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| The Thin Mint cookie cult. |
| Posted: Tuesday, February 20, 2007 |
Word has it that the president is very unhappy with the Girl Scouts of America.
The president of which I speak is MeMe Roth, who heads up the National Action Against Obesity (NAAO). In a recent press release, the NAAO describes the profit that the Girls Scouts make from their annual cookie sales as a "flawed business model" and believes that the Girl Scouts need to modernize their methods of fundraising by dumping the junk food in favor of less fattening money-making schemes.
I'm thinking of they could formulate a delicious shortbread cookie with a creamy influenza vaccine filling, they might be on to a real big seller.
This will be the first year that the Girls Scouts offer zero-trans-fat cookies, but that notwithstanding, you and I know full well how easy it is to snarf down a half-box of Thin Mints without coming up for air. Same goes for those damn Do-si-dos. That's why we go ahead and order two or more boxes, because experience tells us that we will be eating the entire contents of at least one box with no intention of sharing.
That's just the Thin Mint way.
My daughter was recently liberated from her Brownie troop. Although she enjoyed the meetings and probably more so the snacks at the meetings, she just wasn't emotionally invested in the Girl Scout ethic. Her full uniform of skirt, socks, headband, blouse and vest was eventually pared down to just the vest over her regular clothes. A fully paid for summer day camp was passed over in favor of summer school. And who was it that ended up going door-to-door to scrounge up last minute cookie pre-sales? Yep. Me.
From the beginning, I knew she wasn't the Girl Scout type.
She was alerted to the cult of Girl Scouts when she was in first grade. We were walking through the school cafeteria on our way home, and we saw an after-school meeting taking place. She began questioning me about what was going on, and although I was able to skillfully divert her attentions away from joining up that year, she joined Brownies half-way through the next school year, just in time for the cookie sale.
She was fairly excited about Brownies at first, but now her projects come home unfinished, and stay unfinished. There is no desire to be the best darn cookie seller in Girl Scout history, and that she must sing a song after every meeting that lets her know that "God is nigh" does not sit well with the agnostic in her.
We suggested that she take a break from Brownies and she was quick to comply.
And how will we fill our Girl Scout void? What will we do without the macramé keychains, paper-bag puppets and Thin Mints? We are thinking about packing in the brownie vest for some after-school Tae Kwon Do. No, we won't get to hock cookies door-to-door anymore, but we will get to watch our daughter administer powerful body-kicks to other people's children.
When we come upon the little cookie sellers this year, Roth encourages us to "Smile at the children, offer a donation, but leave those cookies behind," because God is nigh, and he doesn't want your butt to look big in those pants.
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