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I'm gonna bust down the double doors
Dec. 2nd, 2005 02:06 pmI attended my ten-year high school reunion on Friday, November 25. From the beginning, I was sort of ambivalent about the prospect of going. On the one hand, I thought, it would be kind of fun to watch the bloated, garishly decorated icons of my youth swagger unironically around their old turf, not unlike the string of floats at the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. On the other hand, I was loathe to imagine myself as one of the very same participants in that pageant, ten pounds thicker and quite a bit balder and boasting little more than a studio apartment and a suspiciously absentee girlfriend. I had an image to protect, right?
But let me back up.
I liked high school. I liked it a lot better than college, which seems to contradict prevailing nationwide opinion. Most people tend to remember their college years as an oasis of freedom, independence, beer and sex; they remember high school as being like spending four years in a dentist's chair, only with more math.[1]
Certainly, my home life as a teenager had something to do with my comfort level. As long as I maintained an acceptable report card and a spotless criminal record, I was given a rather wide parental berth. Other kids were concerned with curfews, chaperones and makeshift Breathalyzer tests; all I had to worry about was the occasional check-in phone call and predominantly guilt-based discipline. It was a nice little set-up.
But high school itself was a nice little set-up, too. The social structure was well-established and I knew my place: I did not run with the "in" crowd – the crowd that experimented with alcoholic beverages, recreational narcotics and cavalier attitudes toward sexuality. I was, most conveniently stated, a "drama nerd" (or, alternatively, "chorus geek"), spending most of my time in one kind of rehearsal or another, cracking wise either on-stage or backstage.
Public Service Announcement for Adolescent Youths: If you are going to be a nerd, I highly recommend being a drama nerd. I think it is the best kind of nerd you can be. For one thing, the girls in Drama Club are way hotter than the ones in Chess Club or Marching Band. People give you lots of attention and compliments, even if you don't really deserve them, unlike academic competitions which are fraught with pressure and wrong answers. Also, it is very easy to be the "tough guy" among drama nerds. For example, Chris P. was by acclamation considered the bad-ass of Webster's 1995 cast of "Guys and Dolls," what with his brutish physicality and thuggish charm. But if Chris had been on the football team he would routinely have been taped to the goalpost. Yes, as with any group of artists, there will be suspicions and accusations of rampant homosexuality, but these claims are usually quite exaggerated. Plus, the costumes are fabulous!
Anyway, while I wasn't necessarily one of the most "cool" people in my graduating class of 484, I was certainly popular in the sense of being visible and well-known. I was savvy enough to get along with the social elite (or stay out of their way), and since all nerds share the common bond of nerd-itude, I also felt comfortable in the vouchsafed society of mathletes and science olympians as well – though not enough to understand their jokes about acetylsalicylic acid.
And, most importantly, I had a close-knit web of friends, so close-knit that it sometimes felt like suffocating neoprene fibers. By senior year, our lunchroom sessions were a potent mixture of drama, gossip, improvisational humor, existential philosophy, Seinfeld references, flirting, fighting and Fiestadas[2]. I forged intense relationships with some really amazing and interesting and intelligent and hilarious people, more than a half-dozen of whom I still talk with several times per year – and some several times per month. As time goes on, I wonder: do I cling to these people because they remind me of high school memories, or do I cling to high school memories because they remind me of these people?
The answer isn't really important. But the question itself compelled me to attend the reunion, if only to get back to those halcyon lunchroom days. It turned out to be a pretty effective simulation.
The event was held in the banquet hall of the Webster Golf Club, way the hell out in East Webster, nestled snugly between Xerox's sprawling office campus and the border of Wayne County, a predominantly farming-and-trucking community that boasts steadily declining incest rates. It serves as an ideal leisure spot for bleached-white-collar Xerox employees who want to hit golf balls without worrying about those balls striking anything particularly important.
