The years have gone by rather quickly and I find myself approaching my 10-year high school reunion in a few years. So I wonder how many of you attended your reunion and how did it go? Is it anything like what you see on movies/TV (sans the zaniness or maybe not…)?
I went to my 20th high school reunion. It was in-teresting.
Nope. I didn’t care about most of those people when I was in school with them, and I care even less about them now.
I’ve been out of high school for 13 years. My brothers and sister attended the same school after me.
We’ve never heard of any reunions at the school…
I went to my 5-year and had a really good time. Saw a bunch of old friends, a hell of a lot more people I “sorta knew.” (my graduating class was over 900). I was able to get back in touch with a few people that I hadn’t ment to lose touch with. It wasn’t anything like in movies, in the sense that it wasn’t held at a gymnasium, no cheesy band, etc. We had the upstairs of an Italian restaurant, and had a pretty good dinner. Only a couple people got completely trashed.
A few people were “just like they always were, only more so,” and others had changed A LOT. I am planning on attending my 10-year (this year) if at all possible.
Sure. Tenth and 20th. (Couldn’t make the 30th because of a conflict.)
Had a good time each time (the second was very poorly organized, though).
Been to my 10th and 20th, and to my wife’s 10th. Hers was better, and much better attended. But all in all it was a couple of fun weekends.
The invitation to my 10th reunion promised that it would be “the best damn time you’ve ever had in your whole life.” So I didn’t go–I don’t want to hang out with people for whom a 10th high school reunion is the high point of life.
Oh, suuurrrre. :rolleyes: I’m going to shell out $80 a plate to sit in a room with a bunch of people who didn’t want to give me the time of day twenty years ago? Yah, right.
Of my graduating class of (500? 600?) I can think of maybe four or five people I might actually want to talk to. Easier just to talk them down and surprise them with a phone call.
Only being out of highschool for not even a whole year yet I can’t say that I’ve been to a reunion, but I have every intention of going to my grad reunion and the year after that, I got caught in the double cohort (Ontario thing)
I can never think of a reason to go other than ‘the spectacle’ it would produce. I see all of my high school friends each time I visit my hometown (my parents still live there) so a high school reunion is a meeting of strangers to me; I never associated with these people. My 20th is coming up in 2006, I don’t think I’ll be going to it.
I went to my 10th reunion in 1995). It was weird but I’m glad I did it.
I was nervous about going because:
(1) I always felt kind of out of step with most people in my high school. I never really got picked on or anything, but was basically the smart kid who read a lot and didn’t drink and didn’t have a girlfriend all through high school (Ok, I had one girl friend at the VERY end of senior year, but that’s another story for another time).
(2) 10 years out of high school, I was still in grad school, living on a grad student stipend, and I thought everyone else was probably doing much better financially than I was.
(3) I had just broken up with my girlfriend, and I thought that everyone else would be married to wonderful attractive soulmates and there would be me standing there by myself.
In other words, I thought I was going to feel like a geek and a failure because everyone else would be wildly successful and I was still trying to figure out what the hell to do with my life.
It didn’t really turn out quite that way. It was kind of weird, and I did feel some of my old insecurities flaring up (insecurities that I had not felt much in the intervening 10 years) such as when a very attractive woman who I thought I had been pretty good friends with couldn’t remember my name.
But mostly, when I met my fellow alums (many of whom I had not seen since graduation) it seemed to me that everyone was kind of just doing the best they could in life, and absolutely nobody (and this was actually the big surprise) was at all interested in posturing or getting competitive or anything.
One thing I’m ashamed of. There was this one guy in high school who was kind of a loner and I guess kind of an oddball. He always used to dress like Prince, and I think (I never really knew him) tried to insist that people call him “Prince.” Anyway, he showed up at the reunion in kind of an urban cowboy outfit–which is WAY out of place in Portland, Oregon–and I remember kind of goofing on him a little bit behind his back–in that way that the 3rd least popular kid goofs on the least popular kid. I shouldn’t have done that, I should have just walked up and said hello. I guess not an earthshaking matter, but I still feel like kind of a jerk about it 8 years later.
