A visit to the past
Jun. 10th, 2014 11:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rscThis past weekend I went to New York to attend my 50th high-school reunion. Unlike quite a few of my classmates, I haven't really maintained contact with my high-school classmates, although Facebook and a class mailing list have reconnected me to some of them in the past few years. I hadn't seen some of these people since the last reunion I attended (the 25th), and others not since graduation.
Fieldston is a smallish private school in Riverdale; our graduating class was slightly over 100 people, which meant that one at least sort-of knew everybody. Some 60-odd were at the reunion, a mix of people I had been friendly with and some that I kind of saw around, and a few to whom my (internal) reaction was "Who are you again?"
Fieldston is also part of the Ethical Culture Schools, which includes an elementary school ("Midtown") on Central Park West and a much smaller one (Fieldston Lower, which I attended from 2nd grade on) next door to the high school, so many of us were among people we had first met over 60 years ago.
In addition to the official reunion on the high school campus (Saturday afternoon and evening), the reunion committee had organized a gathering at Midtown on Friday night at which, among other things, there was a sing-along performance of excerpts from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado, which our class had performed in 7th grade (every class performed a G & S show in 7th grade -- as far as I know that tradition is ongoing); an after-party at a classmate's apartment Saturday night; and a picnic in Central Park on Sunday.
In some ways the after-party was the high point -- some people came to that who were not present at any of the other events. One such was, as far as either of us knows, the only other surviving gay member of our class; I was glad to get a chance to talk to him and compare notes (our experiences were very different, since, unlike me, he had realized he was gay at about 13).
I have fond, if vague, memories of the after-party at the 25th, which broke up sometime after 3 AM; now that we're 25 years older, we could only hold out until about 12:30.
The Sunday picnic started out with a bit of a snafu, since the part of the park where it was scheduled to take place turned out to be closed because of the Puerto Rico Day parade on 5th Avenue, and we had to improvise, but it worked out. (It didn't hurt that the weather was gorgeous.) I wasn't able to stay very long, as I had a train to catch.
The whole weekend was a lot of fun. It's actually pretty remarkable how good most of us look (someone commented on general tendency to weight gain, but I was actually struck by how many people had either more or less maintained their teenage weight or actually gotten noticeably thinner). We seem to have turned out to be a pretty nice bunch of people, and I can imagine remaining in closer contact with some of them over the coming years. It was also interesting to find out what people remembered about me (some of which differs from what I remember about me, but that's to be expected).
The user icon on this post, by the way, is a detail from a photo taken of a few of us in 2nd or 3rd grade, which a classmate sent me a few years ago.
Fieldston is a smallish private school in Riverdale; our graduating class was slightly over 100 people, which meant that one at least sort-of knew everybody. Some 60-odd were at the reunion, a mix of people I had been friendly with and some that I kind of saw around, and a few to whom my (internal) reaction was "Who are you again?"
Fieldston is also part of the Ethical Culture Schools, which includes an elementary school ("Midtown") on Central Park West and a much smaller one (Fieldston Lower, which I attended from 2nd grade on) next door to the high school, so many of us were among people we had first met over 60 years ago.
In addition to the official reunion on the high school campus (Saturday afternoon and evening), the reunion committee had organized a gathering at Midtown on Friday night at which, among other things, there was a sing-along performance of excerpts from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado, which our class had performed in 7th grade (every class performed a G & S show in 7th grade -- as far as I know that tradition is ongoing); an after-party at a classmate's apartment Saturday night; and a picnic in Central Park on Sunday.
In some ways the after-party was the high point -- some people came to that who were not present at any of the other events. One such was, as far as either of us knows, the only other surviving gay member of our class; I was glad to get a chance to talk to him and compare notes (our experiences were very different, since, unlike me, he had realized he was gay at about 13).
I have fond, if vague, memories of the after-party at the 25th, which broke up sometime after 3 AM; now that we're 25 years older, we could only hold out until about 12:30.
The Sunday picnic started out with a bit of a snafu, since the part of the park where it was scheduled to take place turned out to be closed because of the Puerto Rico Day parade on 5th Avenue, and we had to improvise, but it worked out. (It didn't hurt that the weather was gorgeous.) I wasn't able to stay very long, as I had a train to catch.
The whole weekend was a lot of fun. It's actually pretty remarkable how good most of us look (someone commented on general tendency to weight gain, but I was actually struck by how many people had either more or less maintained their teenage weight or actually gotten noticeably thinner). We seem to have turned out to be a pretty nice bunch of people, and I can imagine remaining in closer contact with some of them over the coming years. It was also interesting to find out what people remembered about me (some of which differs from what I remember about me, but that's to be expected).
The user icon on this post, by the way, is a detail from a photo taken of a few of us in 2nd or 3rd grade, which a classmate sent me a few years ago.
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Date: 2014-06-11 09:59 am (UTC)High school reunions are not much different, but I've never been to a proper one, as my classmates only started organising them for our 40th and I couldn't attend. And the high school is in Danvers, so getting there from Marblehead, for me, is somewhat of a trial.
In any case, I'm glad you enjoyed it.