Reunion organizers Nikki, Meghan and Dena had painstakingly arranged copious decorations such as poinsettias and twinkly lights, as well as cheeky centerpieces designed to put us squarely in the bucket seats of the Wayback machine and whisk us into 1995. ("Top Ten Highest Grossing Movies of 1995," "Top Ten Hotties of 1995" – even though "hottie" was not yet a word, "Top Ten Sexually Transmitted Diseases of 1995," etc.)
After an hour of open bar, combined with obligatory "so, what do you do these days"-type questions and outright staring at unfamiliar faces and name tags[3], we were invited to sit down to dinner. The organizers had arranged for a sumptuously starchy buffet – delicious, yes, but conspicuously lacking a certain Fiestada quality.
Thankfully, I was seated with all my favorite people. In the above picture, from left-to-right: Geoff A. and his wife Kristin, Sarah with her special gentleman Graham, Katie, me, Christin, Jennifer and Geoff M., and Maria.
Table 1, as we were christened because of our priority buffet status, had a rollicking good time holding court in our little corner of the room. While most folks mingled in the lobby near the open bar, our table was like a radioactive isotope; occasionally picking up and spinning off straggling electrons but still maintaining nuclear gravity and maintaining reliable structural identity. (Hey, wait a minute. Maybe I am a science nerd.)
I was most grateful for the relative comfort and quiet of Table 1, since it allowed me to catch up with the old crew, to probe them deeply, to inquire about their successes and their dreams, and to show them a picture of my girlfriend. ("I swear she exists.")
Geoff A., my fellow drama nerd and chronic allergy sufferer, now works as a sound designer for an avant-garde theater troupe in New York City, which, frankly, really takes drama nerdiness to a whole new level. He lives in Brooklyn with Kristin and their two-year old son, who – if genetics are any indication – will be taller than me in several months. I interviewed Geoff in May 2003, to amusing results.
Graham, my frequent friend and occasional nemesis, lives in Seattle where he works for Microsoft and spends his weekends wallpapering his luxury apartment with fifty-dollar bills. Graham never finished college but was way ahead of the curve on the Internet, and actually helped me to build my first Web site back when Java was still slang for "coffee". I was the one who introduced him to Sarah, actually a college chum of mine, effectively making both of their lives crazy for the past six years. Vengeance is sweet.
Katie not only still lives in Webster, but teaches German at the high school as well. This is not to suggest that she has not grown as a person, however. Katie is a homeowner, a world traveler, an exciting driver and a certifiable expert on game shows. You can see for yourself in this interview from the summer of 2003.
Christin, on a 1993 field trip to Washington D.C., advised me that Girl No. 1, who I liked, had a crush on me, when in fact she meant a totally different girl, Girl No. 2. I told Christin that I liked Girl No. 1, big-time. Then she told Girl No. 2 that I liked her, when in fact I didn't even really know who Girl No. 2 actually was. So when I told Girl No. 1 that I felt the same way she did, she looked at me like as if I were an empty toaster, and Girl No. 2 overheard this and ran to the bathroom crying, I decided I could blame the whole mess on Christin. Now she dispenses high-priced financial advice to wealthy clients for Ameriprise in Syracuse.
Geoff M. and I have known each other since we were twelve, and the only thing about Geoff that has changed since then is his numerical age. Geoff has always been able to do interesting things with numbers, leaping long division problems in a single bound, and even tried his hand at teaching high school math to inner-city students until they threw a desk out of a second-story window and he began to fear that he might be next. He now lives on the outskirts of Pittsburgh with his wife Jen and loves his job as an actuary for Blue Cross/Blue Shield. He is so mild-mannered and pure of heart that I sometimes imagine it is all a secret identity for a superhero persona: Friend-Man.
Back in high school Maria was a talented musician – a skillful vocalist and cellist who could drive you to sexual abandon with a mere few bars of Prokofiev's second symphony – until she went to college and got mixed up with drugs. Legal pharmaceuticals, that is! Ha ha! She absolutely loves that joke. Anyway, she now works for the Wegman's pharmacy warehouse in Buffalo, aghast and bemused by the number of Viagra prescriptions that pass her desk. Maria spends her spare time avoiding her in-laws and lighting up the world with her smile.
