Monday, January 30, 2017

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).

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