Finance

The Recipe For A Winning 20-Year Class Reunion: Make It Cheap, Local To The School, And Informal

Even if you did hate everyone in high school, don't you think after a decade or two it's maybe time to give some of them another chance for like two to three hours?

By  
on

Party TalkI just had my 20-year high school class reunion. It was a blast.

In the days leading up to this class reunion, I casually mentioned to many people who weren’t in my high school class that it was coming up. There were basically three reactions:

  • “I have never been to one of my class reunions and don’t see any reason why I would start going to them now.”
  • “I went to my 10-year reunion, and it sucked, so I’m never going to another one.”
  • “My class does not have reunions. The class president grew up to be a [drug addict/convicted pedophile/intolerable snob] and I guess no one ever bothered to take over planning for one.”

These are all pretty understandable. Still, you should go to your class reunion. Even if you did hate everyone in high school, don’t you think after a decade or two it’s maybe time to give some of them another chance for like two to three hours?

Despite the skyrocketing rates of loneliness in our society, it is, counterintuitively, becoming harder and harder to get individuals to show up to in-person events. I’m not going to figure out that whole issue in the next few paragraphs. What I can give you are a few simple rules that, properly executed, will prevent your class reunion from becoming a tedious chore that no one shows up for.

First, make it cheap. No one, other than perhaps someone who got rich and really would like to show it off (and who you don’t really want there anyway), wants to pay to go to a class reunion. Hold the reunion at a bar that has food, and if people want to buy their own food, they can. By keeping it cheap, you’re removing a big barrier for people. It’s probably not even an issue of affordability, it’s more of a mental barrier that you don’t need, in that it rubs people the wrong way to have to pay to hang out with their former classmates who they hung out with for free for years.

Yes, by 20 years into adulthood, you will have some folks who have quit drinking (we had several) and they can take advantage of all the soft drinks and nonalcoholic snacks available at a bar. There will be far more people who will want a drink and will show up to a bar than there will be people who would show up at some kind of nondrinking family-friendly event. You can also typically get free use of a party room at a bar by calling in and telling them you’d like to bring 50-plus extra people to spend money at their business on the night of your reunion. If the bar tries to charge you extra for the side room, you are looking at too nice of a bar.

Sponsored

Second, hold the reunion in the town where the school you actually graduated from is (or was). People will travel to go to a class reunion (we had a bunch of folks from out-of-state) but they really don’t want to have to get a hotel room when they get there. In the town everyone graduated from, many will still live there, a bunch will still have parents who live there, and almost everyone will at least have the parents of a close friend who still live there. People can pool babysitting by keeping it local, and can get back to their kids at a reasonable hour. If you make the mistake of moving the reunion to a nearby city or suburb thinking you are making it more convenient, no one will show up.

Third, keep it informal. No ties, no ballgowns, no costumes; leave that bullshit to the weirdo celebrities at The Met Gala. Your high school classmates don’t care what anyone else is wearing 20 years after graduation. Everyone would prefer to be comfortable than to rehash prom.

Make it easy for people to attend, and they will reward you with their company. Consider a counterexample.

The morning of my 20-year reunion, I ran a local marathon with a good friend. We planned it for that day, having both been class officers, and knowing that several other people from our class were distance runners who might also be interested in running the race. We did have a handful of marathon entrants from the Class of ’04 — one even placed in the women’s division — but about 20 times as many people came to the party where all you had to do was show up at the predesignated bar in your hometown at a given time.

Don’t make things more difficult than they have to be. If your former classmates know in advance that the 20-year reunion is going to be cheap, local, and informal, far more of them are going to show up. And when you have that critical mass of attendees, well, it’ll be just like old times.

Sponsored

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

Topics

, , , ,