Eventually we subsumed our neighboring table, which included Danielle and Raina, two bewitching BFFs who were always nice to me back in the day despite the fact that at one time or another I had transparent, hopeless crushes on both of them. Now they are both successful career women on different sides of the country, no doubt inspiring new generations of juvenile poetry.
I occasionally strayed from the table to say hello to this person or that person or to get a dessert but generally I stayed close to home base, prompting some individuals to accuse Table 1 of being a "clique." Imagine! A clique at a high school reunion! It was as if a person had stumbled upon a salad bar and was shocked, shocked! to find bacon bits.
High school is about cliques. And it is also about learning a few things. For example, I learned rather quickly is that this here Web journal is quite the underground hit with the Class of 1995. Hello out there, miscellaneous former classmates! As such, I will be unable to regale you with the more wicked and incisive observations from the evening – not that they would mean much to you, anyway. But I can say this:
I noticed
… Who didn't show up, most interestingly our valedictorian, our salutatorian, and the guy and girl voted "most likely to succeed" as well as their runners-up. This suggests that either these brainiacs turned out to be busts and are loath to advertise their utter failure in the face of great expectations, or they are too busy curing cancer to make their way back home for a silly reunion.
… Pretty much everyone but our table was practically super-glued to the open bar, perhaps the best example of history repeating itself. I was driving, so I stuck to Diet Coke all night long anyway, and I barely saw any of my close friends with a drink in their hand. I suppose it's possible that Raina was a little tipsy, but from what I remember about Raina, bless her kooky heart, I don't know how anyone would be able to tell.
… After living in a culturally and racially diverse city for six years, I couldn't help but notice that I didn't see a single non-white person at the reunion – despite a class makeup that was fairly progressive for a suburban backwater burg like Webster. I suppose I wasn't really looking hard enough to know for sure, but my first impression was that it looked like a Billy Ray Cyrus concert in there. Was there a concurrent Rainbow Coalition meeting downtown?
I regret
… Not having a picture taken with Lucy, the girl I hated in fifth grade (when she was dating Richard), liked in seventh grade (when she was dating not-me) and who treated me to the most entertaining conversation of the night, a five-minute barrage of sentiment and profanity that resembled a mash-up of Bette Midler and Dr. Dre. I also should have taken pictures of the teeming mass of familiar faces in the lobby, the (possibly bionic) woman in the showgirl-red dress and Meghan's valiant-but-dubious efforts to "get the party started" on the dance floor.
… For that matter, I should have helped Meghan get the party started by leading Table 1 onto the dance floor for some rhythmic gyrations, but I was concerned that the hypnotic movements of my hips and tush, combined with the crowd's alcoholic intake, would cause otherwise avoidable automotive accidents and/or nausea.
… I would have liked to say hello to Laurie, or Jennifer, or Brandon's wife, Christianne, but I never gained the required momentum. I barely know Brandon at all; he and I never shared so much as an "excuse me," But Christianne – a graduate of Mercy High School in Rochester – used to work with me at Heberle's Farm Market when we were 16, and I would have like to ask her if she had ever any inkling what our boss was doing when he went into the walk-in freezer for fifteen minutes at a time and came out sniffling and wiping his moustache.
But mostly, I learned
… That sometimes, you can go home again. Even it only lasts about six hours.
I had a great time. It was great seeing everyone, talking with everyone, reminiscing about the Hotties of 1995 (Mmm, Alicia Silverstone) and being reminded that there's no big rush to get old. Sometimes it's nice to stop aging for a night. Thank you, organizers, for working your flux capacitor magic. And thanks, everyone who made it back. And thanks, Madam Fate, for keeping Matt Chatfield the hell away from me.
