Some months ago, against better judgement, I joined the Reunion Committee for Newtown High School (Elmhurst, Queens NY) Class of 1985's 40th Reunion. I was on the committee back when we had the Silver Reunion (25 years). I cannot remember why it was painful, but it was. Lots of work, monthly (?) meetings, hunting people down in many social media platforms, including Plaxo and Friendster - who remember those!? Facebook was somewhat new for me at the time. This time around, we already have a good base of interested people, but what I found out recently is fifteen years after the other reunion, many people are no longer active on Facebook, or left the platform altogether. I cannot blame them.
Proceeded we did, admission price was set and a deadline for collecting x dollars to hand over to the hotel to secure the event space. I was somewhat worried. We live in interesting times, a bizarro world with events making writers at the satirical website The Onion scratch their heads. Inflation, bird flu, uncertain economic future, will people plunk down x dollars to see a bunch of people from high school? But plunk they did and we now have enough money to cover the deposit. Whew! I was worried for a while we won't make it and have to refund the money and lose some more money because the billing service we use charge x percent for every transaction. Maybe we'll hemorrhage our fund because of the service charges and have to use our own money to cover the refund. I know of at least one horror story of someone trying to do a reunion and lost $1000s. OK, not this time for Newtown Class of 1985, whew!
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