My friend KT recently had the Wardrobe Dilemma of a Life Time – one that I, myself, had been through just the previous year. It all came down to the selection of one outfit – a process that was vastly more important than choosing what we wore to the Year 12 Ball, to our university graduations, or even to our own weddings. You see, I’m talking about the task of choosing what to wear to a 20-year school reunion. You want to look attractive but not desperate. Youthful but not like someone who is clinging to their youth. Affluent but not flashy. Fashionable but not tragic. It’s a fine line to tread, especially when you’re lugging about all that emotional baggage left over from your high school years…
But listen, once you’ve chosen your outfit, the rest is relatively easy. No, really it is. Of course there’s still some residue fear – even after 20 years – that someone might call you a Pizza Face and give you a chinese burn but at least you feel like you’ll defend yourself better than just hiding behind your ridiculously long fringe and wanting to die. At least you hope you will.
My reunion ended up being a low-key affair: perhaps 30 people (of a class of 200?) trekked along to the same pub where we all were underage drinkers another life time ago. (An aside: don’t you just love those signs in bottle shops that warn “If you look less than 30 years of age, we reserve the right to ask for ID”. I always say to the guy behind the counter “Go on, make my day. Ask me. ASK ME!” and he gets slightly fearful and pushes the panic button for security to clear me away. Such larks!)
It’s interesting how a school reunion can end up being as much about who doesn’t turn up as who did. On the list of notable absentees: the guy who bullied me for a whole year in Maths and Science basically because I dared to do better than him and be a girl; the girl who went on to become an Actress of Some Note on Australian TV, who dissed me six years ago in the lobby of a hotel (KT – who was at the same school but one year below me – was kind enough to remind me that this same girl wore a dog collar to the Year 11 Ball – KT, I will always love you for that); and the guy who repeatedly broke my heart in a push-pull relationship because he was too embarrassed to let his friends know he liked an acne-ridden psycho-bitch. Ah, highschool. The best years of our lives? I think not. At least I hope the hell not.
The people who did turn up represented a broad selection of the various “groups” that made up our year – and I was pretty much pleased to see every single one of them. Luckily, the reunion format is a bit like speed-dating – you only really get two minutes with each person and never have to get into the nitty gritty questions like “Why have you become so fat?” or “What happened to your hair?” or “You were going to make something of yourself – what the hell happened?”. I had the rather dubious honour of being the only person who had flown interstate to attend – something my good friend AK made a point of telling everyone we spoke to. But listen, there were “other reasons” for my trip, actually… and hell, so what if I flew for four hours just because I’m curious! It’s the novelist in me, okay? And no, I haven’t actually ever published anything or even written anything for 6 years… Phew, our two minutes is up… Next!
In any case, the room was pretty much united by the appearance of a good old-fashioned Mystery Guest – every reunion needs one! In our case, it was a guy with dreadlocks looking cool in that “I’m dating a 20-year-old and my mother still does my laundry” kind of way and the night’s burning question became not “What ever happened to…” but ”Who the fuck is that?”. It turns out not a single one of us in the room could remember him and when questioned closely, he was a bit evasive about who his friends were. I started to think he was some kind of serial school reunion attender researching his next novel called “My Year of Reunions”and was seriously considering if I should go up to him and pretend we’d gone out for two years and say stuff like “How could you forget that you took my virginity at the Year 10 River Rock, you bastard” just so I could get my own chapter in the book. However, it’s fortunate that I decided against this course of action in the end, because it turned out he wasn’t an undercover novelist at all, he was just confused. Whether it was due to an excess of drugs or all that bongo playing had addled his perception of time, he was in the year below ours and had just come to his reunion one year too early. And in which case, I really couldn’t be sure that I hadn’t had sex with him at the Year 10 River Rock (she says as if anyone had actually wanted to have sex with her at highschool).
Anyway, I was glad I went to my school reunion – though many people (my husband included) said they would rather eat their own hands than attend theirs. Nobody called me names. Nobody stood in a corner giggling and pointing at me (at least not obviously). And even if they did, I wouldn’t have cared (much). Because the real gift my reunion gave me was the realisation that I was actually in a pretty happy place with myself, even if that place was about a million trillion (zillion!) miles from where the 17 year old me thought she’d be by now. And that’s something worth traveling interstate for, now isn’t it.
