I have been feeling at sea, as I start to look for
another job (I just heard from the public schools that my application has "has been forwarded to the hiring manager for further review").
And then I remembered
(how did I forget?) that I'd committed to MAKING TOYS when I was in New Mexico a year ago.
The girlettes say they have been waiting patiently for me to remember. This morning, Spike put together The Brownie Look
... It's all about outsized underwear!
(I wrote "lingerie" at first, and was corrected:
"We're eight, we wear underwear.")
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Spike is also wearing a dancing-pixie Brownie pin. It came in a shoe box of old doll clothes Puzzle volunteer gave me at Christmas. She's 73, so this would be from the 1950s.
Why did the Girl Scouts choose the anarchic pixie for the Brownies? Generally benign and even helpful (cleaning up at night), but they can be disruptive too. And they're definitely not Christian.
I guess like little girls?
I found the origin story online:
Brownie Origins
Once, the level of Girl Scouting we know as Brownies was called Rosebuds. But the girls didn’t like their name, so they asked Lord Baden-Powell (the founder of Boy Scouting, which inspired Juliette Gordon Low to create Girl Scouting) for a new name.
Most people believe Baden-Powell named the Brownies after Juliana Horatia Ewing’s 1870’s story, The Brownies, about a couple of helpful Brownie children.
There are lots of Victorian illustrations, but I like this one by Katherine Milhous from 1946:
