HIGHSCHOOL REUNION - LOVE IT AND HATE IT

For guaranteed high drama of the everyday sort, it’s hard to beat a highschool reunion. They can surprise us either way: with all-too-familiar humiliations or wonderful and lovely surprises. In particular, the highschool reunion that occurs ten years after escape from secondary education has acquired a reputation for excessive amounts of joy and disappointment.

Only a decade out of high school, less than a decade out of their teens, alumni tend to regard their tenth reunion with high anticipation. The potential for disappointment can be equally large. Attendees will vary widely between those well on the way to the peak of their career to those still hanging on in post-graduate schooling. The highly successful graduates may be just as insecure as the searchers. A few deaths and divorces may already have occurred.

Just the prospect of a highschool reunion may reawaken hopes and fears about one’s physical fitness and attractiveness. People may wonder whether anyone else will be particularly impressed by their achievements. Some may fear they’ll regress to the stereotypical roles they got assigned back in their school days. Men and women will try to solve their body issues at the gym, pushing to get that perfect figure, or at least as good as they’re apt to have. Shopping malls and boutiques may expect to see women on the prowl for a winning outfit.

In sum, it’s generally acknowledged that many folks try too hard, both in anticipation of the tenth highschool reunion, and on the nights and days of the event itself. Naturally, this has provided excellent dramatic fodder for Hollywood films and cable TV shows.

The 1997 comedy “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion” depicted a pair of 28-year-old LA blondes who go back to Sagebrush High in Tucson, Arizona for their tenth reunion. They make up a false story about their supposed success in life, and dress in business suits, but of course it all goes wrong.

That same year, a comedy thriller called “Grosse Pointe Blank” also used a tenth highschool reunion as a hook in its plot. The hero, a professional hit man played by John Cusack, returns to his upper-class Michigan hometown for a job but really doesn’t want his classmates, especially the old girlfriend he dumped, to know what he does for a living.

That movie incorporated another cliché of the genre: running into an old flame at the highschool reunion who turns out to be just as wonderful, or totally unappealing. Another angle is the person worshiped from afar back in high school who turned out to possess similar but equally secret feelings in return. This happens often enough at real-life reunions that the notion persists in people’s fantasies. Quite a few people actually do rekindle a romance and marry an old high school girlfriend or boyfriend, after divorce or death has taken their spouse in the mean time.

It was probably inevitable that highschool reunions would enter the realm of reality television. The WB network debuted such a show, imaginatively titled “High School Reunion,” in 2003. A successor on the TV Land cable network opted to cover twentieth reunion classes in Richardson, Texas; Chandler, Arizona; and Las Vegas, Nevada.


For more helpful information, I recommend Memory Lane.