The Horrors of Facebook

I went to high school in a small town on the Olympic Peninsula. (Not Forks for all you Twilight fans) It was a very small private school. I got a really excellent education but I never did like small town life very well. All the people that became lasting friends from those years, moved out of that town almost as fast as I did.

Recently, on Facebook, several acquaintances from those years have sent me Friend Requests. And because I don't dislike them, I've added most of them as friends for the purposes of FB. Some of them have been posting pictures from my high school days. There are class pictures and other candid shots where I am tagged. It doesn't really bother me because I was pretty photogenic and slender in those days and I went in for more the Pat Benatar look as opposed to the gigantic hair look which was fortunate.

In a sick kind of way, it has been fun to reconnect with my old schoolmates and see what they are all up to now. Especially, since I have some pretty vivid memories of kids that grew up in that town saying how they were going to move away as soon as they could. Guess what? They didn't. I did. I am amazed at who is married with a bajillion (its a word, look it up) kids and who is STILL single. Some of their stories are hum drum, some are sad (like a classmate of my sister's with 8 children and her husband of 10 plus years walked out on her last year), some are mysterious and some are just plain strange.

Some of them have not been amused to be tagged in old photos for whatever reason. My problem has been that I simply don't remember some of the kids in my class photos. We are talking 30 people in the entire high school and I just don't remember them! It has only been 20 years since I graduated and yet I seem to have blocked out whole people from my memories. I hope that I was more memorable than they were.

The posted picture is from my senior year. We did a production of Little Women. I REALLY wanted to play Jo but I was working part time and couldn't spare enough time for rehearsals so the director said. She had me be Aunt March instead because she only had 2 scenes and they could "work" around me. So I am second from the end on the right in black. Some other time I will tell you the story of how I made that part so memorable that people still (!) remember me playing Aunt March and mention it whenever I see them. It just happened last year in fact.