Sure, it sounds fun and easy enough, right?! Wrong! Planning your high school reunion is one giant headache.
First ensuring you get a hold of everyone is impossible. Second, trying to please everyone is even more impossible than trying to let everyone know it's happening in the first place and third, getting everyone who says they're going to be there to actually show up is the biggest hurdle.
When people started bugging me on Facebook about planning my 10-year high school reunion (why did I have to be an overachiever in high school, why?) I felt pressured to be on the planning committee so I said yes. That was my first mistake.
My second mistake came when one of the planning committee members said she was "too busy" to find a place for our class dinner. For some reason unknown to me now, I said, "No problem, I can do that too" although I had already decided on the date, the location of the mixer and was apparently the lead on the planning committee.
The second mistake ended up being the biggest. Given roughly a month to find a suitable place for our Saturday night dinner, I didn't even think about having people pay in advance. I was too worried about finding a place that could hold as many people who said they were coming. Once I made the reservations and paid the deposit I thought the headache was over...wrong again.
Before I get into why the dinner was so horrible, I will tell you about the rest of the reunion which was actually pretty fun!
Friday night we had a mixer at a local bar, the Gold Dust, in downtown Pueblo. It was so fun, a lot of people came and it was really great seeing everyone again! The turnout for the mixer was really good, about 100 or so people. I did overhear people talking about the dinner and saying they couldn't make it which made me really nervous but I still figured we'd hit our minimum of 80 people.
Saturday afternoon we all met at South High to do a tour of the school which was really fun! It was so weird how small the school seems now and big it was to us just ten years ago.
Here's where the story gets good... Saturday night as I was driving to dinner I was really nervous about us not meeting the minimum of 80 people for dinner. As I was unloading my car, I apparently forgot I was in a nice dress, bent over like I was at the gym picking up the weight bar and split my dress! It wasn't a big split, what happened was the slit at the bottom came undone just a little too much. I began to panic. Thank God my friend Luz was on her way over, stopped and got some safety pins and saved my butt, literally!
After the humiliation of having my entire class know I split my dress, I had to tell them that we were 40 people short for dinner and ask them to pay more. While some were pretty unhappy, most understood. I just wish that 1)the people who said they were coming had shown up and 2)that I would have planned better!
Guess I know better now and I will be able offer some helpful advice to those who plan the 20th class reunion because it won't be me!
