Word: reunioner
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Walking through the Yard during Commencement Week, you pass countless numbers of "classmates" and assorted family in town for their twenty-fifth reunion. Workmen clatter chairs in Tercentenary Theatre and student porters wander from building to building and House to House carrying baggage, playing baby-sitter and being generally affable...
...could upset an alumni wife (like scum in the shower stalls and marijuana seeds in the bureau drawers), and a few dozen of the best of these are chosen to stay on to work the handful of lucrative details that oil the relentless flow of events that comprises the Reunion. The "best" are, of course, chosen by the crew captains who supervise the work effort, and the promised tips of financially flush alumni are the oft-mentioned carrots that gets everyone on the stick...
Theoretically, at least, I worked clean-up and reunion two years solely for The Experience. But actually, I, like everyone else, did it for the money. That's how I found myself driving an oversized station wagon shuttling alumni and their families from the B-school to their dorms. "So you're a Harvard student?" they would ask, while I inwardly smiled at their shock of irrecognition...
...reunion is full of sideshows and of the half of them that are actually prearranged, one of the best is this boat tour that leaves the docks of the Manchester Yacht Club under the direction of a number of neighborhood women. Ostensibly the tours, led by bossy old ladies with cutesy-tough names like Muggins and Bet, ostensibly introduce interested alumni to the fine homes that overlook the coastline's coves. But, as Muggins confided to her coworkers, "Hah, I don't waste my time gushing on about all those old houses. I just let 'em all chew about their...
...Reunion etiquette is actually fairly simple. Just avoid unpleasant subjects and refer to your fellow alumnus as Classmate. At first, it carries an odd note of artificial formality. But then, everyone else does the same thing. Women talk to their sisters, and blacks to fellow brothers, and I even had a professor this semester who took to calling us all citizen to set things on a more equitable basis. Besides, if you're the type that just can't remember first names, it makes it all a helluva lot easier...