Last night was my 20th high school reunion. It was held in a night club in West Vancouver. That, on the face of it, sounds bizarre to me. West Van has night clubs? Or at least ‘club’, singular. Later on in the evening, there were go-go dancers.
It’s a curious experience, a reunion like this. With the exception of three or four classmates, I really hadn’t seen the rest of my 150 classmates for ten–there’s was a previous reunion–or twenty years. I spent six to 12 formative years among these people, and then never saw or, in some cases, thought of them for the next 20.
There was more hugging than I expected. There was instant familiarity with a few people, and plenty of back-slapping camaraderie and clinking of glasses. More than one person told me that I looked “exactly the same” as I did in high school. Were they being kind or just drunk?
Why do you go to a reunion? To see old friends. To compare your waist, hair and credit line to your former peers. I was also quite curious sociologically in the ordinary experiment of a high school class.
For example, of the 40 or 50 people I spoke to or about that evening, I was the only one who was both married and childless. I talked to three classmates who had four children, and several more who had three. The friends I’ve acquired as an adult are considerably less prolific. Is that because I number a bunch of artists and entrepreneurs among the latter group, and they express their procreative instincts in other ways?
Many of my classmates had left West Vancouver, but not gone very far. There’s a healthy population of former Sentinel Secondary students in Vancouver’s other suburbs–White Rock, Coquitlam, Surrey and so forth. Plenty have gone eastward to Ontario.
The evening also reinforced an idea I first read in Stumbling on Happiness: our internal happiness meter is fairly predetermined, and doesn’t actually stray very far from its initial setting. People who were upbeat and chipper in high school seemed to be the same way at 37 or 38. By the same token, if someone was a standoffish and brittle in grade 12, they hadn’t warmed much in the ensuing two decades.
It did occur to me that a subset of people in my graduating class didn’t like high school. So they’re unlikely to come to the reunion. On the other hand, they might have turned out to be the most interesting adults.
Whether you loved or hated high school, I recommend the experience of a reunion like this. It’s a rare thing.
Two friends and I shot footage throughout our graduating year, from the opening night sleepover through our convocation. We edited hours and hours of videotape into a 100-minute video and sold it to our classmates for $20 a piece. We spent long sessions at the school board offices, using their cutting-edge dual-VCR editing setup. The editing took forever. It was, after all, 1991.
In anticipation of the reunion, I dug out a VHS copy of the grad video and got it digitized. Then, after checking with my high school classmates, I started posting sections of the video to the private Facebook group for the reunion.
Spasms of Memories
Unlike many of my online peers, I quite enjoyed high school. I was bullied no more than the average amount. While I was always pretty nerdy, I had plenty of friends and a lot of the school’s cliquishness disappeared by grades 11 and 12.
Perhaps because I enjoyed high school, I rarely have thought about it over the ensuing twenty years. I remain in touch with only a couple of people from that period, and so have little reason to reminisce.
When you edit video, even in the casual, summary way I’ve tweaked these sections, you spend a lot of time in the womb of the headphones, staring at grainy frozen frames. And so I’ve had the odd experience of thinking about people I haven’t though about in 20 years, of trying to remember their names and wondering who they have become. Each name conjures a little spasm of memories
It’s peculiar to revisit your work twenty years later. I’m hesitant to call it art, but it’s definitely an aesthetic creation. Ironically, I’m not really a better video editor today than I was in 1991–I haven’t acquired much experience in the ensuing 20 years. Still, for three high school students wielding bulky cameras and editing on dodgy VCRS, we could have done worse.
What did teenagers care about in 1991? Girls. Boys. Cars. Teachers. Music. The usual things.
17-Year-Old Me
I improvised a clumsy opening to the video before our grad ceremony got underway. Likewise, we shot a short ‘signing off’ segment that appears at the video end. I thought it might interest readers to see a 17-year-old me. Isn’t my hair…full? And, man, I’m optimistic.
