01/13/2023
By Kate Stone Lombardi
Every few months, I put together the alumni news from my college classmates. This involves:
-An initial plea for news
-A follow up desperate plea for news
-A final plea, which include statements like, “Thanks to the THREE classmates who have already written in,” or “Come on! Help me out. I’ve got nothing. Have a heart.”
News trickles in at the last minute, and then I have to put in it into a coherent narrative and send it off to the college. By the time they are published, it’s time to go back to the well and start over again.
I started out gung-ho. My mission was to reach out to those classmates who rarely or never wrote in, and to have our class news reflect the realities of our lives, and not just be a boring, brag-y recital from the usual clique of people who wrote in. You know the kind – every class has them. It begins with boasting about their incredible career, and over the years it moves on to their incredible children, their incredible house – a result, of course, of their incredible career – their incredible children’s college careers, blah blah blah. These folks like to call themselves “blessed” and I have to bite my tongue to say, “Don’t you mean ‘privileged?’”
Well, I have changed the tenor of the class notes, but I must say, it’s been a mixed blessing. Lots of people write in now. I’ve asked classmates to keep it real, and boy, have they. One guy wrote about a “threesome” he had in a hot tub. Another proudly linked to some gay porn he’d written. I’ve gotten deeply personal medical details about surgeries, heard stories of heartbreaking loss, and learned about dog breeding, pot throwing, and more.
Anyway it’s deadline time and I have to go. So far, one classmate reports that he just finished a wine tasting tour and another had prostate surgery.
Is my term up yet?