I'm not paying $50 to hang out with people I went to high school with.

http://www.paloaltothemovie.com/home.html

"Someone watch that trailer and tell me this isn't utterly absurd. If these people are trying to represent Palo Alto as Any Town, U.S.A. that is just patently false; and if they are representing Palo Alto as the rich niche that it actually is, well, I can only say with devastating honesty that that is just not a very interesting story, Tom Arnold or no."
-JT

"It looks shallow, cliche, and vapid. much like its namesake."
-BB

I just found a website announcing my ten year high school reunion. It's at a shitty bar in the town I went to high school in. And by shitty, I mean overpriced, loud and lacking in any personality, but still full of sweaty 20 and 30 somethings dry humping each other and yelling over the terrible music. The last time I went there, I ended up having to leave early to preemptively remove one drunk member of our party, before what she was doing started counting as sexual assault. Blame my drunk friend if you will, but I don't think that behaviour is out of the ordinary for that place.

It's also exactly where and how I would have pictured my high school reunion happening.

My complaint though, is not really about the bar, it's about the cost. Because I would probably go if it were, maybe ten bucks. But it's not ten bucks, it's fifty.

My apologies to any one who doesn't find fifty dollars an obscene amount of money for this particular event, but really? Really? Fifty dollars? Fifty dollars to go and hang out at a crappy loud bar in downtown PA? And have awkward conversations with people? I can do that for free pretty much anywhere else, the only difference being that I may not have already had awkward conversations with those people, 10 years ago. It would be a hundred if I want to bring my husband. We could have a nice meal for that. I can pay $35 dollars and go and see a show in the city at an awesome bar instead of a shitty one.

There was an alternative - the organiser suggested that if we didn't wish to drink, $10 or $15 dollars at the door would be fine, in order to help defray the costs of the reservation. That solution isn't really workable for me though, because being I don't think I could manage the evening sober and it seems like it might suggest a substance abuse problem or at the very least be regarded as a little tacky, if I showed up already inebriated.

I'm not sure what a high school reunion is for, anyway, these days. Isn't one of the wonderful things about facebook that you can keep in touch with/stalk people you want to keep in touch with but you can fairly successfully avoid those you don't?