Whatever happened to that person who broke your heart? : Class Reunion Pros Evoke the Past

Kim Lewis and Phyllis Pazen are in the nostalgia business.

The Camarillo women plan class reunions.

Wonder what happened to the Prom Queen, the Class Clown, the person or persons who broke your heart in the course of that unforgettable, real-life soap opera called “High School”? Lewis and Pazen will track them down and make sure they get invited to the 10th or 20th or 40th reunion of the class of whatever year is embossed on the cover of your yearbook.

“We don’t know who the class nerds were, so we try to find everybody,” Pazen said.

A good turnout makes a successful reunion, which is why their firm, Class Reunion Enterprises, hires researchers to scour telephone books, birth and marriage records and voter registration lists for the teen-agers of yesteryear. Because research takes time, the women like to begin planning a reunion a year in advance.

There are several hundred reunion planners nationwide, about 50 of whom belong to the National Assn. of Reunion Planners, headed by Joan Evans of Orlando, Fla. Lewis and Pazen are members, as are firms in San Diego and San Bernardino.

Evans believes reunions are more important today than they ever were. “It used to be you grew up, you stayed in town, and you saw each other every day,” Evans said. “Why have a reunion? But today people are so dispersed.” Evans knows, because she sends invitations to Europe, the Middle East, Australia, Japan.

Recently, Evans received regrets from an alumnus who couldn’t attend because he was in prison. The judge didn’t think even a 20-year reunion justified a furlough.

Reunion planners, beneficiaries of the decline in volunteerism, claim they can do everything an amateur reunion committee can do, better and cheaper. In addition to finding alumni, they arrange for the hall, refreshments, music, souvenirs and name tags with yearbook pictures on them. They also staff the party. “The committee doesn’t have to do anything but have a good time,” Lewis said.

Lewis and Pazen, who orchestrate about 30 reunions a year, mostly in the San Fernando Valley and Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, have been known to hand-deliver diets to people busy with reunion math: dividing how much more they weigh than they did in high school by the number of weeks until the big event.

In the course of three years in the business, the women have learned what works at reunions and what fizzles. They recommend holding the nostalgia fest at a hotel, so that out-of-towners, locals who don’t want to drink and drive and other attendees can spend the night. “You want to have it at a nice place, but it’s not a prom, it’s not a coronation,” Pazen said. “You don’t have to have it at the Taj Mahal.”

The food need not be extraordinary either, she said. “They get so caught up in seeing their old friends they could be eating sawdust and they wouldn’t care. The waiters often end up clearing full plates.”

A modest ticket price will increase the number of people who can attend, the women say. Tickets for their reunions average $40 per person.

On reunion night, the women tell attendees to put their dinner tickets into pocket or purse as soon as they sign in at the registration table. As Pazen explained: “When people walk in, they see someone they know, they scream and throw their arms up in the air, and the tickets go flying.”

The pros counsel committees to keep the evening’s program brief, no more than 10 or 15 minutes. No one goes to a reunion to hear speeches, Pazen said. People are there to renew old friendships and remember what it was like when the whole world seemed to be lined with lockers and possibilities.

They also counsel against giving insulting awards. “A lot of committees think it’s absolutely hysterical to give an award to the person who has lost the most hair,” Pazen said with dismay. And the girl who was thrilled to be named the most-likely-to-succeed 20 years ago may not be amused at being named the reunion’s most-often-married.

People in the business say you can tell how long ago a class graduated by how they behave at their gathering. Ten years after graduation, status and achievement are important, and one-upmanship and competitive dressing are common. Limos and tuxes are not unusual.

“The older classes are more comfortable with themselves,” Pazen said.

Lewis and Pazen won’t do five-year reunions. The alumni are too young, and their reunions “turn out to be drunken brawls, basically,” Lewis said.

Evans said people will often stay away from a 10th reunion if they are recently divorced, overweight or perceive themselves as less than successful. “The 20 years don’t care if they look like the QE II--they come barreling in.”

However long ago the prom, there is always romance at reunions, the women said. “They don’t see each other as they are now,” Pazen said. “They see each other as they were then.”