Reunion Crashers

I mentioned in my last post that I had once crashed a class reunion. I thought I would share the details...

In 2002, I was a Creative Memories consultant and our executive director, Barbara, was coming to Chattanooga to do a consultant retreat. I, along with some of my downline, decided to head to Chattanooga for a nice, relaxing weekend. We checked into our hotel which was right smack in the middle of downtown Chattanooga. The consultants had a large banquet room for scrapbooking, networking, etc.

The first night Barbara had arranged for all of us to have dinner at a lovely Italian restaurant that was within walking distance from our hotel. We had an outside entrance from our banquet room so we left from there for our dinner. After dinner, we walked back to the hotel in small groups and when we got to our banquet room entrance, we realized it automatically locked after hours. Since there was no one left in the room, we would have to walk around to the main entrance of the hotel.

There were five us that walked into the hotel lobby and were met by a man that asked us if we were there for the ___ ____ Class of 1982 reunion (the name of the high school escapes me at the moment). I honestly don't know why, but I belted out, "Why yes we are!" He pointed us in the direction of a banquet room on the opposite side of the hotel from the one we were SUPPOSED to be in. Outside the doors, a table was being manned by two hotel employees. On one of the tables, all of the name tags were spread out so when they asked our names, I started the trend by picking up a name tag and saying my name. I still have that nametag around here somewhere. Anyway, they checked each of us off the list, we slapped on our name tags and walked through the doors.

Imagine a sixth grade dance. That's what it looked like in there except instead of girls on one side and boys on the other, it was little clumps of couples at tables all eyeing the other couples. There was a nice buffet which we obviously had no interest in since we had just left the restaurant. To be honest, at this point, I was pretty darn uncomfortable. What started out as just something to get some laughs had now landed us in the belly of the whale in my opinion. But instead of turning and running, we hit the dance floor. Danced our booties off. Slowly but surely, people started joining us on the dance floor including this adorable couple who approached my boss and said, "ok, what gives!" He had dated the girl whose name was on her nametag so we were immediately busted. We soon discovered that he was about three sheets to the wind, so he thought it was hilarious and they kept dancing with us. The dance floor was soon packed. Before we knew it, several hours had past and it was time for the class photo. The adorable couple ushered us over where we hammed it up with 200 of our closest new friends. Wonder what those people thought when they got that bad boy?

Right as we were getting ready to leave, a lady approached our circle and said, "I don't know who you ladies are, but thank you so much for coming. This has been the best class reunion EVER!" She was the class president!

When we got back to our real banquet room, everyone was freaking out trying to figure out where we had been and no one believed us until we showed them our name tags. It was a great night and although I would never do something like that again, it is something that still makes me laugh out loud just thinking about us doing the electric slide at someone else's class reunion!