Most memorable yearbook moments

For your information, I haven't watched Saved By The Bell since Wednesday. Of course, my cable is out, so my 11 p.m. date is gone. But the discs might find their way to the player soon.

And what Bell reference would I make, BBAM? The one where Zack made a video yearbook and, instead, turned it into a dating service, including all the girls -- even Kelly -- in it, and then they found out and decided to make him pay. Kelly, dressed in black leather, began necking with Vince Montana in Belding's office, and they all gathered in the video -- and math, chemistry, art, public speaking, history, French, home ec., band, economics and ROTC -- classroom, only to have Zack posing as an ugly newcomer to spy on his friends' reactions during his video-taped apology. You really think I'd waste my time typing that, BBAM?

Clearly, you don't know me.

I didn't have a lot of friends early in high school, and I was pretty shy, too. So this one guy, Scott, signed my book and noticed not many people had. He turned to the back and wrote in big letters: "I'll write big so it looks like you've got lots of friends. You're a cool customer. Scott." I showed someone in January, actually, because I thought it was telling of my future. Not so much the "cool customer" part, but the pity that induced it.

 

Now I feel compelled to go look .... but I'm not sure I know where mine are.

I had a fairly large group of friends my last two years of high school - many of whom I still talk to daily - and when it came time to sign senior yearbooks, we treated it like we'd never see each other ever again even though we all went to college within two hours of each other. We wrote paragraphs upon paragraphs to each other to try to recount the memories, wish luck and do all that other sappy stuff.

When I signed yearbooks, I tried to do it as genuine as possible. If I didn't know a person, I still wouldn't go with the "Have A Good Summer" line. I always made sure to include "I can't believe you knew that answer to XXXX when we played Jeopardy in Spanish" or something stupid of the sort. If I was going to be asked to leave some kind of memory on someone's page, I'd at least want to make sure it counted. I found, too, that it usually worked in reverse as well.

 

When I was a junior, I was fairly good friends with this freshman, Morgan. She was a cute girl, tall and thin and very loud and outgoing. One day in the hallway, someone asked if I was her brother, which became our joke for the last two years of school.

My girlfriend, a sophomore, didn't like her at all. I got to school early one morning, like I did every morning, and so did Morgan. I grabbed my yearbook on my way to our meeting place, and Morgan was the next to enter, holding her yearbook and smiling. She asked to sign mine, and I didn't think of it.

On it, she wrote: "Hey, HA HA, I got to sign it first and Carrie didn't. I will always love you, my brother. Always yours, your sister (of course), Morgan."

As for Carrie: "Hey, Mike. Just remember: 1st is the worst and 2nd is the best, so I'm better then (sic.) Morgan. ... I love you, Carrie."

Oh, high school.

And my best friend and I, for some reason, forgot to exchange yearbooks for the first three years, so we signed each others' years later. The one year we remembered, however, this is what he wrote: "Mike, We will both fail out of college. At least we'll have fun doing it. 754-3146 if you're retarded. -- Jeff"

I got a "Don't have a bad summer," too. That was always special to me.

 

Tough for me to go back and look at my yearbook.

Small class (51 kids), but we were all very close.

One of the girls wrote something very touching on the inside front cover on my yearbook, and 7 months later, was dead.

Very tragic, very sudden, very sad.

Gawd-damn, get these dust-mites out of here.

 

Same here. Of our old crew of nine guys, seven of us were in the school district we graduated from in kindergarten. We all knew each other very well by the time we started junior high, and were pretty well-acquainted by third grade.

The other two arrived in fourth and seventh grades, respectively. We all keep in touch still. I talk to five of them on a weekly basis. There are only three of us left not married.

 

One guy wrote "I KISS BOYS" on the photo of another guy in my yearbook from the school in Maine. I had a lot of explaining to do, since that yearbook made the rounds among my friends at the school in Maryland.

Plus, I was acquainted with hearing a straight woman describing another woman as "hot" for the first time courtesy of that yearbook. Don't laugh. It was 1991.

 

I won't make fun of you, F_T. In 1991, that's how it was in my third-grade class, too.

 

I used the yearbook a lot a few years back, before our 25th reunion. They asked me to find the alumni who couldn't be found. I found all of them, even a few overseas. Some of the people on the list weren't in the yearbook, I had no recollection of them and did not expect them to remember me. I had been editor of the school paper, but that was not a particularly high-status position in the overall high school order. I was an unusual choice as ambassador to the lost, 25 years later. I had not been a social butterfly. But I turned out to be an excellent stalker. The journalist skills came in handy.

I call this guy in Colorado. I could not place him at all. Neither could the cool kids who had delegated this task to me. He was off the radar.

He pauses, says, "Didn't you play soccer?"

As a sophomore I had. "Not very well," I say.

He laughs. "Yup, I remember you."

 

I just got back from my 20th high school reunion. Folks, if you have the opportunity to go to one of these, go. It's entertaining and enlightening ... and totally bizarre.

