RIP Matthew Perry

I went to my wife's 40th a while back and witnessed a straight out of Hollywood moment. I was with my wife and her best friend from high school and her date. There was another woman, good looking, who was alone and sat at our table. The women started talking and it turned out that she was kind of a mousy nobody when she was in school. She was in a bad car wreck in her early in her 20's and had extensive plastic surgery to rebuild her face. The surgeon made her look pretty.

All night long groups of people would drift over to our table, kinda checking in, seeing who was there. Some folks remembered her, not too many, unless she prompted them. Very calm sweet tone, "Oh, you remember me, Sueanne. You and Jenny used to bully me in the girl's locker room. You called me "Acid face" because of my acne. Surely you remember me?" All delivered with a butter wouldn't melt in my mouth smile. They'd wobble and flee. Cold, so cold.

She had flown to Birmingham from Alaska for the event. She seemed to really savor nailing a couple of them.

 

My class has been weird about reunions.

We didn’t have a 10th or a 15th for that matter. But a few people organized a small 16th reunion where a group met at the high school football game, then a larger group joined us for dinner. My wife and I had to duck out really early as one of our kids got sick and the babysitter was panicking.

We had a 20th reunion, which included meeting a bar that a classmate owned back then the night before, dinner and dancing the next night and a small picnic that only a few of us went to on the Sunday afternoon. That was the one reunion that felt like an actual one.

We didn’t have a 25th reunion, and our 30th got pushed back a year due to COVID. One of the 30th organizers tried to have a meet up at a bar that year anyway in spite of the postponement and I was one of four people who showed up. We all were friendly with each other in school, but not in a clique. That was probably the most fun because we ended up getting nice and drunk.

Then we had a 31st reunion, and it was fairly small with maybe 30-40 people out of 200 in our class. Mostly it was, as someone said earlier, a lot of nice-to-see-yous, and then everyone went to their cliques.

 

We did a handful of elementary school reunions and it was a blast. We were the second class to go all the way through the school after it opened in 1964 in a burgeoning San Fernando Valley suburb and many of us were really tight. We did two or three in a park near where we grew up and another in Vegas. Most of us stay in touch through Facebook.

I went to my 20th high school reunion and if my two best friends from then weren't there, I wouldn't have seen anyone I cared to do more than say hi to. We had a graduating class of almost 1,000, so even if a third was there, I didn't know most of them.

 

One of the best things about being a little husky in high school is you don't need to sweat reunions - people will think you look the same. But dang, I ran into people who added a good 100 pounds and lost their hair who were in great shape in high school and I couldn't pick them out of a line-up.

 

Yeah, it sucks when you look around and all these people that you know are your age have turned into old people.

 

I think you’re drastically underestimating just how handsome I am.

My 30th is in a few months. I’d bet folding money I’ll be able to physically and symbolically run circles around almost anyone who shows up.

 

Ithink people go through unhealthy phases and I am glad I am out of mine, seeing some of the dads in the schoolyard waiting for the bell. I think being a young parent in this time would be very hard.

 

I showed up for my 20th last month and nobody knew who I was. I was the fat kid who found a gym.

The quarterback showed up weighing three bills.

Life is weird.

 

I went to a few of my HS reunions, my 10th and 20th I think (I'd be on my 42nd now) and what I disliked more than anything was the same people who thought they were the stuff in HS were congregating again and trying to be front and center again. (Was I part of that group in HS? Kinda, I was the jock who couldn't wait to leave for college not the Friday Night HS game.) What was cool was reconnecting with a guy who was at the Oscars and took one home.

 

My elementary school opened a few years before I enrolled. My nephew, 30 years younger than me, went to the same school and had a few of the same teachers I had. The school closed a few years ago and they had a one last night open house, but my mother-in-law was ill so I couldn't justify the trip. My sister is as unsentimental as I am sentimental so neither she nor her son went. A friend posted some pics on FB and it was trippy just looking at those pics and thinking of how much smaller the school must seem now than then.

 

In this current season of The Morning Show, Jennifer Aniston looks like wax.

 

Rachel meets candler