by Margaret Radisich Sleasman

Created on: March 03, 2010

Well, our 50th high-school reunion is scheduled for next summer (only 18 months away).  All I need to do is lose 85 pounds, dye my hair and have plastic surgery to remove my jowls.  On the other hand, there are only one or two classmates that still look beautiful making the rest of us look like escapees from the old-folks home.  I am sure they have spent nearly a fortune on gyms and plastic surgery – something that never was in my budget.

I was not in the popular group; heck I didn't even make the unpopular group, I was just there biding my time so I could find a job and some sort of man that would commit to a lifetime of having kids and supporting me.  I finally found one, although he was three and a half years my junior.  As it turns out, he is the perfect husband and I did better than anyone in the popular group.  Not only that, I am still alive; quite an accomplishment in itself as there are about three dozen or so of our class that will not be attending because they have met their maker. 

At our 40th, there were a couple of women that looked better than they did in high school – of course I hated them then and I hate them now.  The rest of us are barely recognizable with funny looking makeup and dyed hair; and the men – well, most of them are gray, balding, and much shorter and rounder than they used to be.  When I squinted to look at their name tags, I wanted to call them liars because they looked nothing like they used to and I was sure they were impostors.  The fiftieth should be equally confusing because we won't be able to read the name tags, let alone bend over to look at them.

Some of us stayed friends (or at least acquaintances) for the last 50 years, so we will hug each other and say, “We MUST do lunch;” but of course we will never get around to it as most of us have such busy lives that we could not possibly get away even for a bite to eat.  Of course at this age there is not much left that we can eat and going to a restaurant would cause a gastric catastrophe (the real reason why we DON'T do lunch – that and being more than fifty feet away from the bathroom).

Yes, I am planning to go to the reunion although I will have to take out a loan for the tickets; being on a fixed income means there is usually nothing left for an evening out. Not to mention, I have nothing to wear that is even mildly attractive since I spend my days (and nights) in flannel pajama bottoms and sweatshirts.  I will begin looking for a suitable outfit to wear tomorrow because it will take at least a year to find something I like (not to mention that will fit).  The biggest problem I see for the 50th reunion is that if everyone is my age, they cannot stay up past 7:30 so most of us will sleep right through it.  Come 4 a.m. when we wake up (still sitting at our tables), we can start the party – right after we use the bathrooms and find our teeth.

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