Apathetic Class of 1977

My 30th high school reunion was supposed to be last year; it didn't happen. There wasn't even talk of it until, oddly enough, December of last year, when someone sent out an email to as many people as he knew saying we had to be the lamest class of all time.

So, one person took up the challenge of leading the contingent, and she invited as many people who wanted to come to the planning meeting as possible. Even though I wasn't all that popular, for reasons I won't go into now, I decided to show up to see how I felt about it all, and see if I could offer to help.

A brief word about my high school. We had a graduating class of almost 900 kids. The school was so big they actually built a second school behind us just to hold the 9th graders. I only went two years, and was overwhelmed by the size of the school for nearly the entire period I was there. We were broken up alphabetically by floor and area, and we had six different areas that were called houses. Most of my classes were with people whose last names were close to mine; only science classes and gym class allowed us to mingle, not including lunch. Our graduation took so long that I don't remember a single thing about the day except seeing my first lava lamp at someone's house at a graduation party; I have no idea whose house nor who I went with, or when I got home; and I don't drink!

Still, it leaves a big pool of people from which I expected a nice number of people might show up for this event. I got there and there was only one person, who I didn't recognize but knew had to be the leader, and it was; her name is Cheryl. Within 10 minutes two more people had shown up, one I remembered well enough named Gary who I used to play cards against, and another I didn't recognize, but realized after awhile that I had met named Kevin.

I had bad feelings about the whole thing at this point, but decided I'd help out by running a class blog where we could post information. Over the next bunch of months email was sent out, phone calls here made, and a lot of people were contacted. Commitments were made, hotels were booked, planning was made for a dinner and a picnic. I still had this feeling that things weren't going to go according to plan. the other people on the committee thought at least 200 people would show up; I said I thought we'd be lucky if we got 50, and that was including spouses.

With a month to go, my fears were realized. Cheryl only received checks from 12 people, including me; that pretty much canceled dinner. Within the next week we canceled the picnic also, and decided to set up a happy hour. That was last night, and, for me, it wasn't a disaster, but it didn't go as planned. The happy hour was held at a very popular local restaurant and bar, and there were at least 300 people inside and outside the place. After 30 years, I only recognized one person at the happy hour, and he was from the class after mine. Seems they had been scheduled to go to another restaurant and bar a couple of blocks away, but they, at least he, had the same problem of recognizing anyone and came over to ours, hoping to see anyone else he knew, which was one guy from my class I'd never met before.

So, I didn't know almost anyone; from my class, that is. I did see an old friend that I hadn't seen in about five years and his wife, who didn't go to my high school. And I met one of the local television news anchors, who, it turns out, graduated from my high school in 1983 and was there looking for members of his graduating class, who were also meeting at this same restaurant and bar, and he was having problems recognizing people and couldn't find his wife; wow. We talked with our friends about 5 minutes, then decided to go to dinner with each other and end the farce of the high school reunion.

And we did. Olive Garden was great, followed by the X-Files movie, and my 30th high school reunion was a success, though for the wrong reasons. Once again, proof that you can't wish anything positive for others, only for yourself. I had a good day.