My 30th high school reunion is coming up next month. I bought a ticket and followed the reunion Facebook page, after a lot of debate.
I keep in touch with about twenty high school friends. I see a handful regularly; others are Christmas card exchangers. Because of Facebook, I have gotten back in touch with a few more. But there are large numbers of high school classmates that I can’t remember at all. Sometimes these strangers ask to be Facebook friends. I always say yes, but feel really guilty, because I have no memories of them.
To avoid the discomfort of high school classmate amnesia, I wasn’t going to bother with the reunion. But the event is only a couple towns away and my friend, Pam, begged for me to join her. So, I sent in a check to a woman who had been my best friend in seventh grade and then defriended me in eighth grade when she moved up the social hierarchy.
Like any high school, there was a group of girls inaccurately described as the popular girls. They didn’t actually have friends beyond their small group, because they wouldn’t talk to anybody else. Maybe their popularity was based on their relationships with the football team. I wasn’t in many classes with them and I certainly can’t remember any of their names, but I do remember making a wide circle around them in the hallway and being intimidated by their capacity to fill out a bathing suit and their perfectly feathered hair. It’s New Jersey, so good hair was one of the key components of popularity.
Well, those girls started posting high school pictures of themselves on the Facebook page, and my disgust and fear is all coming back. 30 years later and those girls women are still all LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME. And I’m all like EW. I am increasingly uneasy about going to this reunion dinner.
Apt. 11d 
Oh, I want you to go ’cause I really want to hear about it.
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Ha, I agree with bj.
But I skipped my 10 and 20 year reunions, don’t really plan on going to 30, either. I was neither popular nor an unpopular in high school. The whole experience was perfectly fine, no major trauma, but I don’t live in the past and I certainly don’t want to revisit my teenage years. I like adulthood much better, thank you very much.
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Ugh, I went to my 10 year reunion. NEVER again. But I hope your experience is, um, less awful.
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I went to my 10 year reunion, where I touched base with my former best friend, from whom I’d grown apart simply because of different lives (I went to college, she stayed home; I got married, she came out as a lesbian), so that’s cool. In fact, she just commented on my FB for the first time in a long time. I missed my 30 year reunion in August because it was the same weekend as a planned trip with my sisters and our families. I felt bad. 😦 But I looked at the photos (posted on FB, of course) and I too had high school amnesia. I remember some names with fondness, some names not at all, and no one looks the same. So weird.
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My high school amnesia combined with living a long distance away from my Midwest childhood home means that I have no shame or regret about declining to attend these events. You have my sympathies!
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I’m almost certainly going to my 25th this summer even though it means planning a family trip around it plus driving three hours. I graduated with only 16 others. I’d been in school with a good portion of them since first grade and went to college with about a third of them. Plus, I’m not appreciably fatter than I was the last time I saw them all at some wedding.
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Stupid form memory.
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I have HS amnesia, and I went to a school with a graduating class of 48.
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Facebook. *Sigh* The space where you can never truly escape high school.
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There’s a 30 Rock episode about Liz Lemon’s high school reunion where Liz goes, thinking that she was the dorky, unpopular girl that the popular girls were mean to, and discovers that everybody else remembers her as a mean girl who made everybody else’s life hell with her cutting remarks.
I’ve missed my reunions. It’s really far away and because I skipped 8th grade and 12th grade, I somehow get invited to the wrong class reunion. If it were closer, I’d go, even to the wrong event. Our graduating classes had around 70 kids (I believe my graduating class had 66 in it). Half I wouldn’t remember at all, a quarter I didn’t care one way or the other about, an eighth I probably actively disliked, and another eighth I’d love to see. That’s an awful lot of chaff to sort through to see the people you actually want to see.
For my 10 year reunion, we were supposed to submit a little what-I’ve-been-doing thing. I think the one I wrote was horribly braggy. The only other one I remember was one from a guy who had spent some time in a band and decided to change his lifestyle after waking up naked on a stranger’s lawn. Yep, that’ll do it.
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decided to change his lifestyle after waking up naked on a stranger’s lawn
Persistence is important. According to Malcolm Gladwell, it takes 10,000 hours to become expert at something. He probably spent only a small fraction of that amount of time naked in strangers’ lawns.
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I’ll have to re-watch that 30 Rock episode, AmyP. Reminds me of my own local version of Liz Lemon – a delightful, snarky girlfriend of mine who once asked me why none of the other women in our town (“all those mean popular girls” blah blah blah…) ever seem to want to connect with her. The truth is, she’s the real Mean Girl and they’ve all been scared away by her witty wicked tongue. (But, of course, Liz will hear none of it.)
Laura, you are spot on about how in “any high school, there was a group of girls inaccurately described as the popular girls.” The real most popular girls (aka the Homecoming Queen, Prom Queen) were never the most attractive girls – instead they were cute, respectable, and were well-liked by a lot of different cliques because they were genuinely kind people who were genuinely fun to be around.
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My grandpa graduated from high school in the late 30s and has lived in the same town ever since returning from WWII. A few years back, he went to a multiple year high school reunion (there being so few of that vintage that it made sense to roll together a bunch of years). Grandpa had a great time at the reunion. At that point, I suppose, you’re happy to see anybody roughly your age alive and walking around.
