The other day, the Disco Biscuit bought me a present. Apparently, nothing says “I love you” like fattening food, because he got me a box of Girl Scout Cookies.

And now, a medium-length sidebar on my association with the Girl Scouts of America. First of all, my grandmother served as a scout leader for decades; I think she kept doing it after my mother and my aunt had long since gone to college and gotten married. I know for a fact that, in the basement of my family’s house, stashed far in the back of a dusty cabinet, we have a trove of photographs which feature my mother clad in that distinctive kelly-green polyester uniform and fitted out with badge-studded sash and fuzzy forest-green beret. I didn’t know my mother’s mother that well — she died when I was only seven — and although she seemed nice enough to me, she must have had some sort of sadistic streak because she forced my mother to continue her Scouting career until my mother turned seventeen or something like that. You can see breasts under my mother’s uniform in those pictures. Weird. Anyhow, after Nana died, the Girl Scout folk dedicated a new Scouting center in her name, so if any of you has ever visited the Virginia Enmeier Girl Scout Center, I hope you observed a moment of silence.

(By the way, for you boys in the crowd — and you girls that never Scouted, and yes, GSA uses “to Scout” as a verb — that don’t know the ins and outs of the Girl Scouts, a Scouting Center serves as a shelter for Girl Scout troops attempting to get their “We Spent A Miserable Weekend Outdoors, Eating Disgusting Food, Getting Mosquito Bites, Freezing Our Virgin Asses Off, And Getting In Dumb Fights” badges, also known as the camping badge in some parts of the country. Technically, the troop has to stay outside and gut it out like good little Green Berets, but usually some girl starts moaning about bears, and some other girl tells the moaner to shut up because New Jersey doesn’t have bears, and they get in a dumb fight, and shortly afterward someone voices the opinion that she might have to throw up soon because the troop’s “helper mom” forced her to put a tomato on her hamburger at dinner, and then the troop leader throws up her hands in despair and moves the whole troop inside after forcing the troop to promise not to tell the GSA governing committee that they didn’t spend the whole friggin’ night outside, and then the troop eats its weight in S’Mores, even the troop leader’s daughter that can’t eat sugar or she gets really sick, and then everyone lies around groaning and trying not to barf, and pretty soon the giggles hit, and I don’t think I need to say any more. My poor Nana.)

My other association with Girl Scouting involves my own highly bizarre days as a Girl Scout. I started out as a Brownie. For the uninitiated, you go to Brownies in second and third grades, and then you “get your wings” in the Flying-Up ceremony (for which you have to learn a very complicated choreography, and looking back on it, I think they just want to acclimate you to the cheesy ritualism that you will have to endure should you want to join a sorority, with all its faux sacraments and brittle female bonding, and why does every female rite of passage like this break down to “the big girls will now acknowledge your existence”? but I digress) and then you become a Girl Scout. Well, since I skipped second grade, I stayed with the second-grade Brownie troop for a while just to learn the ropes and then I joined the “big girls” in the third-grade troop. Then we “flew up” to the Girl Scout level and traded in ugly brown outfits for ugly green outfits (any uniform that involves a polyester tunic needs to hit the rag pile, in my opinion).

I will just skip over the deep bizarreness of my troop leader and her entire family (and yes, in addition to being allergic to sugar, her daughter had some weird lung disease, and she weighed almost nothing and came up to my elbow, and she practiced the piano for about six hours a day and became this prodigy, and despite all of these reasons to feel sorry for her, we never did, because she never quite grasped the whole social graces aspect of life, and when she came to the five-year reunion of my high school class which we held at my house, she marched in the front door, looked around with disdain at all the food I had slaved over for hours on end, and informed me, “I wouldn’t have come, but [perfectly nice classmate] dragged me.” I would have, in a big fat shout-out to the Mediarama crew, treated her to a full-body whatever, but I thought it might kill her. Anyhow, on with the article). I will proceed directly to the bloody awful nightmare of attempting to sell Girl Scout cookies.

