GUEST POST: Why I Didn't Go To My 20-Year High School Reunion

Everyone was expecting me to go. Or to do something.

“Are you gonna go? You have to!”

“What are you gonna do? You have to do something!”

I wasn’t so sure. It felt like it had only been a minute since our 10-year reunion, and, really, hadn’t I done enough to those poor, rich people already? Maybe I should just let them reunite in peace.

But then, on the Facebook PVPHS Reunion Event page, I saw this:

And immediately thought, “Well fuck. Now I have to RSVP ‘yes’.”

Because I’m “that girl.”

Y’know, “the one behind that crap” Courtney Wessonnnnnnn is referring to.

You should have seen what Tiffany Wesson, Courtney’s identical twin commented—it was so bad she deleted it. And don’t judge Ryan Eberhard for “liking” it. He is super into Jesus and apparently (I genuinely did not know this), Jesus is no longer into strippers. Sorry, Ryan.

You see, for our 10-year reunion, I thought it’d be funny if I got a stripper to attend and pretend to be me. I went “stripper shopping” at Jumbo’s Clown Room in Hollywood (a favorite amongst people who want to go to a strip club but also want to seem like the type of person who would never go to a strip club) and found Cricket, a woman in a taco costume who can do things with her person that defy the laws of physics. I instantly knew I wanted her to be me. And just a couple days later, she was a better me than I’ve ever been. I got some cameras, friends to operate them, I hired one of the sound guys from the show Punk’d, and we filmed the whole thing. It was funny. And stressful. Scary. Intense. Shocking. Frustrating. Because for someone who didn’t want to go to a reunion, boy did I go. And I KEPT going for years afterwards; editing the footage, doing a wild press tour when the trailer went viral (oh man, you should see some of the comments on YouTube—they make the Wesson Twins seem like the Wakefield Twins), working on a screenplay adaptation of the idea for the next 1,000 years (approximately), and with each draft, having to make the “me” character a meaner and more insecure person, who does this not to be funny, no, that’s not enough motivation for a movie, but for R-E-V-E-N-G-E. And of course, there has to be a love interest.

I know what you’re thinking: they invited you to the twenty-year reunion? No, they did not. But I think you probably know me well enough by now to know that I wouldn’t let a detail like that stop me. I also have more Facebook friends from high school now than I did before my video went viral. I know this because before the video I had ZERO (0!). And now I’m “friends” with Ryan Eberhard, among others. One of these digital friends added me to the reunion event page, so, I guess, yeah, they did invite me.

I started thinking about what to do for number twenty. Would Cricket go again? Sure the jig was up, but a lot of people liked her a lot. Or, what if I sent as many strippers as there were attendees—one for everyone, as a show of goodwill?  OR or, would my celebrity doppelganger, Mayim Biyalik, aka TVs Blossom or, more currently, TVs The Big Bang Theory’s Amy Farrah Fowler, be willing to go as me? For my high school initiation into the Thespian Club I was dressed in a ridiculous outfit and delivered onto Venice Beach to try and convince people I was Mayim Bialik. I wound up having to sign autographs. So, I asked her if she’d do it (the circumstances aren’t important). And let me just tell you, we had been enjoying a perfectly pleasant conversation before I asked, and then she looked at me like I was a crazy person and slowly backed away. I took that as a solid maybe.

Before I had a chance to hammer out the details with Mayim, I noticed that the Facebook Event Page wasn’t… how shall I put this… testing well. Out of a class of 800-1000 kids (art school maths), only 36 were going to attend.  And we all know the rate of attrition on Facebook events is at least 70 - 111%. That meant 10.8 strippers. I thought I could actually pull that off. But then they announced that the reunion would be in the middle of the afternoon, on a Sunday, at one of the bars at a Donald Trump resort, no private space secured. This way, you could still go to church and pre-pray for forgiveness for going straight from there to financially supporting an orange narcissist by drinking enough gin to be able to reunite with your high school friends... and maybe find a love interest?

This was going to be a sad sequel, and the studio system already makes enough of those.

