I went to my 10-year reunion (Rogers High School, Class of '89, Newport, RI). The scary thing for me is that it doesn't seem that long ago yet in two years I'll be making a decision about whether I should go to my 20th.
I don't regret going to the 10-year. It was a small turnout (way less than 100 people, and the class numbered a few hundred originally) but there were a few people I'd lost touch with with whom I was glad to reconnect. Nobody did anything embarrassing. The worst thing was that the deejay sucked (they should have gotten someone who would play at least some of the stuff that was popular between '85 and '89; there at least should have been some frickin' INXS...). But that probably had to do with the classmate who organized it.
My friend Dave was the class president, and about a year or so before the reunion was slated to happen -- and he had been kicking around a few ideas with people -- this woman in our class (not even a class officer) took it upon herself to set up one of those godawful Classmates.com pages and basically pulled a hilarious/sad coup and took the planning over without his consent. His reaction? "Well that's weird. But f*ck, it..." Gooooo, Rogers!
So she ran with it. And it was pretty lame, at least venue-wise. She rented a hall at a golf course in Portsmouth, which, while still part of the island, is a good two towns over from our hometown, and nothing close to walking distance (Newport, on the other hand, has plenty of venues in walking proximity to neighborhoods, and a lot of the class who had stayed in the city were playing host to the since-moved-out-of-towners). See, our class was (and, it turned out, remained) chock full of drunks and drug addicts; we were the age group that was laughing when Nancy Reagan launched the Just Say No campaign -- great, let's cram the state roads with the class of 89 in party-nostalgia mode! Somehow, nobody got arrested, hurt, or killed.
There were several of my friends who opted out, and I think they just didn't think they were at a point where they wanted to have to explain what they were doing with their lives. But the vast majority of people who did show up were sort of in the same boat. Not a lot of doctors or lawyers at all; if there were any, they probably figured they were too good for it. So it was fun, overall. And I think the retrospection that it causes can be healthy. The oddness of it. Which was a lot of us ended up talking about.
The open bar was a nice touch, too.
