This weekend I will be going to my high school reunion-but it’s one with a twist. It encompasses all years. My class('71) was the next to the last class, due to school consolidation. I joked and told my husband that at least we would be some of the youngest graduates there…
To those of you who’ve attended this sort of thing- was it fun?
Or did it just bring back all the crap?
It is starting to freak me out…
I have never been to one, as I didn’t finish high school, but it seems to me that if you are worried about bringing back “all the crap” that you haven’t learned anything in all those years.
Does that sound realistic? No, I didn’t think so.
Go and have some fun, relive a few memories (good and bad), be amazed by what happened to others in the intervening years. I can’t help but think it will be great.
djm
Yeah, I do think it will be fun, but it’s weird too.
I did not like high school. I walked the fine line of getting good grades-class salutatorian, cheerleader (until I hit my rebellious stage), band geek, troublesome outrageous rebel, and all around weird hippie girl.
After all these years, I’m still the same person-in my mind anyway.
I went to my 10th reunion. It was okay. My graduating class was about 700 people, about 250 showed up for the 10th reunion. I knew three or four people there. None of the people I hung out with were there.
So it depends on a lot of things. For class of 71, attending with a spouse that went to the same school, it will probably be a good time. If it isn’t, it is easy enough to talk about high school times between the two. Having all the classes there will make it less likely to see people you know. However, if it was a small school in a small town, everyone will know everyone and be able to talk about everyone there and not there.
I definitely would vote yes on going. At worst it is a few dollars for tickets and a few hours spent. At best it will bring back a lot of good memories and maybe turn up a lost friend or three. That’s an easy decision. A 10th reunion or something like that would mean some folks are more into comparisons, but with that much time (36 years), people are usually mostly happy to be above ground and that other folks they know are still above ground.
Watch Gross Point Blank before you go.
My tenth reunion is supposed to be this July. We had a graduating class of 300, and apparently less than half a dozen people have expressed enough interest to actually help with the preparations (and deposits). It’s in danger of being called off.
Mine was the apathetic generation…!
My University keeps sending me stuff inviting me to reunions.
I would rather pluck out my eyeballs and fry them.
Part of that is the agoraphobia, of course. And failing your degree doesn’t really incline you to these things. But the real killer is the knowledge that it’s a fundraising event, and they just want to get their hooks into me for as much as they can. It’s like saying “Fine, how much?” to a blackmailer. You’d never be free of them.
with that much time (36 years), people are usually mostly happy to be above ground and that other folks they know are still above ground.
I’m gonna be laughin’ at that all day…and thinkin’ how true it is.
Go, you’ll enjoy watching what passing time has done with all those fleshy bodies. I even couldn’t recognize some of the guys.
This is realistic.
And it’s exactly why I really did enjoy my 10th, 20th, and 25th reunions.
It was an opportunity to talk to people who’d actually grown up, and were interesting, solid people. It helped that I brought my husband who, being the proprietor of the local hardware store, knew more of the “kids” who’d hung around than I did. I also had a couple of close friends there to fall back on. But what surprised me, and made it really worthwhile, was to find someone who I’d known only peripherally in high school, and find out–for example–that the awkward, dorky guy in my AP U.S. History class had turned into an attractive, gay, successful landscape architect, or that some of the snobby cheerleaders had turned into really nice people.
And, for the record, I felt kind of like a space alien when I was in high school.
My family moved from a perfectly good city where I went to a perfectly good junior high school and had perfectly good friends to a small backwater Kansas town the day before I was supposed to start 10th grade. The place was so socially stagnant and inbred that half the teachers had taught my parents before the war (WWII – the Big One), and I was the new kid for two and a half years. I had my things packed and in the car the day after graduation. When I write my biography (The Life of Gonzo), I will entitle this chapter “Contrition.”
So, no, I didn’t make it to the 10-year reunion, nor the 20, nor the 35 (30 was apparently skipped due to lack of interest). There is not enough liquor in Kansas to get me back to one of those.
My recommendation would be to give it a pass, unless there will be someone there you’d like to slap the crap out of, in which case, I’d say “Go for it.” The penalty for misdemeanor battery is probably only a fine of a couple of hundred dollars and a few months probation, and I can think of several people from high school I’d pay $200 to get to smack them upside the head.