I just read this silly National Post piece about Wayne Gretzky’s interest in his team moving to southern Ontario. The article contains a throwaway reference to the Great One’s ties to California:
“Why would Wayne want to go back to Canada?” asked Hollywood agent and friend Marv Dauer. “He’s been in L.A. for 21 years. His kids are in school here – one of them is a star football player who plays with Will Smith’s kid and Joe Montana’s kid – and his wife obviously likes the good weather.
That’s quite the pedigree. I went looking for confirmation, and found this great ESPN piece about the three superstars attending the same high school football game. It turns out that Joe’s son plays on an opposing team in the same league, but it’s still a charming story.
Longtime physical education teachers say the decline began more than a decade ago and may have started when schools cut back on laundering towels to save money. Kids forgot to bring towels, and it spiraled from there to become optional. Nobody complained, and gym teachers found better things to do than monitor the showers.
This is my favourite quote from the article:
“The only person I saw take a shower this year was a Canadian kid that moved here,” said Jack Taylor, a Wilsonville High sophomore.
We Canadians are very clean.
When I was in high school in the late eighties, we almost never showered after gym class. There really wasn’t time in the schedule for it, and the school certainly didn’t provide towels. There was only a shower room, but we mostly used it for soaking our clothed friends on their birthdays. Good times.
Communal showers remind me of the movie Carrie (not safe for work) more than anything. They seem to regularly feature as a backdrop for high school cruelty, actually. I also remember a hokey-more-than-scary scene in Stephen King’s It. Which, speaking of my high school years, featured a scene shot at one of my classmate’s houses in West Vancouver. I remember it as one of the first films I was aware of that was (partially) shot in Vancouver.
Did you take showers after gym class in high school?
Today over at The Conscious Earth, there’s a post about Heather Stillwell, hyper-conservative rabble rouser:
As Conscious Earth visitors read last month, free copies of An Inconvenient Truth were made available to every high school in British Columbia thanks to the charitable contribution of the Tides Canada Foundation. Now, Surrey school trustee Heather Stilwell wants the widely discredited mockumentary The Great Global Warming Swindle to be shown alongside Al Gore’s global warming documentary.
If you read on in that post (or this one or this one), you’ll see that Ms. Stillwell fancies the contrarian limelight (would that be the lemon light?). And why do all the conservative nutters seem to live in Surrey? Hmm…in truth, I guess there are a few in my childhood home of West Vancouver, too.
I should clarify my ambiguity in that last paragraph. All conservatives are not nutters, nor are all Surreyites (Surreyans? Surreydanavians?). However, it seems like all the Lower Mainland nutters who are conservative come from Surrey. Onward.
In circumstances like this, the Heather Stillwells of the world appeal to our rationalism by calling for ‘both sides of the story’ to be told in schools. That theory has always appealed to me, but obviously isn’t practical on every single issue we teach. Is smoking really bad for you? Was Shakespare actually a nobleman? Do muons really exist? High school would stretch into our early thirties.
Really, it’s a question of scientific consensus. I think that if there’s an academic consensus on a subject (say, gravity), then we should just teach it. Teachers ought to be open to debate on the subject, but they law shouldn’t require them to cover the Holocaust and moon landing deniers for every fact.
Like evolution (but unlike, say, the creation of the universe), I believe there’s a scientific consensus on climate change. The dissenting minority is loud but shrinking. So, I think it’s germaine germane that we show students “An Inconvenient Truth” or a similar film, and not feel obligated to dedicate another ninety minutes to the opposing viewpoint. They should probably discuss the political and public relations debate being carried out in the offline and online media around the world, but in this case they don’t need to give opposing viewpoints equal weight.
Schools must foster debate, but they have to pick their spots. I remember in Geography 12, Ryan Jaye, Albert Kaan and I made a kick-ass video about nuclear power. I believe we came out in favour of it, and got an A. I don’t recall if there was much debate or not.
The New York Times reports on the continuing lack of girls entering computer science programs. Of the 21,400 students who took the AP computer science exam in 2001, only 10% of them were girls. This isn’t particularly suprising, but why does the media care so much about computer science? Where are all the articles describing the lack of female plumbers or female mechanics? Why are they fixated on computer science?