I don’t like trying to sell anything. I especially don’t like it in my neighborhood, which at the time had a lot of older folks, and you really had to scream to make yourself understood, and then they would buy one lousy box and you would have to trudge to the next house. In addition, a lot of the other Scouts’ dads would pitch in and take the order sheet to their offices, and Tita Edoga won the most-boxes-sold prize every single year because her dad worked in a hospital, and she would sell thousands of boxes — literally — and I would sit at the dinner table and regale my family with my notions of Dr. Edoga standing over a dying patient and yelling, “I’m not calling a Code Blue until you buy some Samoas, buster,” and I know for a fact that every doctor, nurse, intern, janitor, and newborn baby on the maternity ward got suckered into buying boxes from the Edoga family, and I would wind up this highly melodramatic but possibly true harangue by whining, “Dad, you HAVE to bring the sheet with you to work, please please PLEASE, if everyone on the Exchange floor buys a box I’ll kick Tita’s butt this year, pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease!” and my father would give me a lecture on doing my own work and how Dr. Edoga had made a mistake by helping his daughter in this fashion, and I objected on the grounds that Dr. Edoga let Tita and her sister Sherifa, who had a heart condition, stay up as late as they wanted, and thus Dr. Edoga could not possibly make a mistake, but my father staunchly refused to bring my cookie form to the office. (I forgive you, Dad.)

And on top of all this, my best friend and I had to compete with each other for the cookie market in our neighborhood, and I wouldn’t call our neighborhood bullish on cookies, if you see what I mean. One year, it had snowed about a foot, and Sharon and I put on the accursed snow pants and went out and hit every house on the block, and when I got to the Nasrs’ house, Sharon had just sold them twenty boxes, and Mrs. Nasr explained that to me and said that Mr. Nasr said that they didn’t need anymore. I stared at her for a full minute. Then I wanted to know how one more measly box would bankrupt them, and Mr. Nasr yelled from their living room, “NO MORE COOKIES!” and Mrs. Nasr shrugged apologetically and closed the door in my face and I stood on their doorstep for another ten minutes, glaring at the door, and I know they knew I hadn’t left, and finally I gave up and stormed home and called Mr. Nasr “that Iranian Nazi,” and then my mother got angry at me and when my father got home and heard the story he just patted my head, and I could tell he felt a little guilty about not taking the cookie form to work with him, and Tita Edoga won again that year. I won’t even tell you about going to the Waldos’ house. Mr. Waldo had had a laryngectomy. He spoke by burping, and he never let his wife answer the door. No nine-year-old needs to deal with that.

But despite these scarring travails, I always looked forward to the arrival of the cookies themselves. My mother laid in vast supplies of Thin Mints — always my favorite. The delicate balance of crispy chocolate biscuit and waxy fudge coating; the dread chocolate breath counteracted with a hint of mint; the size, perfect for inserting an entire Thin Mint into one’s mouth and feeling it crumble against one’s palate . . . no, you couldn’t beat a Thin Mint. You could try, though, with a Samoa or a Do-Si-Do, although Samoas have always struck me as sort of a gyp; the illustration on the box ends up much larger than the actual cookie, and despite the illusory packaging, you only get fourteen per box. The Do-Si-Dos fared better, although they often proved too rich for sustained eating (and let’s face it — if you can’t kill a whole sleeve in one sitting, what’s the point?). My nemeses included the VanChoc — why would anyone buy a box of VanChocs when they could haul their lazy butts to the store and buy Oreos? We had a neighbor who always bought VanChocs by the bale, which confirmed our theory that she came from a distant planet — and the chocolate-chip cookie, introduced in the early eighties for no apparent reason, but I especially despised the Trefoil. My mother bought even more Trefoils than she did Thin Mints. I tried to explain to her that, at two bucks a box, she should buy cookies that had a taste, or that at least did not wick away every drop of saliva, but she had none of it and put three Trefoils in my lunchbag every day for a month. (I forgive you, Mom.) Anyhow, I think the VanChocs bit the dust a while back, replaced by Snaps (not bad, if a trifle dry — too bad about the ground raisins, though).

One final note: the box art has GOT TO GO. The fictional “troop diaries” on the backs of the cookie boxes, written in artfully childlike script, detail the pukey-cute activities of various Girl Scouts. The modern emphasis of these activities — river-rafting instead of sewing, for instance — goes hand-in-hand with the amateur sociology blurb on the bottom left, which states that girls develop better socially in the company of other girls. Whatever. As long as they introduce a “Make The Samoas Larger” badge soon, I don’t care what the little brats do.

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