So I just didn’t go. I don’t know if anyone did. I think I may have inadvertently killed reunions for our cohort. Now I’ll never be able to hug it out with Courtney or Tiffany. 

You can watch “I Remember Andrea” at www.irememberandrea.com and if you meet Amy Schumer, please ask her to play Cricket in the movie (but pitch it better than Andrea did with Mayim).

Want do know more about 40 Lunches?  Follow on Facebook, subscribe by email, Pin it, share it, tell a friend.

Becoming A Writer

I grew up in the South.  And in the South we tell stories.  Every day at 5pm, my great-grandmother would hold court during Happy Hour, where she would drink bourbon and tell stories.  My grandmother and her sisters would join in as they transformed fiction into fact.  It was at their feet that I learned how to tell a story.

But it was in a dark, dilapidated theatre on 52^nd Street that I became a writer.  Youngblood is the Ensemble Studio Theatre’s lab for playwrights under 30.  Well known for their annual marathon of one act plays, EST has been an incubator for new work since its founding. 

We met once a week where we would do writing exercises, then members would share new work.  It became a safe space where I could count on receiving constructive feedback.  With different backgrounds, we were all telling different stories.  It was an invaluable resource for a young writer trying to learn the craft.

Youngblood not only taught me how to be a writer, it taught me how to be a theatre artist.  Theatre is a collaborative art and in order for our work to succeed we all had to pitch in.  Recognizing that plays are meant to be seen, not just read, we were always creating opportunities to put our work on stage.  There was Asking For Trouble, a series of short plays written and rehearsed in a week.  Every other year we produced Thicker Than Water, an evening of fully produced one-acts.  In between there were readings and workshops, which created deadlines to hold us accountable for our writing.  And to make those events a success we all had to support one another.  We read stage directions at readings.  We ushered for shows.  We put up posters in coffee shops and asked family members to donate money.  We swept floors, took tickets, and ran lights.  My day job at an investment bank regularly supplied us with copies of scripts.

We were a motley crew of young writers, all working multiple jobs while trying to make theatre and hone our craft.  In the summer months we would pack up and go to the EST retreat in Lexington, NY where we slept in bunkhouses, cooked our own meals, and told stories by the late night fire.  The group has grown and competition for membership has become fierce.

Amy, Jason, and Edith were already members when I arrived a Youngblood.  More than 15 years have passed and we are all still be writing, as challenging as that is at times.  We have all been fortunate enough to receive validation by the theatre and film community.  Amy’s play, Heights, was first presented as a one act during our Thicker Than Water production.  Merchant Ivory optioned the play, which was then adapted into a feature film starring Glenn Close.  As members of Youngblood, we were able to experience the process vicariously through her.  Now a professor at NYU, her most recent film, Equity, debuted in the summer of 2016 to critical praise.  Jason, a lifelong New Yorker, moved to LA a few years ago.  He made the decision to give up playwriting and instead has been focused on writing for film and television.  The winner of the prestigious Humanitas fellowship, he was recently a writer on the Fox show, Pitch. Edith has enjoyed a commission from Steppenwolf and was the inaugural playwriting fellow at Emory where she taught for two years. And after all these years, Edith and I have found ourselves living on top of the same mountain in Tennessee.  Sewanee, which originally brought me to Youngblood (thanks to my mentor at the SewaneeWriters’ Conference), has brought Youngblood to me.

It would have been great to find a nice little café and overstay our welcome while catching up, but with four writers in three different time zones, the logistics were impossible.  Instead we opted for a virtual visit, which was almost as good.

As we talked about our time in Youngblood the thing we kept going back to was that the communal, collaborative nature of the group taught us all about generosity.  We learned how to champion the successes of our fellow writers.  That generosity has served us well as we navigate the professional world where not everyone is as supportive.