Constantine
My 10th came up in 2001. I didn’t go to it - we weren’t a highly active class, and I’m not sure there was much going on for the reunion. I may go back for the 20th, depending on where I am and what’s going on schedule wise.
My 10th college reunion comes up in 2005. By that time I’ll be a year out of grad school, and I really hope to make it. I couldn’t make the 5-year for that because of scheduling conflicts (I was out of the country).
My ten-year reunion was held in 1998. I have not received any word on whether or not a 15-year reunion will be held this year (I was never informed of a five-year reunion being held if there was one at all.) I tentatively planned to attend it, but by the time I had been informed of the date I already had plans to be out of town that weekend. I really didn’t feel like it was worth attending anyway. Most of the people I went to school with were jerks and I wasn’t very popular. Also, the high school I attended through my juinior year split into two schools when a new school was built. I went to the new school for my senior year and graduated from it. Most of my friends lived closer to the old school and graduated from it instead, so I lost touch with a lot of them before I even graduated. Thew few people I still knew in my senior year weren’t really that close of acquaintences. Lastly, I’m still single, and at the time of my 10th reunion I had a crappy job, so I didn’t have much to show for then. On the other hand, I’m sure many of my classmates had been married and divorced and may have been out of work altogether. Even if I went to the reunion I know I would end up making a lot of unfulfilled promises to get in touch with the people I hadn’t seen since graduation. I don’t have any plans to attend the 15-year reunion if it’s held, nor the 20th.
My 20th was last summer. I didn’t go to in nor to my 10th and have no regrets. My class was around 6-700 people and I knew 50 or 60 of them. I am still in contact with 4 people from those days and one of them went. He told me that everyone he talked to asked specifically about me (we knew pretty much the same people). That was kind of cool but I’m still never going to go to a High School reunion.
Haj
My 10th was a big party, my 20th was to see how bad everyone else had aged and my 30th – well, my best friend from high school wanted me to go with him because his wife wouldn’t go and it was a long drive. It was okay, though.
However, Mrs. Kunilou’s 25th reunion found her seated next to someone who spent the entire dinner telling her who exactly in the world would be saved and who would go to hell. She has no desire to attend another one.
I wanted to go to my 10 year reunion. But, I was sort of a nerd and the three people I was friends with now are still my friends. I asked them if they were going, but they were nerds too and had no desire to relive the hell that was high school. Since no one wanted to go, we didn’t.
I did however order a memory book. In the book, it gave a brief biography on all of the students since high school. My friends and I really wish we had gone now. As it turned out, so far, we are the most successful people from our class.
Skipped the 10th & 20th.
Plan on skipping the 30th.
Will be dead by the 40th.
I went to my 10th, and had a nice, if not amazing time. Most of the people I would really have liked to see didn’t come; we were sort of the misfits, and I’m sure they would echo the sentiments of those posters who think “I’m still in touch with the people I liked, and why should I bother with the ones who didn’t give a damn about me 10 years ago?” (That, and we were a bunch of hardcore geeks, so I’d guess many of them were in the throes of dissertation research or something similar.)
It was nice, though, to see what some of the people I wasn’t close friends with (but still liked), or only sort of knew, had done with their lives so far, especially the ones I’d known in grade school, or been in non-academic classes like choir with, or who had been rather quiet in H.S. but had gone on to do some neat stuff. (The theater dept. at my HS was very strong - John Cusack was a couple of years ahead of me - and some of my classmates had started a very successful Chicago-style improv troupe in Amsterdam.) I was also surprised at how many people remembered me who I hardly remembered at all, and vice versa.
I brought my S.O. at the time; he was Russian, and they don’t do that kind of thing, and I think he was pretty much bored to tears. For the 20th, if I go, I won’t bring a date unless we’re either married or in some sort of super-serious relationship. The whole point is to catch up with people, so why torture a guest and distract from your purpose at the same time? And no, nobody got plastered that I saw, but we didn’t stay to the end. The bad sucked, though.
I’d probably enjoy going to my next HS reunion.
Well, I say “enjoy”; what I really mean is “be able to tolerate”.
Well, I say “be able to tolerate”; what I really mean is “have my eyeballs shaved by a rabid gibbon wielding a rusty cheese grater before I even thought about considering”.
Thank you, Mark LaMarr.