How to Plan a Failed High School Reunion
For years, people assumed I would plan my high school reunion. I always acted surprised at the idea. I hadn’t been class president; it wasn’t my job. But since 2008, I had been president of almost every club I touched, so this jump in logic was not without merit.
Nevertheless, I maintained it wasn’t my responsibility. “I’m not even sure I’ll attend the damned thing,” I’d say. While I did not hate high school, I felt particularly ambivalent about four years of growth spurts and 6 am alarms and did not want to commit to an unnecessary weekend in my hometown. But after the factual class president defriended everyone on Facebook six years ago, the assumption grew. “Who else is going to plan it?” a friend asked aloud.
Then this past February I opened a Facebook message to find myself assorted into the oddest collection of my high school peers, including the class VP, the most popular girl of my year who I crushed on for three years (THREE YEARS, help), two other former popular girls (well, if the in crowd was a real thing), a former Christian party girl now pregnant with her first child, a jock turned physical therapist (funny how that goes), and myself. The connection between our shoddy fellowship escaped me other than we all graduated the same year from the same school.
The missive declared that it was 2019. If we hadn’t realized, this was the year of our ten year reunion. What were we going to do about it?
For a few days, the group kicked around ideas and then shifted toward actionable items like making a Facebook page, creating a survey for alumni to fill out, and outlining vague details for a venue including catering and a band. Some of this came to pass, namely the Facebook page and survey. We collected nearly a hundred data points. People wanted the reunion in the summer or fall (groundbreaking!); they were willing to pay admission; and a lot of them wanted to bring plus ones.
Then no other action happened. I questioned whether I’d attend the eventual event that seemed destined to happen, but not by my active hand.
A month later, a high school friend not a part of the self-assembled planning committee asked if I was part of our high school’s Facebook group. Group? I knew we had a page; I was the admin of it. But group?
I quickly joined this rumored group only to find a classmate created this Facebook group a whole seven years ago specifically for our alumni and the imminent reunion. Except I had never heard of this classmate. Apparently she was real and had gone to our school; we had 50 mutual friends. But who was she? (For the reader’s reference, my graduating class numbered over 450.)
Starting last year, this classmate began posting about the reunion. She asked for ideas and who would go. But no action had been taken. Surprise! Same old story.
I contacted her to say we had a planning committee that had finalized some details (read: solidified ideas) and we’d love to pair up. Maybe this classmate would be the action officer we needed!
I added her to the Facebook chat that our planning committee had going. Immediately she added three more people—other high school classmates I remembered, but who had no evident role in this other than they just wanted to be there. The planning committee, already slothful and lacking aim, ballooned to an incomprehensible seventeen dolts that simply resulted in any singular message being sent only to be viewed by seventeen Facebook personas until three days later someone would reply, “Yeah, that sounds like a good idea!”
Same, Kayleigh, same. Except are you going to act on the idea?
Simultaneously, alumni outside our self-appointed planning committee grew restless. We told them details were coming, but since nothing had been announced except “it’s going to be ticketed and in the summer, hold your calendars,” people asked for more details (how dare they) and was it still happening. Someone even had the audacity to demand a reunion.
“How can we not have a reunion?” the woman posted, quite seriously. I don’t know, Ashley; these things don’t just happen—someone actually has to do them. Contrary to mistaken belief, high schools don’t host annual reunions for their past classes just because.
Personality assessments typically define me as an achiever. In fact, a test once foretold me as the sort of person to plan my high school reunion. That fortune cookie truth had stuck with me for some months, so now I sprang to action. I reached out to alumni who indicated they had connections with venues and also asked my high school if there were any leftover class funds. I shouldn’t have tried. Of course not. We were on our own.
I soon discovered planning a ticketed summer reunion when it was already June did not provide the timeline we needed. I proposed we structure the reunion around our high school’s homecoming game in October. That resulted in the new discovery that we were now competing with weddings and rehearsal dinners for venues whose budgets we could not bear. $7,000 for a private space? Sure, we’re all down for $70/head.
By luck, a classmate said he could waive the venue minimum if we had the reunion midday and a week before the homecoming weekend. Heck, I didn’t care about homecoming.
I put the idea to the planning committee. Silence. Just seventeen people who saw my message and no responses.
“We need to make a move on this,” I replied a week later to myself when two more people commented on our Facebook page about the reunion (“Is it happening?” Frankly, I don’t know).
“What if I told you,” one person on the committee replied, “I could get us a free venue in another city?”
Another city? This was our high school reunion. We came from a city of a half million people (Virginia Beach). Why would we go to another city? Thankfully, I did not have to point out the absurdity of the counter-offer. Two others replied short-living any hope of a high school reunion in any place but our hometown.
