There is a little twinge of an emotion that exists somewhere way in the back of the chest called “Reunion Jitters,” and though I barely passed any Science class I ever took, I know that this emotion is real. I personally felt those Reunion Jitters take hold when I attended my high school reunion a couple of years ago and I vividly remember that that a clear side effect of RJ (That’s right: I’m gonna abbreviate my made-up emotion, patent the phrase itself, and then contact Merck to see if they can develop a pill that quells the ailment, one whose only side effect is drastic weight loss and shinier hair) was that my hand shook when I applied my mascara. I’m not sure what it was that I was so nervous about, but it was probably an unbalanced combination of having not seen most of those people in years and wondering if certain guys were going to show up and whether or not it would be weird that I wasn’t married. (Who cares? said a friend of mine who couldn’t go to the reunion because he lives across the country. You’re the only one who has published a book.) Still, there was something really f*cking weird about pulling up to the house of a girl who is now a woman and walking up to a front door that her mom wouldn’t be answering.
The reunion itself turned out to be a whirlwind of drinking and conversations that occurred in brief bursts, but it was really fun and there was actually no need for the RJs, but please don’t tell Merck that – I’d like to retire soon. Everybody got along and we all laughed a lot, and I guess that it’s pretty clear that the tone of a room is set by those who inhabit it – which is why the lucky Sur bartenders and servers should gulp down a handful of my newly-minted medication right here and now because shoving them into a room with one another with the express purpose to rehash all of their misdeeds should be causing them to collectively tremble – and the ones who aren’t experiencing full-body tremors clearly either lack self-awareness or they were born without a conscience.
Maybe there’s a pill for that too.
Now, there’s precious little I enjoy more than the arrivals of the participants to a Bravo Reunion show. They walk onto the set sans makeup and the most idiotic ones in the bunch question aloud whether or not anybody will be “gunning” for them and they have the audacity to wonder what it could possibly be that they might have done that could cause anger – after lying, cheating, manipulating, and instigating all season long while being recorded by cameras.
“I’m sure they’ll find something to yell at me about,” says Jax, the human equivalent of the grimy, blackened snow currently covering the gutters in New York City that dogs enjoy pissing on. Hmmm, I expect this idiot allowed himself to ponder, could it be the fact that I continuously exposed the secrets of my best friends, toyed with the emotions of several tragic women, or lied vociferously even though I knew it would come back to bite me on my ass since every time I lied I was wearing a microphone? But really, I cannot spend too much time contemplating Jax’s fractured thought process because I am far more concerned with mentioning what I think nobody else wants to mention: that I’m relatively positive that his new facial scruff – far more scraggily than usual – has been steadfastly constructed from the pubic hair of women who have very little self-esteem, like Carmen – I mean, the hair of his beard totally matches the color of her roots – who was with Jax the night before the reunion.