Forty Years Later

I'm back in Colorado now, after attending my 40th high school reunion on Saturday.  Forty years!

I stayed with my sister and her husband, who bought our childhood home several years ago, some fifteen years after my mother moved away and sold it to another owner.  Much of the house has been remodeled: entirely new kitchen, French doors leading out to an entirely new deck - but much of it is uncannily the same - same mailbox with same wrought-iron house numbers on it, same forsythia bush by the driveway, same doorbell chimes, same heat vent where we used to lie on the floor to dry our hair (though the vent now has a little shelf of teddy bears in front of it - in general, the house now has an estimated 10,000 more teddy bears than it did when we were growing up there).

The past three reunions, or maybe even four, were held at my friend Kim's beautiful house in Basking Ridge.  This year one of my classmates felt like mixing it up a bit, and so she organized a get-together at a roadhouse with a 60s vibe, where we could listen to songs like "Cherish" by the Association, and "To Sir with Love" (the very song to which I "led off" a dance with Dick Thistle at an 8th grade dance - oh, the memories!).

Someone had brought a yearbook, which triggered the idea of retaking pictures of the "senior superlatives" for our graduating year: the boy and girl voted most likely to succeed, best athlete, most popular, did most for class.  We were able to reshoot five pairings, which seems quite amazing, four decades later.  I was Class Actress.  Here I am with Nick Tufaro, Class Actor., holding the yearbook open to our page (we're the bottom photo on the left).  I don't know if we look like stellar thespians, but there we are, anyway.