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Oh man, I went to my 20th a few years ago–like 7 years I guess. It was a little wonky. A cheerleader recently friended me on Facebook, and I thought, you didn’t speak to me in HS and now you’re friending me? I have to admit that watching my FB feed depresses me. It makes me feel like I’m back in HS, negotiating all the weirdo politics of mean girls, jocks, etc. There’s a group of HS classmates that visit each other all the time, have a yearly trip somewhere, etc. And they post pictures of these events, and I think, oh yeah, like in HS when I didn’t get invited to the party that everyone talks about on Monday.
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I’m also class of ’83, but I skipped my 30th earlier this summer. I did go to the 20th, which was pleasant enough, but I keep in touch with the 7-8 people I care about (a few of whom went to the 20th with me, which made it more fun) – the fates of the others just don’t interest me much.
I do have two other FB friends from HS that I don’t care about – they friended me when I first signed up and I just haven’t felt like cutting them off – but I wouldn’t keep anybody on my FB feed that I didn’t like or whose presence stressed me out. (The only FB posts that depress me that I am willing to put up with are those where otherwise delightful people go on and on about how great their spouses are.)
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geekymom, unfriend them or hide them! Life is too short.
I went to my 10th and was cured of any desire to do that again. I did enjoy seeing pictures from my 30th on Facebook (I joined the reunion group temporarily) and man, the meanest girl from my grade school is now really fat and has not aged well at all. I feel like a jerk enjoying it as much as I do.
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“I went to my 10th and was cured of any desire to do that again.”
I remember reading that the 10th is supposed to be the really bad one and that it gets better from 20 on. Of course, Facebook may have changed that.
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I went to my 25th over the summer. It was local, so I felt like I really didn’t have a good excuse not to go. It was neither better nor worse than I expected it to be. A few fun moments, a few people I feel better about now that I have a new image to superimpose over the old, less favorable one. There was the same group of “popular” girls/women present, and some of them were just as they ever were, or at least they were projecting that image. But others had become (or perhaps always were) really lovely, pleasant people. I find that the strangest part of these sorts of things is coming face to face with other people’s outdated and likely always erroneous impressions of me. It can feel a little sad to walk away with the sense that most all of these people never really knew me. On the other hand, it is a reminder that I likely never knew them either, and a useful kick in the pants to remind me to strive for both authenticity and generosity in my own life. So, over all, not necessarily a lot of fun, but certainly good medicine.
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“But others had become (or perhaps always were) really lovely, pleasant people.”
Oh, yes. There was a guy from the class of ’93 that I rode the bus with in high school who was a pervy, lying weirdo, generally attired in a black trench coat (that was years before Columbine). He allegedly had an “out of town girlfriend” and a college wrestling scholarship despite not being on the high school team and not having an athletic bone in his body. I also seem to recall him going out with much, much younger girls (probably because his female high school classmates wouldn’t have touched him with a 20-foot pole). He once told a friend of mine (apropos of nothing) that he’d like to [bleep] her brains out, which from him sounded REALLY disturbing. He had various sad tales of woe about his mom, although it was never possible to tell what was for real and what was pure invention. I have no doubt, though, that his home life was terrible.
Years later, my sister bumped into him and she told me that he was actually a normal guy. Considering what he was like in high school, turning into a normal guy was a pretty amazing achievement.
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Yes to the outdated impressions. At brunch recently I ran into a guy I had worked with straight out of university. It was unsettling because he just could not adjust to me “now” and kept responding/acting to the me “then”.
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Sadly our 25 year was just cancelled! Boo! For our 20 year we had a turnout of 140 (that includes some spouses). We have had the highest turnout among all classes, but since our 20 year it seems lots of folks moved out of the tri state area. Our class was huge with 480 people, and even though there are still some residual feelings folks tend to enjoy this. I always miss the folks who don’t attend. My favorite victory story: a woman was slightly overweight in HS returned to our 10 year as a knock out! I love these stories.
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it seems lots of folks moved out of the tri state area.
Doofenshmirtz got to be too much to deal with?
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My old high school boyfriend recently posted his gay wedding announcement on facebook. My kids found it kind of unsettling. I like hearing what my high school classmates are up to, particularly the ones that have stayed in the area where I grew up. We went to a small Catholic high school and I find it fascinating what a diverse group of people we have become — some really conservative, some not so much. A lot of really cool social activists among us. But no, I have never been to a reunion and probably never will — you see, ours is always the day after Thanksgiving and (this is so embarrasing), my husband never wants to go because it conflicts with deer hunting season. (We’re just a bunch of rednecks.)
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“My old high school boyfriend recently posted his gay wedding announcement on facebook.”
The only boy who danced with me the one time I went to homecoming eventually came out.
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Late to the game but…. go! I went to my 30th (the only one we had) and reconnected with someone I didn’t even remember being friends with — he saw me as I walked into the room adn the look on his face was one of the most gratifying I’ve ever seen. I talked with him for a long, long, time, and also with a girl who told me, once she had won my confidence, how much she dsliked me in high school and why. And another girl, whom I didn’t recognize, acted like I was her best long lost friend. Only after she left did someone point out who she had been — the quiet girl I fancied but never had the courage to talk to. Everyone was likable, even the girl who hated me thoroughly and was later the center of a national political scandal. In their late 40s everyone has had some real defeats in life, and at an event like that they seem able to let it out. My only regret is that I spent so little time talking to the girl I was most friends with — we talked afterwards, and we both held back from the other because we didn’t want to pressure the other into talking. Don’t make that mistake.
We were told, explicitly, not to bring spouses, which was an excellent idea.
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