I recently got in touch with an old school friend/school heart-throb/general all-round stud/first ever snog/first love after 20 years (turns out we weren’t that close afterall…). I only tracked him down cos I was being stalked by another old “friend” from school who found me on Facebook and then wrote to me again via Friends Reunited when I ignored her the first time round and … there he was, bold as brass on FR…
Anyway, turns out he’s had an office 200 yards down the road from me for the last four years and is CEO of a large organisation that makes millions in government contracts in the same line of business as I’m in, and I never knew (I must be seriously crap at my job…). But the interesting thing is that he’s got really fat and is completely unrecognisable even when you’re sittiing across a table from him. Given that he ultimately rejected me it was quite gratifying, especially as I look fantastic. I sent my sister a photo of him and told her about the proximity of his office – she observed that I could have been passing him in the street every day and not known it as his disguise was better than a witness protection programme…
*Must be loaded though! Bummer!
What a good post I can hardly believe only one person has commented on it so far.
But more importantly, in the section under your blog that says ‘possibly related posts’ a post on: “December trading strategies, gift cards to buy & avoid and cyber monday” is somehow pertinent to your beautiful little piece on school reunions. What the ‘quack’? (as Tiddles would say).
I’m not going to read it – sounds seriously very weird (and we must not raise anyone else’s stats).
I’ve been having mini-school reunions via facebook, and have just discovered someone I had a mild but unrealisable crush on (he was in the year below me) has started up a festish photography business in the next suburb over from me. (www.soulfocusstudio.net) We are going to meet up for coffee. Shall I wear my gas mask or my bottom-size-disguising corset? Having experienced all the emotions you just mentioned, with the possible exception of ‘how did you get so fat’ cos its hard to tell someone’s size via the interweb, I’m with your husband and would rather eat my own hands than go to my school reunion.
I too was disappointed that many of the people I was most interested in had not come to my school reunion. In other words, all the cool people… which made sense since I was there and I certainly was not one of the cool people.
But come to think of it, the people who didn’t come probably all chickened out due to not being in a very happy place with themselves. Not so cool after all…
I bet you were the coolest one there, NDM. Goodonya for going.
This guy that nobody recognised – was he the hired hitman?
- still obsessed with Grosse Point Blank -
Excellent post. Made all the more splendid by its titular evocation of a Peaches and Herb classic. Nice.
Am with Fee S though on the ‘possibly related posts’ (which we are helpfully – and perhaps tellingly – told are ‘automatically generated’). No, REALLY??
Well, at least you stilled my fears for now. But what of that outfit?
Brilliant post NDM – Romy & Michele did an OK job dealing with the whole 10 year high school reunion shebang but you’ve captured the whole 20 year zeitgeist thang for sure.
I was SO thankful that, by some miracle, the time of my 20 year reunion didn’t coincide with me being either a) hugely pregnant & puffy-faced, or, b) a pile of jelly wobbling post-birth blubber, as it seemed I had been in either one of these states almost continuously for the 7 years prior to the event.
After producing the pretty cool (if I do say so myself) 80s retro invite for the night, I too thought a fair bit about my outfit… Slightly vintage dress, bright & floral.. a little quirky and left-of-centre… purple platforms (yeah, let’s go crazy).. and top it all off with red hair that was a hell of a lot brighter than it ever was in 1987…
I felt like I stood out, I felt like I was kind of from the wrong side of the tracks – just like I always did – but yes, the good thing was that I didn’t care anymore and kind of revelled in it. Vive la difference! Who cared anyway? I guess that was the great thing really, nobody did.
Some people were fat as and looked way worse and more haggard than at school and then some people were way thinner and hotter than they ever were in the late 80s but none of it really mattered like it did when you were in your 20s…
There were a bunch of people who seemed to really know me but I swear I’d never seen them in my life before – anyway, they seemed pretty happy to see me and so I pretended to remember them and listened to their life stories (in the 2 minutes allocated) and was just happy to hear that they were happy with how their lives had turned out. Whoever the hell they were.