The Making of a Reunion Part II

( . . . . . continuation.)

Feeling more motivated, I started searching for our former teachers via Google. I was successful to find a little over 20 teachers. Some were still teaching at Burton, while a few transferred to other schools. I emailed, called, Facebooked, and even visited teachers at Burton dropping off invitations on my days off. Jenille also managed to find teachers on LinkedIn. We succeeded on getting five teachers to attend: Dr. Dorman, Ms. Haines (who flew all the way from New York to see us), Mr. Kim, Mr. Salvemini, and Ms. Santiago.

Eventually deposits were slowly trickling in. We had to give a few extensions, but it still worked. Half way through our journey, we came across another bump in the road. In our contract, we said we could get 100 people to go, but we could barely get 60. Jenille and I emailed Laura once again. I scheduled another meeting with her hoping to renegotiate the number of people that would be attending. Lucky for us, Laura was very understanding, and agreed to drop our number down to 60 people, and still let us keep the ballroom, only rather than the whole ballroom, we would get to use 2/3 of the ballroom instead.

As months turned into weeks, we found that we only had 55 people who left deposits, basically not the 60 people we agreed in contract. To make matters worst, the last two weeks, seven people decided not to go anymore even if it meant they couldn’t get a refund. We were down to 47 people. OMG! What were we going to do? We started texting those who mentioned before that they were interested in buying a ticket closer to the date. We changed our Facebook statuses reminding people to buy tickets. We even instant messaged people convincing them to go. SUCCESS! With two weeks to spare, we managed to get our final head count to 66 people. Six more people than we anticipated.

With that solved, we started finalizing on our given tasks. Milan was able to get us a DJ. I managed to get my good friend Iz to be the photographer. Both were willing to hook it up big time and work within our budget. Melvin worked really hard on trying to get more guests to go. Jenille continued to handle our money, and send out monthly reminders about the reunion. We couldn’t think of a good souvenir to pass out, until I remembered that I had a tape from our Senior Year. The miracles of Facebook I tell ya, minutes after posting that I’m looking for a place to transfer an old VHS tape to DVD, my friend Richard tells me he can do it at home. Richard was nice enough to edit our ancient VHS into a brand new DVD, along with a couple of surprises of his own. LOL I was in charge of making place cards and center pieces. As soon as we knew how many tables we would be having, I sent out posts asking people if they were willing to donate their old text books. We had a stack of books in the middle of the tables, tied by a silver ribbon, holding down a bouquet of balloons in our school colors. Jenille, Elsie, Audrey, Cecilia, and Bern were nice enough to come over my house and help me wrap some of the books like how we used to make book covers in high school. They even helped me stick the names of the guests on the proper place cards of their meal choice. Even my 10-year old son helped! He scanned ALL our pictures for the slide show. Audrey had this whole box of candid pictures that she kept from high school! She brought them over and sorted through them, while my son scanned them. LOL Elsie thought of games we could play for our mini-rally at the reunion, while Bern was nice enough to make a run to Target to buy a couple of gift cards as prizes. Elsie also made the cutest name tags for all our classmates. Rather than using stickers that read, “Hello my name is . . .”, Jenille suggested using our old school IDs. LOL Luckily Elsie still had her Senior ID. We even had gifts for the teachers who came. Gotta love BevMo. I found great deals on bottles of wine. Everything turned out great!