthful members have a good time, learn something useful and scientifically accurate, and treat their fellow Scouts like human beings regardless of whether they have a mommy and daddy, two mommies, two daddies, and or one or the other. Modern Scouts can and do earn merit badges in subjects like being a locavore, public policy, and geocaching and if a young Cadet or Senior Scout finds herself dreaming of the captain of the field hockey team instead of the football team, no one much cares.
Unlike the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts don't care if you're religious, agnostic, gay, straight, rich, poor, disabled, or transgendered. All they care about is the kids (and the cookies), and if that means that the less enlightened aren't all that happy, so be it. Daisy herself never let a crappy marriage, deafness, or the cancer that eventually killed her slow her down, and in a time when women were encouraged to stay home, she forged her own path and showed young girls that they could more than drudges or decorations. The American dream of self-reliance and inner strength became acceptable in the mainstream at least in part because of the Girl Scouts, and that includes girls like Bobby Montoya.
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