In retrospect, I'm not sure which image I was trying harder to protect: my view of myself, 18 years old, hale and hardy with a bright dawn on the horizon; or those precious, pristine memories of the comfortable school bus that got me where I am now. As it turns out, all of those images escaped intact – and more valued for the viewing.
I'll be damned if I'm going back in another ten years, though. Unless there are Fiestadas. And Maria: bring some of that Viagra.
Click here for more pictures.
But let me back up.
I liked high school. I liked it a lot better than college, which seems to contradict prevailing nationwide opinion. Most people tend to remember their college years as an oasis of freedom, independence, beer and sex; they remember high school as being like spending four years in a dentist's chair, only with more math.[1]
Certainly, my home life as a teenager had something to do with my comfort level. As long as I maintained an acceptable report card and a spotless criminal record, I was given a rather wide parental berth. Other kids were concerned with curfews, chaperones and makeshift Breathalyzer tests; all I had to worry about was the occasional check-in phone call and predominantly guilt-based discipline. It was a nice little set-up.
But high school itself was a nice little set-up, too. The social structure was well-established and I knew my place: I did not run with the "in" crowd – the crowd that experimented with alcoholic beverages, recreational narcotics and cavalier attitudes toward sexuality. I was, most conveniently stated, a "drama nerd" (or, alternatively, "chorus geek"), spending most of my time in one kind of rehearsal or another, cracking wise either on-stage or backstage.
Public Service Announcement for Adolescent Youths: If you are going to be a nerd, I highly recommend being a drama nerd. I think it is the best kind of nerd you can be. For one thing, the girls in Drama Club are way hotter than the ones in Chess Club or Marching Band. People give you lots of attention and compliments, even if you don't really deserve them, unlike academic competitions which are fraught with pressure and wrong answers. Also, it is very easy to be the "tough guy" among drama nerds. For example, Chris P. was by acclamation considered the bad-ass of Webster's 1995 cast of "Guys and Dolls," what with his brutish physicality and thuggish charm. But if Chris had been on the football team he would routinely have been taped to the goalpost. Yes, as with any group of artists, there will be suspicions and accusations of rampant homosexuality, but these claims are usually quite exaggerated. Plus, the costumes are fabulous!
Anyway, while I wasn't necessarily one of the most "cool" people in my graduating class of 484, I was certainly popular in the sense of being visible and well-known. I was savvy enough to get along with the social elite (or stay out of their way), and since all nerds share the common bond of nerd-itude, I also felt comfortable in the vouchsafed society of mathletes and science olympians as well – though not enough to understand their jokes about acetylsalicylic acid.
And, most importantly, I had a close-knit web of friends, so close-knit that it sometimes felt like suffocating neoprene fibers. By senior year, our lunchroom sessions were a potent mixture of drama, gossip, improvisational humor, existential philosophy, Seinfeld references, flirting, fighting and Fiestadas[2]. I forged intense relationships with some really amazing and interesting and intelligent and hilarious people, more than a half-dozen of whom I still talk with several times per year – and some several times per month. As time goes on, I wonder: do I cling to these people because they remind me of high school memories, or do I cling to high school memories because they remind me of these people?
The answer isn't really important. But the question itself compelled me to attend the reunion, if only to get back to those halcyon lunchroom days. It turned out to be a pretty effective simulation.
The event was held in the banquet hall of the Webster Golf Club, way the hell out in East Webster, nestled snugly between Xerox's sprawling office campus and the border of Wayne County, a predominantly farming-and-trucking community that boasts steadily declining incest rates. It serves as an ideal leisure spot for bleached-white-collar Xerox employees who want to hit golf balls without worrying about those balls striking anything particularly important.
Reunion organizers Nikki, Meghan and Dena had painstakingly arranged copious decorations such as poinsettias and twinkly lights, as well as cheeky centerpieces designed to put us squarely in the bucket seats of the Wayback machine and whisk us into 1995. ("Top Ten Highest Grossing Movies of 1995," "Top Ten Hotties of 1995" – even though "hottie" was not yet a word, "Top Ten Sexually Transmitted Diseases of 1995," etc.)
