Gotham Girl Guides Beat Cookie Records

It's been a tough year for the Gotham Girl Guides, but not even cookie thieves can keep these young women down. Eleven-year-old Vanessa DeFoliano made history by selling over $200,000 worth of cookies last year — and the money all goes to charity.

Girl Guide Leader Sarah Alexis Schwimmer made the announcement yesterday at a special high tea hosted by the Gotham Victorian Hotel. "I always tell the girls that great things can come from adversity, and Vanessa proved how right that is," Sarah said in her introduction.

The impressive achievement came after a traumatic year for the guides. Many of the girls still harbor traumatic memories of being accosted and robbed by thieves in clown masks while they were selling cookies at a convention.

But at yesterday's ceremony, those memories seem to have been replaced by immense pride in Vanessa's sales figures.

Vanessa, a boisterous and confident tween chicly dressed in a grown-up business suit, got up from her table to jubilant applause. Her friends clapped and cheered as she bounced up to the podium and took the microphone away from Sarah.

"Hi everyone! Want to know what my secret is?" She paused for dramatic effect and then said, "Volume."

Vanessa proceeded to show a series of infomercial-style videos she created and posted on the Internet. In pitch-perfect recreation of late-night TV filler, she and her friends presented the cookies to a mock audience of enthusiastic adults. In the infomercials, Vanessa plays a lively host who claims that for only $5.95, people can "feed a child, plant 10 seeds, teach an adult to read, cure a sick person, and lots, lots more!"

"Vanessa is really something else," proud mom Victoria said. "Her grandfather was a traveling salesman his whole life. She must get it from him."

At the beginning of this year's sale, Vanessa told Sarah that she intended to beat the standing 1983 record of $2,450 raised by Girl Guide Francis Alexander-Higgs. Francis, who declined an invitation to attend the event, went on to a career in pharmaceutical sales before being jailed on charges of passing fake checks.

Vanessa completed her speech at the Victorian Hotel with a special "thank you" to Alexander-Higgs "for paving the way and showing the great things that Girl Guides can make possible. I'd like to promise now that next year I will sell $5 million, but you'll have to wait till then to find out how."