Rich’s piece got me thinking about my own high school reunion history. Fortunately, my next high school reunion is not until next year, so I don’t have to make a decision about going until a week before. My class reunites every five years anyway, so it’s okay to skip a few.
I went to an all-girls Catholic high school in the Midwest. Our graduating class was less than a hundred students. When I was there, I had one goal---get out and move to a glamorous place. I achieved that goal, and at eighteen I moved to New York. I now live in Los Angeles. It’s a glamorous life.
Because the high school was private, I started receiving a lot of requests for donations while I was still in college. I ignored the lot of it, but a few years ago, I started to worry that all that paper was contributing to global warming. Besides, I was getting notices for golf events which I didn’t want to fly to. I called up the alumni development office and asked the nice lady to take me off the alumni mailing list and to send me notices by email only. After a back-and-forth where I patiently explained that email and a website were an effective means of communication, I got myself freed of the high school paper. I wouldn’t even give them my address just for their records.
I did attend my ten year high school reunion. Husbands and partners were allowed to attend as well, so it wasn’t all girls. I went solo. Since we were all twenty-eight, the girl who had a baby at 17 was sitting happy. She and her husband were looking forward to forty when the kids would be out of the house and they would still be young enough to party. There were a lot of pregnant and recently had babies women. The overachieving girl in the class was on her way to being an overachieving mom.
There was one girl who heard that I wrote plays and confided in me that she wanted to be an actress. She had seen those actresses on television and thought that she could do it. She wanted to know how she could break in. I told her she should take acting class and read plays. She then wanted know if that was required or if she could just skip all that. I told her it was totally required and walked away.
Have I told you guys that story already? I keep thinking I have. Anyway, I haven’t been back for a reunion since. Maybe I’ll go the fiftieth. I plan to look fantastic at sixty-eight.
Reading about Rich’s high school reunion drama also made me also think of the movie, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, which always makes me smile. Romy and Michele are two beach party girls who disguise themselves as successful business women to attend their high school reunion where they plan to dazzle everyone including the snotty popular girls. Of course, their plan goes awry (thanks to a slip by a chain-smoking goth girl played by Janeane Garofolo), but they decide to go back to the reunion as themselves in their favorite dresses. Meanwhile, the nerd of the class, who had a crush on Michele, has grown up into Alan Cumming with a private helicopter. When he arrives and asks Michele to dance, she says she will only dance if her best friend can dance too. And the rest is movie magic. . . .
