Kimberly Emerson

Time marches on in this very active summer, and I am trying desperately to keep pace.  Labor Day weekend this year brought my college reunion, and more learning experiences.

I call it my college reunion to simplify things.  In reality, I got my Bachelor’s degree at Cal State Fullerton, a school of some 30,000 students, and if they had a reunion of my graduating class, I doubt I’d recognize three people.  This particular get-together was a reunion of the students of the acting conservatory I later attended.  This is not only lengthy, but requires explaining to people that I did indeed go to acting school at some point in my life, which usually starts a much longer conversation about why I am now working as a financial analyst.

I decided to go back to school to study acting at a little school called the Pacific Conservatory for the Performing Arts, or PCPA for short.  (Well, I decided to study acting.  PCPA was the school that decided to take me.  As it turned out, the school and I were well suited to each other.)  My class was made up of thirty-two students.  On the first day we all sat down in a big circle (something we would do frequently over the course of the next two years).  The Conservatory Director, Paul Barnes, said, “Look around at this circle.  This is your lifeline for the next two years.”

I spent two emotional, rewarding, suffocating, exhausting, frustrating, exhilirating and inspiring years there.  We got to know each other very well.  Sometimes a little too well.  Once in a while well enough to be heartily sick of each other.  Being in a class is kind of like being in a family – you get to know each other’s deep dark secrets, and you don’t get to pick who’s in the group.  At the end of the day, the whole experiment seems to work best if you just accept who fate happened to throw at you, and learn whatever it is they have to teach you.  I worried a little about how I was going to adapt to this group, since at 27 I was one of the older members.  By the time the two years were up, I had an anxiety attack at the idea of leaving this microcosm to rejoin the big scary world.

It was 1998 when my classmates and I, in a flood of tears and well-wishes, went out to build the rest of our lives.  Along about now, if you’re good at math, you’re thinking, “That was 11 years ago.  Why are you having a reunion now?”  Good question.  We tossed around the idea of having a ten-year reunion like normal people, but everyone had gone their own ways, and tracking them down was a big project.  One of my classmates, Brandon, somehow wound up in charge.  (Not sure how that happened, Brandon.  Sorry about that.)   He couldn’t figure out how to do it last year.  Then, as he told me, “Facebook happened, and I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, I can do this.'” 

And he did.  God love him, Brandon sent messages to everyone he could find, opening up the party not only to our class, but to the class above us and the class below us.  It made sense.  Our class had always been an inclusive group.  During my two years at the school, I can’t remember a single party thrown by a classmate (and there were many, many of them) that wasn’t open to everyone in the school. 

I should probably also throw into the conversation here that I didn’t go to my 20-year high school reunion.  I didn’t find out about it until it was over.  So, walking into the lobby of the theater that Brandon had reserved for the event was pretty much my first reunion experience.  My initial thought was, “I only know about half of these people.”  A second later, as though I were looking through a kaleidoscope and the filter suddenly changed, I thought, “No, I know ALL these people.”  It had been eleven years since I’d seen most of them.  They had changed in subtle and interesting ways.  But underneath, they were the same people I had studied, rehearsed, laughed, cried, danced, screamed, and grown with.  Suddenly all the time melted away.  We were together again – well, a lot of us were, anyway.  Twenty-one from my class plus another ten or so teachers, interns, people from other classes and significant others. 

Does everyone have that same reunion experience of a thousand memories trying to cram their way into your brain at the same time?  Making Patrick a pumpkin pie for his birthday.  Running into my roommates in the kitchen while we all tried to get breakfast.  Kissing Sean good-bye after a show.  Feeding Brandon chocolate chip cookies fresh out of the oven.  Sharing a dressing room with Rachel.  Before the reunion, I had spent considerable time putting together not only my face and my outfit, but also an under-a-minute reply to the question “So, what have you been up to?”  That was probably the hardest part, because I didn’t particularly like the real answer.  I’ve done lots of things, but there’s no crowning acheivement in any of them.  Eleven years of getting through the day, that’s what I’d been up to.  But once I was there, I completely forgot all my preparation, because it didn’t matter.  These people loved me.  They loved me then, and they loved me now, the same way I loved them.  When I talked to them, I liked listening to their stories, but the truth was it didn’t matter what the story was about.  What they are doing makes little difference.  It’s enough to know that they just are. 

We talked until after the official closing time of midnight.  At 1:30, when with promises of visits and emails I said I had to go, Patrick summed it up perfectly by simply shaking his head. 

No.  You are not leaving.  You are part of my heart, and you are staying there.

As far as my search for direction that I mentioned in the last column, well, I didn’t find direction during the evening.   But it did occur to me that if I’ve found people like this to share the journey, maybe the actual direction doesn’t matter so much.

Next stop, the Time-Warp Weekend…