The League Plans on Attending a sort of Mini-High School Reunion

Apparently in Mid-March, the life of a young The League will come headlong with his shady, useless present.

Yes, my 20th high school reunion IS occurring this year.  No, I am not going.  I moved to the greater Houston area a couple of weeks prior to the beginning of my sophomore year of high school, and while I made some great life-long friends, it was not necessarily in a capacity strictly as a member of the Class of '93.  I'm just not that invested in seeing people I don't remember.

The winter of my sophomore year I quit the basketball team, auditioned for a play and wound up understudying several roles for our school's version of A Midsummer Night's Dream.*   So, for the next two years I stuck around the auditorium of dear old Klein Oak High.

I would eventually play parts in The Crucible, The Rimers of Eldritch, You Can't Take it With You, All My Sons, Rumors, and probably one or two things I'm forgetting.  I was, at best, unmemorable on stage.  And I don't think I want to know what people do remember.  Sadly, my requests to stage Frankenstein, so I could do something a 6'4" high school kid was suited for, went unheeded.

Really, I was happiest on the backstage crew, anyway.  Using power tools with a lack of adult supervision, painting scenery, hanging in precarious positions far over the stage floor while we mounted lights or set pieces...  that was good times.  I helped build things for a lot of the shows I acted in, but only ran crew on Bye, Bye Birdie (I was king of the fly-booth), a musical revue show called A Bit of Broadway, and Watch on the Rhine.  

Between my Junior and Senior years of high school I went to a 7 week drama workshop that was sort of intended to warm you up for participating in college drama classes, I guess.  I don't really know why I was there, now that I think about it.  I do know I was there all of a week when I realized that not only did I not want to pursue a career as an actor, I didn't want to live a life of greasepaint and footlights beyond the age of 18 and someone shoving a high school diploma in my hands.  It was a long 7 weeks.   

Luckily, when I arrived at UT in 1993, I had film, history and this thing called "the internet" to goof on, and somehow those became my things.  

Curiously, it sounds like I may have accidentally sparked a KOHS Drama Club reunion of sorts when I mentioned to some pals on Facebook that I'd recently watched Watch on the Rhine.

I won't say that high school drama kids didn't have drama.  We rarely all got along as a unit.  We did a lot of shows, but the cast and crew of that particular show (written by no less than Lillian Hellman) was particularly tight.  There were no backstage squabbles, very little malarkey, and a lot of love for the show itself.  That didn't happen very often.

People are agreeing to go.  I'm not doing anything to organize it, and I've handed it off to an old pal who recently moved back to the Spring area.  Likely we'll meet at a bar and drink and call bullshit on each other's recollections.

It should be interesting.  It has been 20 years.  I'm older, fatter, slower and less wide-eyed in general.  I assume my former colleagues have similarly changed.  

To be truthful, I'm kind of shocked at who I've forgotten over the years.  I'm not naming names, but some folks just plain old had not fired a single synapse for me since graduating and now they're showing up in the list of folks who want to attend.  Other folks I think of often, and not just thanks to Facebook.  But we're going to try to get the band back together for a day just south of the school.

No, I don't remember any of my lines.  But why start remembering them now?

*That was the one show I participated in with The Big Bang Theory's Jim Parsons and a host of other folks who I thought, and continue to think, were pretty swell.