by Frank Croson

Created on: February 03, 2008   Last Updated: January 21, 2009

"Class Reunions: Torture or Punishment"

A class reunion can be a refined form of torture, so I only attended one for my age group before I wised up. The most distinctive thing I remember about it was that everyone had changed shape over the years. Mens' faces had gotten longer and womens' hips had gotten wider. Well, mens' hips too, I suppose. Otherwise, it was a matter of trying to identify old friends -and old enemies- by physical features not affected by the pull of gravity.

Some were easy. Eddie, who'd suffered a bad bout of acne as a teen, still had the face of a goalie for a dart team. Jean was still a little cross-eyed in a sexy kind of way, and Bill's funky rooster tail hair never improved. It just went away. Other than those three, the rest of the identification process boiled down to "Who ARE these old farts, anyway?!" Very depressing, especially since I could fairly assume they were assessing me in the same way.

But my wife's fifteenth class reunion was much more entertaining, in part because it reunited middle-aged farts rather than an eclectic collection of old geezers like me, and in part because it got her off my back. Suffice to say that the battle over whether or not to attend her reunion was, well, Epic. The ultimate threat -to cut me off for an indeterminate time- did the trick. It always does, but she uses it sparingly.

The first notable event was the kind of conflict which changes women's lives. Diane had shopped for a new dress to honor the occasion, or maybe it was just an excuse for a new dress. In any case, it was a helluva number... black, form-fitting, sequins, the whole enchilada. And she looked pretty damn good in it, confirming the wisdom of my decision to cave in and avoid the "cut off" option.

Tina. Although I didn't know this at the time, Tina had been a foe to Diane during their high school days, belonging to a clique which held Di and her friends in low regard for some reason. I think it had something to do with whose daddy did what, and something to do with body shapes. Anyway, Tina and Di locked eyes immediately, frozen in place like pillars of salt. I turned, looked, looked again, and finally saw it. Tina was wearing the same black, form-fitting, sequined dress.

Any man who's knocked around awhile will tell you that such a thing is a recipe for disaster, if not an outright Gotterdammerung. But in this case it wasn't as bad as it could have been. As a matter of fact, it was actually a good thing. Tina, you see, had gotten, well.

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