Reunion

January 1987
Originally uploaded by Tokyorosa

That photo of me and one of my high school friends was taken four months before graduation. We were going out that night and so we dressed up and did our makeup. Dave took this photo of us in the bathroom of the house where I grew up.

This is one of the very few photos that I have from my high school years. Of course I had yearbooks, but a couple of years after I graduated from high school, I was living in an apartment that had a fireplace and one night I burned those yearbooks up.

What were you like in high school? Were you like me? Did you skip some grades and graduate when you were sixteen, too? Did you ditch school and get stoned in the parking lot before classes like I did? Did you play in the orchestra like me? Were you a little speed freak like I was because your classes were so boring that you got high to get through them? Did you take up smoking cigarettes when you were a freshman, too? Were you as bored by Beowolf as I was? Were you as fascinated by Mark Twain? Did you, like me, actually read all the Shakespeare you were supposed to? Did you sometimes drink until you passed out on the weekends like I did? Did you pierce your ears with safety pins? Did you have purple hair like mine? Did you hold down a job, too?

I don't miss high school at all. I'm not nostalgic or sentimental about it. I've never been to a high school reunion and I never will go to a high school reunion. Of all the people I'd want to see at a high school reunion, I live with one and the other, my friend in this picture, died a long, long time ago.