I think it’s great when people want to go to their reunions. If you think it will or might be fun, then I think it will be, at worst, okay and maybe even really fun.
For myself, I also would rather, as IB said,
…pluck out my eyeballs and fry them.
I don’t think it might or will be fun for me.
I was one miserable teenager—not because of school so much, it was just everything. I remember a girl on the school bus asking me if I thought high school was the best part of life. I said, I sure hope not. She said her sister said college was a lot better. We both seemed to derive a little hope from that.
I was working late one night at a customer’s site in Slough. The (internal company) Mail Clerk said something ending in “…Schooldays are the best days of your life!”
I looked at him. The woman at the next desk (who I didn’t know) looked at him. There were only the three of us in the office. I said, “no, I didn’t enjoy School that much.”
He asked, “Well how would you put it then?”
I said “The best of times is now.”
The woman nodded and said “exactly.”
We talked on for a bit, and it became clear that at school he was an athlete, and (reading between the lines) something of a bully. Didn’t do the work and ended up as Mail Clerk. Whereas woman and I did the work, got pushed around by the athletic crowd, and sometimes had a rough time, but ended up with some kind of reasonable job. It seemed to be a suspicion borne out by example.
I’ve never had any interest in high school reunions. As someone mentioned above, it’s just a fundraiser for the school… and the tickets are ridiculously priced.
I never cared much for high school. I never joined clubs, played on school teams, and I never went to school functions that weren’t mandatory. I did what I had to to get through and I did well but the good times in that stage of my life were had outside of the school with the people that I am still in contact with (mostly). Anyone that I wanted to keep in touch with from school, I did so. Some of the relationships fizzled over the years and a reunion probably wouldn’t change that. If I wanted to get in touch with anyone that badly I’m sure I could track 'em down via the internet if I really wanted to.
I also don’t like the fact that many people go there to compare their success (by their standards) with others or to prove something… sounds a little too much like high school for me.
I can definitely see the appeal it would have to some but it’s not for me.
never went to one. The people I care to know about, I still communicate with - the others I could care less.
However, I’d love to go to a multi-year reunion of my gradeschool. Only because two “alumni” of it are George Clooney (3 years younger) and Dan Patrick (3 years older - and that isn’t his real last name)!
I’ve gone to every single one of them (35th was the last, 40th in 3). I enjoy seeing the “adults” of the group as opposed to the campus clowns of yore.
The closest I ever came to attending a school reunion was the wake of a parent of one of my daughter’s friends.
His daughter had earlier told my daughter that her parents knew me from HS.
At the wake his widow told me a lot of the people we’d gone to HS with were there, but I didn’t recognise him, her or anyone. We were all 30 years older and I imagined we looked very different from what we did back then. Since she was busy with family, after chatting with her I mingled with who she pointed me towards for a while to appear sociable.
It was a big class, a thousand students. I’d never learned the names of everyone.
I had no idea who I was chatting with until people started talking about old times
and then I realized they were the people who used to do things like lock me in my gym locker and other cruelties.
I quietly made my exit before they figured out who I was.
I went to my tenth, but skipped the ones since (20, 25, 30, 40). If we make it to 50, maybe I’ll go just to see who’s left.
My take on high school reunions is that they’re for two groups of people - those who want to remember those ‘wonderful’ times and those who want to brag on what they’ve done since. I hated high school and, as I told someone else recently, my sucess in life was to have achieved a lifetime of comfortable mediocrity and anonymity. Nothing to brag on either, unless you count still having my own hair
I skipped the 10th, but went to my class’ 20th reunion (Class of '85 WOOO! ). I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. On one hand I expected people to be the same as they’d been in school. On the other, I hoped that since we were all nearing 40 that we’d pretty much be over ourselves and just be happy to see one another.
I was really quite pleasantly surprised. Yes, there was sort of a surreal quality to the whole thing - in my mind they were all still the kids I went to school with, and here I was suddenly confronted with near-middle aged adults.
After the initial weirdness went away, we all had a great time.
I’m looking forward to our 25th. 
All I ever wanted from High School was the F*** outta there, and if they ever had a reunion, I’m glad that no one ever troubled me with the news.