But we all still struggle with some of the same fundamental challenges that we faced when we were younger:  What will the next gig be?  As an artist it is easy to feel like your last job will be your last job.  It’s a career that in many ways is defined by uncertainty.  Amy continues to call New York her home, but the rest of us have moved quite a bit, all in search of work.  Life in the theatre can feel very migratory at times.  We talked about our desire to feel settled, to have a sense of permanence.  But even though there are moments of doubt and the occasional threat to leave the business all together, we all love what we do most of the time.  Our visit serves as a reminder that it's important to have a community of people who are a part of your history and share a common vocabulary.  

New to 40 Lunches?  Read more about the project here and check out some of my previous lunch guests here.  You can also follow along on Facebook.

One Of The Cool Kids

HIGHLY MOTIVATED

I don’t like to think of myself as a jealous person; I prefer to say that I’m highly motivated by the success of others.

It is no longer the fatal flaw that it once was.  I’m older and wiser.  I have good friends whose success I feel invested in as if it was an extension of my own. But jealousy isn’t all bad, because when used constructively it can be an excellent cure for complacency.

THE FIRST PLAY

When people ask me when I wrote my first play I often tell them about meeting Wendy Wasserstein after a matinee performance of the Young Playwright’s Festival at the Public Theatre.  After the performance she held court in the lobby of the theatre.  I accosted her and spewed forth all of the wisdom that comes with being a 17 year old in New York City.  She suggested I go home and write a play.  And so I did.

But what really motivated me to actually sit down and write was not the directive from Ms. Wasserstein, but rather that afternoon's production of The Most Massive Woman Wins written by Madeliene George.  In the audience that day I watched a play written by a young woman my age, about things I could relate to.  It was the first time I realized that I could write plays and that they could actually get produced.  If she could do it, perhaps I could do it too. 

So I went home and wrote a play, and I submitted it to Young Playwrights barely qualifying due to my age.  It was rejected because, admittedly, it wasn’t very good.  But I was hooked.

THE BLIND DATE 

Madeleine George is one of the cool kids, and effortlessly so.  She might not agree, but it's true.  She was a member of 13P, a playwrights' unit dedicated to producing the work of each member over a 13 year period.  She also earned a coveted spot at New Dramatists, as well as the respect of the theatre community.  Somehow our paths had never crossed, even though I enjoyed watching her career from afar.  I finally built up the courage to ask her out for lunch after writing and rewriting the same email for a week.  It was like a blind date but without the expectations.  She said yes.
We decided that we would forego lunch and go straight for dessert.  When you’re 40 you can do that.  We baked in the hot July sun as we waited for a seat at the Black Tap (famous for their monstrous milkshakes), sharing stories about the friends we have in common.  She had read my work and I had read hers; it gave us common ground.  There was something very approachable and familiar about her, which made me want to unload my entire life story (which I more or less did). 

YOUNG PLAYWRIGHTS

Madeleine grew up in Massachusetts and attended a school with a strong arts program.  That’s where she started writing plays. She had an English teacher who gave her a creative writing assignment.  He suggested that if she removed the narrative she would have a play.  She started submitting to Young Playwrights and won a spot in their festival in New York, twice. (I saw both plays.)

Young Playwrights was created by Stephen Sondheim.  The program offers workshops and mentoring for young writers from throughout the country.  For the fortunate few were are selected each year, they are partnered with a director and professional actors for a full scale production of their work.  Alums of the program include Carter Bays (How I Met Your Mother), Pulitzer-finalist Rebecca Gilman, and Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester By The Sea). 

Madeleine continues to write plays, as well as young adult novels.  Over milkshakes we talk about writing, but we also talk about our lives as writers:  balancing work and relationships, making money, the triumphs and the defeats.  I fell in love with her spirit, her honesty, and her love of our craft. 

KEEP YOUR EYES ON YOUR OWN WORK

As artists we never really know if or how our work will impact others.  There’s a little note stuck to my bulletin board that says, “Keep your eyes on your own work.” That simple advice has kept me from being consumed by the green-eyed monster that wants to obsess about the success of others.  But sometimes, perhaps, it’s worth taking a look around.  You never know where you might find inspiration.

To learn more about Madeleine's work click here.

