[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published September 25, 2019]
©2019
Well, after last week’s column I haven’t heard from my high school
classmate Dave Barry’s lawyer asking me to cease and desist writing about him,
so I’m going to continue taking advantage of our extremely distant association
to reminisce about the Pleasantville High School class of 65’s 40th
and 50th reunions.
I would reminisce about the 10th, 20th, and 30th
too but I didn’t go to them. Too far to go to suburban New York City from San
Diego. But I was persuaded by a pathologically-persistent classmate to come to
the 40th all the way from Sweden where we were living at the time.
If I could change one thing about the 40th reunion it would
be to magically remove all photographic evidence of me. The afternoon before I left Stockholm, a stylist at a
Swedish salon misunderstood my instructions for a “trim” and, a mere twelve
hours before I was leaving for New York, transformed my shoulder length hair into
a short, layered pixie haircut that I had no idea how to style. (I have to
take off my glasses while they do my hair.) I tried to convince myself it was
not as bad as I feared, until Olof came home and said, “Hey - Sandra Dee
haircut. Great idea for your reunion!” I hadn’t lost any weight but had hoped
that at least my hair was going to look nice. Now I was going to my reunion as
a fat Sandra Dee. (And by the way, wasn’t she dead?) I do NOT embrace change –
and especially the night before my fortieth high school reunion to see people
who I have not seen in four decades. To make matters worse, Tropical Storm
Tammy was due to wash through the New York City area that weekend.
Pleasantville High School reunions have a predictable itinerary. There
is the pizza party at the Armonk American Legion Hall on Friday night followed
by a dinner dance at the Pleasantville Country Club whose heyday was in the
1940s.
By the time the pizza party started at the
American Legion Hall, Tropical Storm Tammy had created a deluge. The humidity
was about 150%, and my now-short hair, the ultimate humidity barometer, looked
like my head been plugged into an electrical socket.
There was plenty of pizza, beer, wine, and
soft drinks. But no name tags, which everyone agreed was a massive oversight
on the reunion committee’s part. Instead it was kind of like a surreal
Halloween party where you were trying to guess who was inside the “costume”
that was their much older self. You know there is someone you once knew in there
but you’re really not sure whom.
“Who did you come as?”
“Oh, I came as the
pot-bellied gray-haired balding version of the former seventeen-year-old Joe
Smith. What about you?”
“I’m dressed as the
overweight crepe-necked three-chinned version of Home Coming princess Muffy
Minton.”
“You look great!”
“So do you!”
OK, so it didn’t quite go like that. And for
the record, I thought that as a group, we had held up extremely well. But it
was like meeting all new people. And of course, some were spouses, just to
confuse the issue. Ja, really, really needed name tags. (Large print
would have been even better.)
One person who didn’t need a name tag (and talk about holding up REALLY
well) was our Pulitzer Prize winning classmate, Dave Barry, who attended the
pizza party the first night. Of course, we all wanted a photo with him,
preferably signed “to my best friend from high school, Dave.” He was
incredibly accommodating. I, in fact, have such a photo (minus the inscription)
but unless I could photoshop my hair, it will never be seen.
What was absolutely delightful about the reunion was that nobody was
trying to impress anyone; people were just being their most down-to-earth and
unpretentious selves. Whatever they may have needed to prove in the past, they
seemed to have proven - or given up on. What people did for a living rarely
came up. People seemed most interested in connecting with each other on a
personal level. Very refreshing indeed. Oh, if only high school could have
been like that.
It being a high school reunion, we also had
to have embarrassing impromptu musical performances. At the dinner dance at
the Pleasantville County Club the second night, our table did the Supreme’s
“STOP – in the name of love”. The four women from our table did the arm
movements and we all sang the lyrics. Unfortunately, we only had three copies
of the lyrics for the eight of us and as we were moving, so were the lyrics.
Very hard for people with bifocals to keep up, especially in such low light.
But we had fun and occasionally even got the choreography in sequence.
Stay tuned next week for the 50th
reunion!
Thanks to Pleasantville's draconian zoning laws, my old street
looked exactly the same 40 years later (OK, a little leafier)
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