If you are one of the many natives and immigrants alike who tend to find winter in Wisconsin more a wasteland than a wonderland, a morsel of deliverance is within your grasp.
You hear about it on the local news, from friends and family, even echoing through the drafty halls of academia. One simple phrase alights as a glimmering beacon of hope through the subzero gales and down the ice-sheathed sidewalks: \It's Girl Scout cookie time!""
Whether you're savoring the year's first Samoa like a long-lost love or devouring both stacks of Thin Mints in one sitting, with that little overpriced box of shrink-wrapped merriment in hand, for a few brief, sugary moments, life just sucks a little bit less.
For me, however, at some point during the season, the bitterness of an ancient grudge against the Girl Scout organization resurfaced to taint my snacking experience. You see, at the tender age of seven, I was spurned by the Girl Scouts of America.
It began one winter's eve when I, seduced by the images of ordinary girls like me with bad hair and braces frolicking across the cookie boxes, journeyed with my mother to the Girl Scout House for their annual sign-up.
But alas, Brownie life was not to be mine. For no sooner did we approach a recruiter but, in a turn of events which would serve as an apt foreshadowing of life beyond elementary school, my candy-coated visions of papier m??ch?? and campfire ghost stories were shattered in one fell swoop by a perturbed old bitty.
She informed us that my school's troop and all others I could feasibly join were full, and that if I wanted to be a scout, my mother had to start up a new one, presumably with me as its sole member.
Though at the time I was utterly dejected, my being cast away ultimately proved a favor. The uniforms would have only aggravated my neurotic aversion to exposed knees. The closest I've ever had to come to ""roughing it"" was staying at a mouse-infested Comfort Inn in Cleveland. And I can to this day truthfully report that I've never donned a beret. (Suck on that with your Do-Si-Dos, ""chosen ones."")
Yes, though I can usually enjoy my Lemon Pastry Cremes with nary a nod to their unseemly origins, occasionally I see something like what I witnessed in my hometown over break, which stokes the resentment anew: There are now signs speckling the lawns of troop leaders across town seeking any random riffraff with access to a phone to become a Girl Scout.
While I suppose it's not too late-I could always emulate those women who take ballet with a class of third-graders because as children they were written off as clumsy lummoxes-I have achieved a measure of peace with the matter.
For as the courts have reaffirmed time and again in dealings with the Boy Scouts, private organizations can exclude whomever they please. It's the true spirit of freedom in its most shining, awe-inspiring, brings-a-tear-to-John Ashcroft's-eye form.
So, Girl Scouts of America, keep on peddling those Peanut Butter Patties and new Atkins-friendly Jerky Jubilees. We salute you!
Holly Noe can be reached at flamingpurvis@yahoo.com. Her column runs every Friday in The Daily Cardinal.