The shy, quiet guy got hot deadly hot and we spent a lot of time together. We would be together today if it wasn't for that mess of a few thousand kilometres in between.

The good-looking quiet guy is well off and deadly hot and living in Calgary. We have a date tomorrow night.

There are classmates dead. There are classmates who have turned out to be total train wrecks. And there are the rest of us who all went off to live life in our own way.

Learning how some of us turned out was, at times, surprising but, for the most part, pleasing. The cliques were still there but the lines were blurrier than they used to be.

One of the shy girls turned into quite the inquisitive gal. After chatting with us for a few minutes, my BFF's husband leaned over and said: I feel like I should go vote for her somewhere.

And, as one of my friends reminded me when after almost two decades we found each other on Facebook last year, "Friendship is a funny thing, it never goes away when it' s real."

That said, I spent a lot of time in the last month looking at my senior yearbook. My profile reads:

Flash comes to us each morning from Church St. One of our townie-hicks, she can usually be found slaving over hot ovens at Greco Pizza. Flash has fond memories of being stranded in Port Hawkesbury, Magic Mountain (and the lifeguards), and Halloween. Future plans include public relations at Mount St. Vincent University.

I never did go to the Mount. But I find it kind of funny that I've ended up in PR after all this time.

Most of my autographs make reference to pizza and donairs, since I worked at a pizza joint through senior year. Yeah, somebody signed my crack and, yeah, more than a few used the old standby of AFA (A Friend Always).

The guy I'm going out with tomorrow night wrote on my autograph pages (P.S. he was best friends with my prom date):

Hope you and Dave have a great time at the prom. Don't SHAG too much. Have a great summer!

 

Agreed. I went to two high school reunions in 2001. Both were 10-year reunions.

The first one was for my school in Maryland. I was able to take the bus there (I didn't drive at the time), and I can remember stories like dancing with this one woman whom I believe was there with her boyfriend or husband. I guess he wasn't interested in dancing and she was. Anyway, the songs we danced to were "Bootylicious" (at the time, I ALWAYS played air guitar to that song because Stevie Nicks played guitar in the video) and "Pride (In The Name Of Love)."

The thing that struck me about that was the fact that I ended up talking with one guy I remembered, but I *never* spoke to him when we were in high school. It wasn't that we didn't get along. We just didn't know each other back then. He gave me a beer. It was cool. I got a ride home from one of my classmates. At least it was only like five-10 minutes away.

Anyway, my second reunion happened just two weeks later. This one was for the school in Maine. Honestly, if I had to choose between reunions, I would have picked the one in Maine because I felt like that was my real high school.

I went up there and I remember walking in and seeing some of my classmates gathered. I said my name and I heard one of them say, "Oh my Gawd" in classic New England accent. She also told me I changed a lot. I go, "Yeah, I gained weight." Her response: "Actually, that's not what I meant." Either way, it was great talking to folks and catching up with them.

One thing that stood out was seeing a woman who was without a doubt the class bitch. I heard someone say that people came up and said, "Oh my God, Krista (the class bitch) was actually nice to me." I heard someone tell me she was actually glad Krista didn't look that good. I also heard someone else paint me as her big arch-rival. Of course, I very famously punched her in the hallway back when we were juniors.

I remember having a drink named after my old high school nickname. I remember seeing one guy look EXACTLY the same as he did when we were in high school ... as if time forgot him. I remember seeing a guy who was textbook goth punk dude in high school married and clean cut. He ended up driving me to my hotel. I remember that we talked about my moving up to Maine for my junior year and my concerns about fitting in. He said I did, very well. We parted with a hug. Times definitely changed since 1991.

For me, though, the reunion in Maine was about a lot more than just seeing old classmates. It was about finally closing an incomplete chapter in my life. Unlike the other reunion, though, I didn't get to see everyone I wanted to. I wanted to see the guy who wrote the moving yearbook entry I started this thread with, but he wasn't there. I would have thanked him for what he wrote and for its continued impact on my heart.

 

Ah God, I wish I'd had the chance to punch her, too. My 'best friend' from elementary came up and talked to me at the reunion. She said, 'you know, after all these years, I've been dying to ask you: why did you ever quit playing soccer? you were too good to stop playing.'

I replied, 'Char, I couldn't handle the crap I had to take from the other girls on the team. I was different because I was younger, not as wealthy, and my parents didn't socialize with the town elite.'

As we spoke, the chief girl responsible for my bullying (yeah, that's right, I was one of those who got bullied, so not cool .) walked by and I said, 'You can really thank her for most of it. She and RC made my life hell on some days.'

Char looked and said, 'You know ... they made life hell for a lot of people. And I'm truly sorry I helped it go on by participating and not saying anything.'

I was dumbfounded. It certainly wasn't what I expected to hear after all these years but, damn, it felt good to hear it.

 

You kissed boys?