Excuses

There is an entire magazine devoted to reunions.  I don't know what this must be like for its staff, but to an outside observer, it’s one of those publications that you can’t imagine an audience for, like Minature Donkey Talk or Modern Drunkard (these are actual publications that I am not going link to, lest they return the favor, so you will have to trust me). Issues feature reunion themes like “mermaids,” “plantations,” Ya Gotta Regatta,” and “Wild West.” Articles offer “reunion recipes,” and tips for reunion safety as well as surviving “the reunion committee from hell.” On a more somber note are features like “How Reunions Change People” and “Class Reunions as Catharsis.”

The magazine has its own website, and the whole project seems designed for the uber-planner, someone who does not want to miss one detail, because that will be the detail that ruins the reunion for everyone. But mostly, it seems determined to convince its readers that no, reunions are not as bad as they seem in the movies or on TV, and that it is the job of good planners to help attendees overcome their reunion resistance (it has a "top ten reasons people do not attend reunions" which did not include my reason for sitting out our 15th: sprayed by skunk, or the 20th: work thing requiring red polo shirt and lots of pep.) With the right amount of planning, the message seems to be, a reunion can be welcoming and fun.

Back in 1997, on a Christmas Break from graduate school, I went to the (dearly departed) Gilford cinemas—the one in the Osco/Star strip mall—to see a nearly empty showing of Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion with my friend Elizabeth, who was living in Boston at the time. It was not a good film by any standard, but we really liked one scene in particular. The class depicted in the film was from the 1980s, and while they looked far older than we do, in my opinon, it was a ten-year reunion. It was so over-the-top:  the metallic pastel suits (who wears a pastel pantsuit to a reunion? Besides Hillary Clinton?), the predatory leers of the grown up mean girls, just waiting to trip up poor Lisa Kudrow. And there I was, 28 years old--in the same theater I had seen serious movies like Out of Africa and the Color Purple with Kate Flaherty and Steve Norton and a group of other seniors eleven years before--back in Gilford and watching Romy and Michelle instead of writing my dissertation, traveling the world, getting married, having kids, or inventing post-its.

And that's sort of why I missed the 10th one, too. If Reunion magazine has it right, though, good organizing--perhaps a luau or dance fever theme--might have made all the difference.