What We Learn

Finding A Place
It all started because I was trying to get out of gym.  Since I wasn’t a cheerleader, didn’t play organized sports, and wasn’t in the band, my freshman year I found myself in gym class with some of the school’s most unsavory characters.  With doctor’s note in hand (procured thanks to an Oscar-worthy performance) I marched into the guidance office of my over-crowded public high school and asked to be placed in drama.  That’s when I met Diane Maisel.

My transition to high school was not a smooth one.  During the summer months my old friends formed new allegiances with students from other schools and I found myself completely lost.  It was easy to do in school with around 2,000 students at the time.  Built in the 1926’s, the Spanish stucco school is on the National Registry of Historic Places.  At the time there was no air-conditioning, which made studying in the stifling southern heat a challenge.  We ate lunch on the front lawn of the school, which was peppered with historic oak trees and Spanish moss.  Many of the students were legacies whose parents and grandparents had also attended. 

The theatre department was legendary thanks to the dedication of their first theatre teacher, a woman whose name now appears on the auditorium.  But when she retired, she was replaced with a young teacher from Tuscaloosa, who was well aware that she had big shoes to fill.  Diane was in her early 30’s and single; the kind of teacher who guys crushed on and girls looked to as a cool big sister. 

If you’re lucky you can look back on your education and find at least one special teacher who had a meaningful impact on your life.  Diane was mine.  She saw that I was struggling to find my place, so she opened up the theatre and invited me in. 

Above and Beyond

There were pep rallies every Friday during football season, where the school would pile into the auditorium, which sat 1000.  We would arrive at 6:30 in the morning to find hot Krispy Kreame donuts waiting for us.  Diane taught me how to hang and focus lights, re-patch a light board, and set up a stage manager’s bible.  When I was struggling with geometry she decided to let me do the math required to build the set for the spring showcase, giving me practical use of sine, cosine, and tangent ratios (skills I have never used since).  The goal was to give me confidence and help me apply something that terrified me (math) to something I loved (theatre).  Her faith in me meant the world.  Unfortunately, no one thought to check my math and all of the wood had to be re-cut.  But it was an exercise indicative of a teacher who was always looking for ways to connect to her students. 

Like me, Diane is an only child.  She grew up putting on shows for the neighbors and her parent’s friends.  On huge rolls of paper she would paint scenery and then recruit friends to perform.  But she didn’t become serious about the theatre until she was in college.  She followed a friend to an audition at the University of Alabama and fell in love.  She ended up changing her major to theatre before getting her teaching certification.  When I asked her what she liked about being a drama teacher she said, “I get to help my students find inventive, new ways to tells stories.  And I still get to play make believe.”

More Than Just A Teacher

Diane has played different roles in my life at different moments.  She has been a teacher, a big sister, and a surrogate mom.  She knows how to drop the truth bomb and follow it up with a hug.  In my mother’s absence, she hosted my bridesmaids’ luncheon (which was really just lunch with dear friends, male and female).  And then when that marriage ended, she was there to assure me that I would be ok. 

She went on to have twins at 40 and raise them to be amazing young women.  Over the years the girls have been kind enough to share her with me.  Both of them excelled in school and are great role models for my daughter.  Diane has stepped in as my daughter’s Auntie D, playing a role that is part Auntie Mame and part grandmother.  I love seeing the two of them curled up on the couch together reading a book or playing a game. 

We enjoy a visit over pizza and she tells me stories about growing up and how she found her way to the theatre.  We talk about teaching and the joy of watching our students grow and learn.  We talk about our girls, and retirement, and the possibilities that await us in the years ahead.  She continues to be my sounding board and a constant source of support.  When she returns home after lunch she’ll spend the rest of her day preparing for the next school play.  Her Saturday, like so many over the years, will be spent at school working with students.  

I was fortunate to have many great teachers over the years and to see first hand the time and sacrifices they make for their students.  They are the teachers who raise the bar. What we learn from our teachers often - if we're lucky - goes beyond what comes from the textbook.  They believe in us, guide us, ask the difficult questions, and help us find our own answers.   

Have you enjoyed this post?  You can read about other guests on 40 Lunches here.  You can also follow along on Facebook.