Sixty Five Bucks to Wear Your Seventeen Face

I got invited to my thirty-year high school reunion and it is a Facebook event with 84 interested and 9 going. Tickets are sixty-five dollars and they are doing name tags with senior photos. I can not decide whether to go or just disappear. What do I do?

Terrified Of Reunion Name Tags,
Name Tag Nervouswreck

Sixty-five dollars. For a performance review you did not request. Administered by people you last saw when you thought JNCOs were a financial strategy. That is what this is. The senior-photo name tag is not a fun detail, it is evidence. They are pinning your seventeen-year-old face to your chest like a hunting license and letting the room compare the before-and-after like it is a county fair pie.

And the numbers tell you everything. Eighty-four “interested” is not interest. That is surveillance. That is people clicking a button so they can window-shop outcomes. Nine “going” is the brave platoon marching into a hotel ballroom to stand under bad uplighting and say things like “Wow, time flies” while their eyes do math.

Also, Facebook already held this reunion in 2009. Everybody already knows who sells supplements, who got real into marathons, who became a motivational quote with knees, and who quietly did fine and therefore committed the greatest sin: being hard to summarize in a sentence.

Now. You might think, I’d like to see a couple old friends. That is the trap. That is how they get you to buy a ticket to your own audit. They dangle two decent conversations so you will stand there the other ninety minutes explaining your life to someone who still talks like student council never ended.

If you go, you do not go as yourself. You go as an expensive rumor. Hire a driver. Bring a fake assistant with an earpiece and a clipboard. Show up thirty minutes late, stay seventeen minutes, and let the assistant answer every question with “We can’t really get into that.” Then leave like you are late to something that has a nondisclosure agreement.

Or better, host a rival reunion across the street the same night. Five dollars at the door. No name tags. No photos. Just music that does not sound like it is apologizing for existing. Let them keep their sixty-five-dollar comparison-theater. You run the afterparty called Still Alive, Still Busy.

– Uncle Bobby