Is 20 Years Enough?

I attended my 20 year high school reunion this weekend.  It was crazy and more than a little surreal.  High school is such a strange transitional time.  You move from barely being a teenager to almost being an adult, with none of the self-directed growth you can do in college.  Basically, you are thrown together with a lot of people you probably would never have chosen.  And all together, you must survive four years of education that will shape the rest of your life.

I was a high school misfit.  I think most of us are.  For most people, it is the first chance we have to play at being adults.  We play at relationships and personality traits the same way we play at make-up and hair styles, trying things on for fit.  If you are lucky, you find a group of people who accept you as you are (or as you are pretending to be on that day), and you learn and grow and morph and run away to college.

For me, those people were in theater.  Our drama troupe was called Company and we were largely a group of people who just didn’t fit anywhere else.  I think many Company members walked in several circles and really, isn’t it the nature of drama that we can be chameleons?  I never felt like I had a lot of ability to move around socially when I was in high school, and I wouldn’t say that it was all wine and roses, but I had good friends across many years and I had really hoped to see some of them this weekend.

Nope.  Most of the folks I really liked in high school, those I was closest to, were not at the reunion.  That’s the other thing about arty types, we’re not really joiners.  So, I had a couple of glasses of wine, a couple of surprising conversations, and left with my husband, my oldest friend, and my dignity.