The Reunion

To begin with, a little background:

My highschool, like all highschool's, I'm sure, had it's drama and it's cliques. There was one clique, the "popular people" who were called the Beverlys. It was a nickname given to them due to their likeness (or wannabe likeness) to the affluent folks on the then popular Beverly Hills 90210. They adopted this nickname and made it their own, and even wrote things like, "Beverlys 4 ever" in their yearbook grad writeups.

While I have remained in contact with really only a smattering of people from highschool, and of those only two who I consider to be good friends, the Beverlys have stayed together. The reunion was originally scheduled to be a few weeks earlier, and I was totally on the fence about going. Harmony was unable to come, and our long planned Romy and Michelle style entrance was not going to be possible, so what, really, was the point? It turned out the event organizers had made a HUGE mistake . . . they had set the date of the reunion on the same day as one of the Beverlys was getting married! Oh, the humanity! An email was sent out saying that the date would have to be changed due to the "large number of people" who would be attending the wedding. This made me so fucking angry. I felt like in 10 years NOTHING had changed, so what was the point of going at all? What percentage of our grad class would be attending the wedding to justify changing the entire thing around? Such bullshit.

A friend bought me a ticket, so I was committed.

A couple of weeks out of the reunion I bumped into a couple of people who I hadn't really been friends with in highschool, but they seemed like alright folks, and we agreed that we'd go, and if it sucked we'd ditch out early and go get a drink somewhere. Before the reunion I met up with a good friend, and another guy who I'd actually gone to school with all the way from grade 1 or 2, and we had some dinner and (I felt) much needed drinks. Fueled by liquid courage, we went to the reunion.

Upon arriving my first thoughts were mainly, "who the heck is that?" and a table of "hello, my name is _______________" stickers quickly solved that problem. I felt pretty awkward for the first 15min or so, and the hairs on my neck were on end. A couple of gin and tonic's later, I was much more relaxed. I did the small talk thing with some people, didn't bother with some others, and made some surprisingly real connections with a select few. What surprised me the most was the lack of Beverly presence in the room. There were maybe five or six Beverly girls, and only a couple of Beverly boys who bothered to show up, and the kicker is, they all left early to go to a Beverly Halloween party! Thank god the entire reunion was rescheduled for that!

A guy I had always thought was pretty cool told me he had a crush on me in highschool! A number of people told me they had really hoped I was going to show up, and were glad to see me. One girl who I had always respected quite a bit told me that I stood out in her mind as the person who had changed the most over the 5 years of highschool, from wearing all black in grade 10 to becoming (in her words), a rainbow in grade 11, to seemingly figuring out who I was in grade 12. She told me she had always admired how blatant and obvious I was about trying to figure it all out, and she had felt intimidated and not known how to talk to me back then. It felt really good to hear that, and to know that someone had noticed when I really thought no one had. With the Beverly coningent gone, it seemed to become a room full of really interesting people who were fun to talk to. I talked to people who I had absolutely no recollection of whatsoever, but who were great, fun, people. I even left and went to some house parties with people who I would have never considered spending time with before.

I'm very glad I went. Going to the reunion has actually put an entirely new spin on my highschool experience, and made me feel remarkably better about it. I've made some new connections I'm very excited about following up on. Yesterday I made a phone call to a girl who I had exchanged phone numbers with, and it made me laugh when she said, "Didn't it make you so mad that the whole thing had to be rearranged for the Beverlys, and then hardly any of them showed up and those who did left early?"

Yep.