After an hour of open bar, combined with obligatory "so, what do you do these days"-type questions and outright staring at unfamiliar faces and name tags[3], we were invited to sit down to dinner. The organizers had arranged for a sumptuously starchy buffet – delicious, yes, but conspicuously lacking a certain Fiestada quality.
Thankfully, I was seated with all my favorite people. In the above picture, from left-to-right: Geoff A. and his wife Kristin, Sarah with her special gentleman Graham, Katie, me, Christin, Jennifer and Geoff M., and Maria.
Table 1, as we were christened because of our priority buffet status, had a rollicking good time holding court in our little corner of the room. While most folks mingled in the lobby near the open bar, our table was like a radioactive isotope; occasionally picking up and spinning off straggling electrons but still maintaining nuclear gravity and maintaining reliable structural identity. (Hey, wait a minute. Maybe I am a science nerd.)
I was most grateful for the relative comfort and quiet of Table 1, since it allowed me to catch up with the old crew, to probe them deeply, to inquire about their successes and their dreams, and to show them a picture of my girlfriend. ("I swear she exists.")
Geoff A., my fellow drama nerd and chronic allergy sufferer, now works as a sound designer for an avant-garde theater troupe in New York City, which, frankly, really takes drama nerdiness to a whole new level. He lives in Brooklyn with Kristin and their two-year old son, who – if genetics are any indication – will be taller than me in several months. I interviewed Geoff in May 2003, to amusing results.
Graham, my frequent friend and occasional nemesis, lives in Seattle where he works for Microsoft and spends his weekends wallpapering his luxury apartment with fifty-dollar bills. Graham never finished college but was way ahead of the curve on the Internet, and actually helped me to build my first Web site back when Java was still slang for "coffee". I was the one who introduced him to Sarah, actually a college chum of mine, effectively making both of their lives crazy for the past six years. Vengeance is sweet.
Katie not only still lives in Webster, but teaches German at the high school as well. This is not to suggest that she has not grown as a person, however. Katie is a homeowner, a world traveler, an exciting driver and a certifiable expert on game shows. You can see for yourself in this interview from the summer of 2003.
Christin, on a 1993 field trip to Washington D.C., advised me that Girl No. 1, who I liked, had a crush on me, when in fact she meant a totally different girl, Girl No. 2. I told Christin that I liked Girl No. 1, big-time. Then she told Girl No. 2 that I liked her, when in fact I didn't even really know who Girl No. 2 actually was. So when I told Girl No. 1 that I felt the same way she did, she looked at me like as if I were an empty toaster, and Girl No. 2 overheard this and ran to the bathroom crying, I decided I could blame the whole mess on Christin. Now she dispenses high-priced financial advice to wealthy clients for Ameriprise in Syracuse.
Geoff M. and I have known each other since we were twelve, and the only thing about Geoff that has changed since then is his numerical age. Geoff has always been able to do interesting things with numbers, leaping long division problems in a single bound, and even tried his hand at teaching high school math to inner-city students until they threw a desk out of a second-story window and he began to fear that he might be next. He now lives on the outskirts of Pittsburgh with his wife Jen and loves his job as an actuary for Blue Cross/Blue Shield. He is so mild-mannered and pure of heart that I sometimes imagine it is all a secret identity for a superhero persona: Friend-Man.
Back in high school Maria was a talented musician – a skillful vocalist and cellist who could drive you to sexual abandon with a mere few bars of Prokofiev's second symphony – until she went to college and got mixed up with drugs. Legal pharmaceuticals, that is! Ha ha! She absolutely loves that joke. Anyway, she now works for the Wegman's pharmacy warehouse in Buffalo, aghast and bemused by the number of Viagra prescriptions that pass her desk. Maria spends her spare time avoiding her in-laws and lighting up the world with her smile.
