The Dirt Field

Last night was Bobby’s 10-year high school reunion.

I KNOW.

He’d been on the fence about wanting to go since the announcement first came out, but because the event was held five minutes from our house and the $99 ticket was going to admit him and a guest, we decided to make it a fun date night. I’m a sucker for anything that involves dressing up and dancing.

I KNOW.

It turns out he’d read the website incorrectly: the “enter your guest’s name here” field was strictly for the purpose of relating guests to graduates. We got a call yesterday afternoon from a guy at Capital Reunions telling Bobby he needed to pay another $99 so that I could attend as well. Bobby waffled for a few minutes before deciding that no event would be worth spending $200 to attend, so we made other plans.

Just as our 45-minute wait for a table at Rio Grande was up, he had a change of heart. We hurried home, threw on dress clothes, stopped at an ATM to get the cash needed to buy my ticket, and went to the reunion.

I KNOW. I wish we’d been hit by a bus on the way there so that I would still be $100 richer.

The first sign of a problem was that the “dinner stations” involved multiple types of fondue (impossible to eat neatly in cocktail attire), three pastas (hard to eat while standing), huge slices of lukewarm roast beef (but no knives), and that was it. The cash bar could be considered ‘discounted’ only if you live in Manhattan – $8 for a tiny cocktail, $9 for a glass of wine, $4.50 for a plain soda. The crowd was packed into an undersized ballroom, none of Bobby’s friends from high school were there, and there was nowhere to sit to eat the plates of unwieldy food.

We stood around with another couple who were determined to eat their ticket price in food. That led to jokes about how we should have brought bigger purses, or as the other woman said, “I thought about taking off my boot and filling it up.” At one point, she laughed out of the blue and when her husband asked why, she replied, “I’m laughing at the fact that I thought it would be a good idea to come to this.” Then we all laughed and laughed and laughed and went back for more crappy food.

It also felt very much like high school redux. There were a few bar tables with long tablecloths, and I kept seeing people climb under the tables to search for something. A girl came up with a bottle of water at one point, which I thought she had just put there for safekeeping, but when another guy made a huge production of rummaging under the table where I was standing, I finally asked what the hell he was doing. Turns out it was not bottled water; they had smuggled in vodka in plastic water bottles.

As a sign of how bad things really were, I then made him pour me a glass of straight vodka that Bobby and I sipped for the rest of of the night. That consisted of thirty minutes of sweaty dancing, me eating the tops off of as many of the dessert table cupcakes as I could stomach just to be spiteful, and then me saying PLEASE LET’S JUST GO HOME THIS IS A NIGHTMARE.

Then we went grocery shopping at 11:15pm in our cocktail attire and honestly, that was the highlight of the whole experience because at least my freezer is now stocked.