Back to the original question. I carefully wrote, “So if I book our reunion at this beach bar on a Saturday afternoon with $40 tickets covering two drinks and a taco bar, would you all go?”
More silence.
Finally, two girls spoke up. Yes, they’d go.
“Will the rest of you not go?” I dared ask.
Lots of views and no replies. Cowards.
I one-off messaged the affirmative girls. We decided to move forward as a reduced planning committee. For those who are familiar with Lord of the Rings, we were the hobbits committed to destroying the ring. I don’t know what the elves and dwarves were doing.
We needed to sell a hundred tickets. We could sell more, but to ensure the private space (which was still technically free minus food and beverage charges), we needed one hundred heads there. Which one hundred should not have been hard: we graduated in a class of over four hundred, people had spouses (not me), and we had three months to market. No problem, right? Wrong.
In the first month, we sold four tickets, including my own (I just wanted to test the Eventbrite page). We emailed the alumni. We posted on Facebook. We threatened that we only needed to sell ten more by a made up date when we really needed to sell 70.
At a happy hour, I vented to my friends at the irony that these alumni who complained for months that they needed a reunion and what were we going to do (I don’t know, Ashley!) could not now purchase a ticket to the very thing they wanted. With another drink on the table, I broke into further rant that maybe the ticket price was too high and maybe they wanted it to be in the evening, but they should try planning it themselves. I wasn’t upset or bitter, never.
“I don’t even know if I’ll go to it,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” a friend repeated when, the week before, tickets had only reached 30 sold (they never would go higher).
“It’s fine, I don’t care,” I replied. “Even if it doesn’t happen, at least I can say I planned it.”
The conversations also landed on the likely culprit: what purpose does a high school reunion serve if social media reveals all the dirt we all seek? We already know who’s married (and re-married), who has kids, how many, and how much weight someone has gained without showing up to drink bottom shelf liquor and eat stale nachos while reliving what were the supposed glory days if you didn’t mind the homework, acne, curfew, and adding water to your parents’ liquor cabinet. Facebook gives it all without the calories!
Several friends—not from high school—confessed their classes had had no reunion and/or they chose not to attend theirs.
“You’re the problem,” I chided them.
With 30 tickets sold, our abbreviated planning committee moved to refund the tickets and have alumni just show up at the bar at the appointed time. In the thirteenth hour, we turned to the original, simplest idea, a non-ticketed meetup—but not after months of plotting, accepting myriad friend requests from people I really didn’t remember, and coaching people how to use an Excel file of email addresses to email the class. I think I was most touched by two alum who donated to the event above and beyond their purchased tickets.
I canceled my train ticket home. I had no need to show up to a haphazard bar meetup even if I was the facilitator. Then, four days before the actual reunion, other life events necessitated I return home (namely, a dying family member). Now available and present, I pondered whether to attend. Yes, that is how deep my ambivalence ran, yet also demonstrates how even deeper my passion for event planning runs!
I showed up an hour late, more solo and sober than I intended (read: absolutely sober and absolutely solo). My high school friend even bailed on accompanying me. This is why ticket sales did not succeed.
The turnout resembled the refunded ticket sales: about 30 classmates hovered around tables in one half of the bar. Someone brought balloons in our high school’s colors. I recognized about half the room, and the other half could have been classmates or spouses. The worst was recognizing some people, but realizing I did not remember their name. How would I greet them?
I bobbed from one familiar face to another. I ended up in two awkward situations where I asked how they were, what were they up to, did they ever leave the area? I meant the last not as a challenge, but found myself and the conversation abruptly cornered by confessions of complacency. No, they had never left; they admitted they worked a humdrum job and did not see themselves seeking more.
“Well, sometimes that happens,” I tried to comfort their Eeyore honesty.
“I wish they lied,” I told a friend later. “Make something up. Don’t tell me you’re disappointed with your lot in life at a high school reunion.” This was a daytime affair; don’t traumatize me like that.
I searched for someone I could hit on. What good is a high school reunion with no potential hookup? I found all eligible prospects ineligible by wedding band. Did this mean I was winning or losing in the game of success?
“Are you dating anyone?” a classmate asked pointblank.
I left the reunion after two beverages and drove past the hotel where we had high school prom. I stopped at the oceanfront where I spent many summer days with classmates, had my first cigarette, stayed out past curfew for the first time, and remembered many conversations with friends who didn’t make it to the reunion. This felt more comforting and victorious than standing around with acquaintances I had seldom checked in on since 2009. Everyone who really mattered I still talked to without showing up to a hometown bar. I probably would skip the next reunion.
The next night I grabbed dinner with a high school mentor. She promptly me informed I was in this for life. This mentor planned her own reunion at ten, twenty, and now thirty years.
“You’re now the de facto planner,” she proclaimed. “But they start dying at 40.”
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