KEY POINTS:
I am never organising another reunion in my life," I groaned as I threw off my heels and launched myself on to the couch, interrupting my husband's viewing of Monster Camp on TV.
"You did so much work for this one," he said as he led me into the kitchen to make me a late-night toasted sandwich.
"You must be exhausted."
I had just spent the evening at a reunion. Reunions are the latest new trend as we desperately search for some meaning in our glorious past when our future looks so uncertain.
A desire to spend time with those who knew us in better days. A time when we looked quite hot and were still a stranger to the world of sagging flesh, weight gain, wrinkles and memory loss.
I've never been much into reunions. I've always thought they were simply an opportunity for those who have done well to lord it over those who haven't or for those who have not done well to indulge in the gleam and sparkle of an era when they weren't quite such a loser.
But neither of those things entered my head as I blithely proposed to a former colleague and delightful man from the old school of journalism, who refers to his wife as the War Office and catches the bus everywhere, that we should assemble the entire former staff of the Auckland Star newspaper.
And so we set about letting everyone know. He used the telephone, being old-school, and I was supposed to email as many people as I could think of. Which, disappointingly, turned out to be not many.
My job was then to find the venue. It had to be the Occidental Pub in Vulcan Lane where we used to drink after work but it's a Belgian restaurant now. Then it was the Corner Bar at DeBrett's Hotel but the manager failed to see the financial advantage of hosting 50 hard-drinking journos and never rang me back.
I briefly considered hiring out the carpark on Shortland St which sits on the site where the Auckland Star building was demolished and thought we could have a little service with candles, making good use of my celebrant skills.
And then my former colleague got on the phone, proving once again the advantages of old-fashioned methods of communication, and sorted it.
Actually he sorted the whole thing, and the hardest part for me was working out what to wear. How do you dress for people who haven't seen you for a quarter of a century?
"I was thinking 'casual just popped in after work'," I suggested to my friend. "Or do you think more 'top to toe designer to reflect success', or perhaps just a 'basic black Coco Chanel-inspired'?"
"Wear that dress you wore to Phil's funeral," she said rather abruptly, eager to get me off the phone so she could resume her busy work day unfettered by my wardrobe crisis.
And so I went to the Auckland Star reunion in my funeral dress.
"Apparently I used to have a potty mouth," I informed my husband as I munched on melted cheese and bread at the end of the long night. "I had quite the repertoire of filthy jokes for a 20-year-old. Everyone remembers them; how disappointing that I was so low-rent."
"Really," he said.
"And I can't believe half those people are still alive. They were old 26 years ago, and they look just the same. Like time stood still."
