Monica Yant Kinney: 20 years on, the Reunion holds no fear for grown-ups

This weekend, I will attend my 20th high school reunion. I have watched movies about these supposedly wretched affairs, but I'm excited about reuniting with my fellow North Side Redskins and don't anticipate any theatrics. We got that out of the way back in the day when our French teacher was hauled off in handcuffs for her role in a drug ring.

Miss Stewart's arrest notwithstanding, North Side was a fairly ordinary 2,000-student public high school in the heartland.

We drove clunkers, such as VW bugs with rotted floors. My friend Bethany tooled around in a 1971 Ford LTD as big as a city block. It had no AC, but she could haul the entire volleyball team comfortably.

In Fort Wayne, Ind., high fashion meant girls with gravity-defying perms and acid-washed jeans, boys with shaggy mullets and shiny Members Only jackets.

We had all the typical cliques: jocks, nerds, stoners, cheerleaders. Everyone had a place, but cross-pollination was rare.

The Afro Club had no white members. The tennis team had no black members. Progressiveness in the 1980s meant girls infiltrating the Wildsiders jazz band.

Back then, no one contemplated gay-straight alliances, but everyone knew and used crude sexual slurs.

Officially, our flag-twirlers were known as the Arrowettes. Unofficially? Some called them the "whore corps."

To prepare for the reunion, I dug up Volumes 58 to 61 of the Legend and crammed for a social exam.

In my 1986 yearbook, fellow freshmen waxed poetically about my aerodynamic 'do: "May you be the first woman to venture into fencing with your weird haircut."

In 1987, many girls used hot pink ink to recount one of the year's biggest scandals: my getting arrested for underage drinking.

Nothing shatters stereotypes like an overachiever stumbling. Before I got busted, toughs who frequented the smoking section didn't talk to this honor student. Afterward, some kindly offered legal advice.

Junior year, half the inscriptions used party as a verb. The rest were a jumble of now-indecipherable inside jokes such as: "T-bone and Ricky: Flowers under covered trees. Cheers!"

By 1989, graduation had us quoting John Mellencamp lyrics ("Hold onto 16 as long as you can") while pledging that we'd never change, that our bonds would stand the test of time. Then we all went our separate ways, met new friends, and started listening to Nirvana.

As an 18-year-old, you're all but required to trash your town and swear you'll blow out of there as you save up enough from your job at the Dairy Queen. As 38-year-olds, 80 percent of my classmates still live in or within a couple hours of Fort Wayne. Guess that stuff about the Midwest being a nice place to raise a family wasn't so bogus after all.

More than 100 of us will attend the reunion festivities. Even more have been catching up about old times and new lives on Facebook.

Today, we chat about getting married or divorced, having babies or (gasp!) dropping kids off at college.

One classmate shares inspirations from her pastor. Another links to her blog, which features yummy recipes and home-front hilarity.

Steve, a shy teenager turned overseas executive, proudly offered travel aid to Redskins heading abroad. So Tiffany, another classmate, looked him up on a business trip in Asia. They didn't hang out in high school. Now they dine in China.

Twenty years removed from the sturm und drang of adolescence, the members of the Class of 1989 seem genuinely interested in each other. We've dulled our self-drawn edges and thrown off clichéd archetypes.

Back then, we were freaks or geeks. Now, we're mothers, husbands, strivers, strugglers.

Some might say finding common ground in the mundane means the "party naked" people became lame. I think it just means we grew up.