Manhattan Girl Scout Is a Tough Cookie to Say No To

--Markita Andrews has a sweet sales pitch for Girl Scout cookies--and no one is going to call it half-baked. In six years of annual cookie drives, Markita has sold 15,500 boxes, mostly in her New York neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. She has sold an additional 10,000 boxes while delivering orders and collecting from her customers. In 1984 alone, she sold 8,000 boxes. “You just can’t chat,” she said. “You have to ask for an order.” During the drives, Markita, 13, stakes out lobbies and mailboxes in the eight buildings of the Lincoln Towers apartments, where she lives with her mother and aunt. “It’s best to go where the people are,” she said. Her techniques have been recorded in “The Cookie Kid,” an 11-minute sales-training film that has been shown to such corporations as IBM and AT&T.; “I probably could sell anything if I really wanted to,” Markita said. But, come April, some of Markita’s customers are sure to rue her success. A Mack truck filled with cookies clogs Lincoln Towers’ delivery lanes for hours until its cargo can be unloaded into Markita’s apartment. Then, for the three weeks or so it takes to deliver the orders, said her aunt, Meredith McSherry, the apartment is “wall-to-wall cookies.”

--Champion of the homeless Mitch Snyder’s life is going to be made into a television movie. Snyder, who staged a 51-day hunger strike before Christmas until President Reagan promised help for street people, sold the film rights of the last six years of his life to Charles Fries Entertainment Inc. for $150,000. He said the money will go to his downtown Washington shelter, which is $30,000 in debt. “This whole thing is so alien to us and the way we live,” Snyder said. “I spent the morning waking people up in the shelter, picking up cigarette butts and cleaning the latrine. It won’t change life for us.”

--”Tomorrow” is only a day away for New York Mayor Edward I. Koch, who wrote the best seller “Mayor.” Charles Strouse, who wrote the songs for “Annie,” said: “Ed called me one day and he said, ‘This may be the stupidest idea you’ve ever heard, but how about using my book for a musical?’ ” Strouse didn’t laugh; he got to work. The show is expected to open in April--just in time for Koch’s reelection campaign. “It was Ed’s idea,” Strouse said. “He takes chances, and this is a big one. He is not going to be lionized in this show.”