Friday, December 26, 2008

Increasing Troop Presence in School

Although we live in an artsy-fartsy town, the Beast ended up going to the elementary school in the non-artsy, non-liberal part of our school district due to “zoning.” I, in turn, ended up sitting in meetings with mothers who, I swear, must have been visiting from other planets.

One of the first meetings I attended was for the Girl Scout Daisy Troop. An Ubermom (blond streaked hair coiffed, fingernails manicured, SUV in parking lot) said that the girls should wear their uniforms, not just for the Girl Scout meetings, but for the entire day—because she felt there should be more of a “troop presence” in the school.
“Like a war zone?”...I queried. “Please..this whole little girls in uniforms thang goes against my pseudo-liberal mind-set” I explained to the hostile alien beings. “and besides those little Daisy smocks that they don are not going to command any true respect anyway...if that is what you are after...”

The long suffering, human troop leader moved the conversation away from military protocol to suggestions on field trips for the kindergarten girls to go on.

The pastel attired extraterrestrials chatted about going to the bagel shop where the girls could learn about making bagels or to the local karate school to learn about self-defense or to BJs...to learn about blatant consumerism and other forms of normal human behavior on earth.

Feeling that the trip idea trend was heading towards Beckett-like absurdity I piped-up--”we are very close to NYC—perhaps we could take the little girls in one of your big SUVs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or to the Natural History Museum or maybe even Carnegie Hall... “

They stared at me with their almost human, perfectly mascaraed, blank eyes for a several minutes and then turned back to one another and the Ubermom, said: “The Police Station is also interesting—they fingerprint the kids and then lock them in a cell...”

Oh the joys of public school.