Eventually we subsumed our neighboring table, which included Danielle and Raina, two bewitching BFFs who were always nice to me back in the day despite the fact that at one time or another I had transparent, hopeless crushes on both of them. Now they are both successful career women on different sides of the country, no doubt inspiring new generations of juvenile poetry.
I occasionally strayed from the table to say hello to this person or that person or to get a dessert but generally I stayed close to home base, prompting some individuals to accuse Table 1 of being a "clique." Imagine! A clique at a high school reunion! It was as if a person had stumbled upon a salad bar and was shocked, shocked! to find bacon bits.
High school is about cliques. And it is also about learning a few things. For example, I learned rather quickly is that this here Web journal is quite the underground hit with the Class of 1995. Hello out there, miscellaneous former classmates! As such, I will be unable to regale you with the more wicked and incisive observations from the evening – not that they would mean much to you, anyway. But I can say this:
I noticed
… Who didn't show up, most interestingly our valedictorian, our salutatorian, and the guy and girl voted "most likely to succeed" as well as their runners-up. This suggests that either these brainiacs turned out to be busts and are loath to advertise their utter failure in the face of great expectations, or they are too busy curing cancer to make their way back home for a silly reunion.
… Pretty much everyone but our table was practically super-glued to the open bar, perhaps the best example of history repeating itself. I was driving, so I stuck to Diet Coke all night long anyway, and I barely saw any of my close friends with a drink in their hand. I suppose it's possible that Raina was a little tipsy, but from what I remember about Raina, bless her kooky heart, I don't know how anyone would be able to tell.
… After living in a culturally and racially diverse city for six years, I couldn't help but notice that I didn't see a single non-white person at the reunion – despite a class makeup that was fairly progressive for a suburban backwater burg like Webster. I suppose I wasn't really looking hard enough to know for sure, but my first impression was that it looked like a Billy Ray Cyrus concert in there. Was there a concurrent Rainbow Coalition meeting downtown?
I regret
… Not having a picture taken with Lucy, the girl I hated in fifth grade (when she was dating Richard), liked in seventh grade (when she was dating not-me) and who treated me to the most entertaining conversation of the night, a five-minute barrage of sentiment and profanity that resembled a mash-up of Bette Midler and Dr. Dre. I also should have taken pictures of the teeming mass of familiar faces in the lobby, the (possibly bionic) woman in the showgirl-red dress and Meghan's valiant-but-dubious efforts to "get the party started" on the dance floor.
… For that matter, I should have helped Meghan get the party started by leading Table 1 onto the dance floor for some rhythmic gyrations, but I was concerned that the hypnotic movements of my hips and tush, combined with the crowd's alcoholic intake, would cause otherwise avoidable automotive accidents and/or nausea.
… I would have liked to say hello to Laurie, or Jennifer, or Brandon's wife, Christianne, but I never gained the required momentum. I barely know Brandon at all; he and I never shared so much as an "excuse me," But Christianne – a graduate of Mercy High School in Rochester – used to work with me at Heberle's Farm Market when we were 16, and I would have like to ask her if she had ever any inkling what our boss was doing when he went into the walk-in freezer for fifteen minutes at a time and came out sniffling and wiping his moustache.
But mostly, I learned
… That sometimes, you can go home again. Even it only lasts about six hours.
I had a great time. It was great seeing everyone, talking with everyone, reminiscing about the Hotties of 1995 (Mmm, Alicia Silverstone) and being reminded that there's no big rush to get old. Sometimes it's nice to stop aging for a night. Thank you, organizers, for working your flux capacitor magic. And thanks, everyone who made it back. And thanks, Madam Fate, for keeping Matt Chatfield the hell away from me.
In retrospect, I'm not sure which image I was trying harder to protect: my view of myself, 18 years old, hale and hardy with a bright dawn on the horizon; or those precious, pristine memories of the comfortable school bus that got me where I am now. As it turns out, all of those images escaped intact – and more valued for the viewing.
I'll be damned if I'm going back in another ten years, though. Unless there are Fiestadas. And Maria: bring some of that Viagra.
Click here for more pictures.
