30 years of Sentimental Bullshit

It’s 3am on a Sunday morning and I am sitting at a table with my best friends from high school (including The Blonde), three of our former teachers and the members of the band The Singles Bar discussing the recent Midnight Oil concert. Not for the first time this year I wonder how I got here.

If this post was a bad 80s TV sitcom then this is where the screen would go wobbly to let you know that you are entering into a flashback.

The Blonde and I went to high school together. This was quite some time ago. In fact 2017 was the 30th anniversary of us finishing year 10.  In high school, I was a dork. Naive, ultra respectful, enthusiastic about school, no sense of style and prone to bizarre obsessions. I did play the saxophone in a rock band but I think that may have added to my oddness. You would think that I would have been a friendless nerk but I was fortunate enough to fall in with a crowd of six girls who have remained my lifelong friends. They strangely seemed to value my oddness. 

Flash forward to 30 year High School Reunion.

Apparently 30 years haven't changed things all that much I am still a dork and my friends are still the most wonderful and remarkable women I know. They can be relied upon through thick and thin, sick and sin (gratuitous 80s book allusion).  

Our classmates hadn't changed that much either.  There was thickened waist lines and receding hair (although there was one girl, who looked identical to her 16 year old self) but no-one had changed in the ways that really matter.  Personality that was masked in high school had just come to the surface with the self-confidence that comes with age.  

I suspect the characters that are in our year are no different to characters in every school group.

• The Newshound. Knows what everyone else has been up to over the past 30 years who is married, divorced and separated etc. 
• The Enemy. She still hates my guts and wasn’t afraid to tell me why. For my own good, of course. 
• The Party Guy.  He still drinks more than is good for him and partied a little too hard and sustained a classic drinking injury.
• The Grabby Guy.  The bloke who holds you in that welcome hug just a little too long.
• The Cool Guy.  He'll be cool until the day he dies. Loved by all and a friend to all (including dorks like me).
• The Teachers. Many of our teachers were hardly older than us. Many teachers had their first placement at our school and form strong bonds with each other and as it turns out with their students as well.

As much as I was so glad to see everyone and was full of joy and anticipation, I found the experience all extremely overwhelming. It became all too clear to me that I am not terribly much different to my 15 year old self.  I am still a socially challenged dork.  

I am always fascinated by the power of music to bring people together, bring back memories so strong you can touch them and embolden people to share their joyfulness and in my time of crisis I turned where I always turn, to music.  That night I found that music is a convenient place to hide from people who might find me as boring and dorky as they did 30 years ago. But dancing dissipates overpowering feelings of inadequacy and help you put aside your fears. Sharing the music with my former classmates, through singing and dancing, gave me a way to reform those old connections.  As the night wore on dancing became a place to celebrate, not to hide. I began to feel as though I belonged a little more and the shared experience of just letting it all hang out (in dancing terms) was freeing.

The band, The Singles Bar were in fine form and seemed to know just the right songs to play - there was a high quota of songs from the 80s.  This encouraged a 'dance off' with each of the boys took their turn in the middle of the dance floor trying to improve on the last dancers efforts. Fantastic.  The Triabunna Two-Step was nowhere to be seen.

Sadly, but inevitably, the music stopped and the event came to an end but no one wanted it to go home. We were only just starting to form new friendships. Arrangements were made to continue and to share some old tunes at homes.

Popular convention dictates that the point of a high school reunion is to turn up and seem cooler and more successful than anyone may have predicted way back when you were in high school. It turns out this is flawed thinking. A high school reunion is about reforming long forgotten connections with people who know things about you that no one else does and have a shared experience of teenage life. 

Now we have new experiences that we have shared, we will always talk about our fabulous 30th reunion - the fractured wrist event, the strange noises coming from the Bowls Club hedge, the vomiting in the staff toilets during the school tour the following day, how many of us partied and danced until dawn. How I ended up with my mates, my former teachers and the band talking about Midnight Oil at 3am in the morning.