A 30-Year Reunion With Her Inner Teen

Today, I get the blond streaks. Nothing too outlandish, just a smattering of highlights to give my graying hair that sun-kissed look that suggests days spent on the beach.

Tomorrow, it’s a facial--the first of my life--to erase the lines and dark circles I have collected on the march from 17 to 47.

Then, it’s off for a manicure and pedicure and a final sweep through the mall, in search of a red tank top for Spirit Night (“Wear your school colors, classmates, to put that Fighting Eagle spirit on display!”) and a slinky party dress to show off the body I’ve been working all summer to trim and tone.

For weeks, I’ve been measuring the time until my high school class reunion by the work I must do to create the new old me I want my classmates to see. Now, there’s time for just three more ab classes and two workouts at the gym; just four more days to starve myself to get closer to what I looked like 30 years ago.

Thirty years ago. Could it really be that long?

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Maybe it’s a sign of my aging brain, but I don’t recognize most of the names on the roster. And I can’t seem to recollect the faces of classmates who have signed up for this weekend’s reunion of the John F. Kennedy Class of 1972. I only hope that people will wear their name tags and that the writing on them will be big enough for failing eyes to read.

Ours was a giant public school in Cleveland. Think “Boston Public” with no white students. More than 900 kids started with me as sophomores, and 600 made it to graduation. Most stayed on in Cleveland; they went to work in factories, hospitals, government offices, schools. Others went off to college and scattered--to Atlanta, New York, Washington, Philadelphia.

Folks who left the Midwest for California feel a special burden upon our return--to look like movie stars, be rolling in dough, dressed to the nines, driving fancy cars. Our more provincial classmates greet us with condescension and awe: How do you survive in that moral wasteland? What celebrities have you spotted lately? Don’t you miss the seasons and worry about earthquakes? How do you stand that freeway traffic?

This time I’ll have questions of my own. How has my old boyfriend, Walt--now a schoolteacher with a wife and six kids--held up? What became of that cool clique of guys who used to cut class to play cards in the Senior Lounge? And whatever happened to Saundra Curtis, the girl who beat me out for the English award?

And I’m bracing myself for the raised eyebrows that will greet me and my date--my fiance Johnny. You see, this is Johnny’s reunion as well, and we’re probably the least likely couple our classmates would envision, given what they recall of us. We were friends back then, never anything more. It took a chance meeting--after 25 years apart--for us to see each other through different eyes. As teenagers, he thought I was too square to be much fun. I figured he was too much of a pretty boy ever to amount to much.

Now it looks like we both were wrong ... or maybe we just like the changes that life has inflicted as time moved us along.

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For months I took the stairs, turned down desserts, opted for a trip to the gym instead of a drink after work. When anyone asked, my explanation was simple and always understood. “My class reunion is coming up” elicited a sympathetic “aahh.”

Something about reunions tends to spark a bit of angst in most of us. There is something quite humbling about the prospect of a few nights among folks who remember you as that skinny cheerleader with long hair and glasses--that would be me at 17--long after you have added curves, lopped off your trademark curls and traded your spectacles for contact lenses.

At their most benign, reunions are about reconnecting with friends, reliving good times, resurrecting old memories. But they are also a sort of measuring stick of how far we’ve come and how much--or how little--we have changed. Few things prompt a bout of self-evaluation like the expectation that everyone else will be evaluating you too. Each increment on the reunion schedule has its own set of hazards and perks. At the 10th, we’re expected to strut our stuff, far removed from the awkwardness of adolescence but not yet bound by the ennui of middle age. By the 20th, emerging midlife concerns have many looking to recapture their youth and rekindle old relationships. Those reunion encounters are startling; we aren’t prepared to see classmates who look more like their parents than their yearbook pictures.

Thirty should be a piece of cake. There will be bald heads and blond weaves, successes and failures, folks bragging about grandkids and others toting toddlers. We all want to put our best face forward, but there’s little room, at this point, for pretense.

It’s a rare chance to be in one place with hundreds of others who are all the same age. And if that evokes comparisons, it also reminds us of something else we share: The feeling that, someplace inside us, we ought to still be 17.

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Sandy Banks’ column is published Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes. com.