I FINALLY HAD MY OWN CHEESY '80S MOVIE MOMENT

BY CARL KOZLOWSKI

I’ve always loved ‘80s high school movies, and I’ll even admit that I was hooked on the original “Beverly Hills, 90210.” They all depicted the world’s coolest proms, the most exciting football games, and offered up characters like Brandon Walsh or Ferris Bueller who were able to get away with anything they wanted, and most of all, they offered up dramatic moments of utterly cheesy uplift - like when the school geek finally gets his moment to shine as the rest of the class gives him a slow-building and stirring round of applause.

Those movies made my teenage existence in the small city of Little Rock, Arkansas, where I was a hardworking but mostly quiet kid, feel like there was hope out there somewhere to have my own moment of glory someday. But I never imagined that that moment would come this year, right back where I came from, in Little Rock at my high school’s 20–year reunion.

I went to Little Rock Catholic High for Boys, which was about two miles away from the Mt. Saint Mary’s Academy for girls. You can only imagine the sheer social delight to be had from the fact that we were in gender-segregated schools while raging with hormones. If I wanted to have the same cool social life as Ferris Bueller or Brandon, I’d have to make the trek up to the Mount after a grueling eight hours of girl-free schools - and even then it was hopeless because I didn’t get to drive ‘til my senior year and was trapped having my Mom behind the wheel for a full ¾ of my high school experience.
Not exactly the kind of thing that lends itself to living a life as cool as the ones I watched in the movies. Add in the fact that my year-older sister Krys went to the Mount, and imagine my agony knowing that the only girl I’d be picking up each day from that school was related to me. Krys tried to be good sibling, going out of her way to help my nearly-nonexistent social life, but she went about it in entirely the wrong way: by pimping me as a prom or homecoming dance date for the strangest foreign-exchange student in her class each year.

There’s really no way to describe the joy I felt twice a year when told that I would be taking yet another girl who barely spoke English - or whose culture didn’t even allow them to dance anyway - to the big dance. I relished sitting on the sidelines, unable to communicate with my date as everyone else cut a rug and wondered why I didn’t shake my tailfeathers along with them, assuming that I must not know how to even hold a conversation. And even better, I got to pay for dinner and throw down $50 on a tux rental!

Perhaps now you’ll understand why, by the time graduation rolled around, I and my two best friends – the one open atheist, and the one all-but-openly gay guy – vowed to leave the grounds and never return. I treated college like a federal witness-protection program and completely reinvented myself into my present adult status: as a stand-up comic and entertainment reporter in Hollywood getting to do whatever I want just like Ferris Bueller, with a big, brash personality and unfortunately a big fat gut to go along with it. But I kept my personal promise to live my life the way I wanted it and make up for the 18 years in which I felt bottled up by going through Catholic schools in the buckle of the Bible Belt.

So I skipped my 10-year reunion. I was in Chicago at the time, still skinny as in high school and working at my dream newspaper, the Chicago Tribune. I was head writer of a local TV comedy show and was the show’s host for “Weekend Update”-style fake news, complete with a memorable night in which I got to “co-anchor” with future “Today Show” substitute host Lester Holt! Why would I possibly want to go back?

Well, the subsequent decade taught me a little bit of humility. I developed a sleep disorder that cost me jobs, forced me to stop driving for years and screwed my metabolism up to the point where I topped (or should I say popped?) scales at over 300 pounds. I had to back out of an engagement when my fiancé developed severe bipolar disorder and her doctor said the emotional rollercoaster of relationships often prove impossible for manic-depressive people to deal with healthily.

And I had a profound reconciliation with my dad, who had often been repressive in my childhood but was now not only my friend but an artist himself, creating a successful second career as a painter in his retirement. I’d been coming home happily for the past seven years, so when the word came this time about the 20-year reunion, I realized it was time to confront and reclaim my past.

One big part of that decision came thanks to Facebook, where a few of the guys I thought never gave me a moment of thought in their lives tracked me down, saw my avatar picture in which I’m hanging with Jay Leno, and started asking about my standup career. Then some of the guys started buying a humor book I wrote. And finally, my senior class president – a real-life Ferris Bueller who had become a major-city TV anchor while maintaining his staggeringly funny sense of humor – wrote me a note two weeks before the two-night reunion in which he ordered me to come, assuring me that high school was “o.v.e.r.” and that rather than being a loser for not having a wife and kids, I’d be seen as a hero still living the single-guy dream.

So I went, plunking down a fat $500 for a plane ticket with the awareness that that same president had ordered me to “entertain the troops” and perform standup at the big party. All I can say is, if you’ve ever wondered if it’s worth going back for a reunion, you’ve simply GOT to do it.

It was fascinating to see which people looked older and which ones stayed the same. Most of the guys had either gained weight or lost hair, providing a much-appreciated shot of self-esteem as I realized I wasn’t the only person who’d grown up to resemble the Michelin Tire Man. On the other hand, the women had either stayed the same or gotten even better looking with age. The only problem was, we had a live ‘80s band cranking out the hits of our youth, but I couldn’t tell who was married and who was single and wound up talking on the sidelines for fear that I’d wind up getting hit by the husband of someone I tried to hit on.

Our class president was a rising-star TV anchor, and another guy is in the Secret Service protecting former President George W. Bush. Another is a cop in New Orleans who slogged through the pandemonium of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, while yet another guy is now the doctor keeping my parents alive. But whether they were computer techs, concrete-truck repairmen or grocery-store managers, it was cool to see that all the old social barriers – the walls that separated freaks from geeks, and jocks from nerds – were gone.

We were just people now, happy to see how each other survived and changed and moved forward in life – while also sad to think back on the four classmates who had died over the intervening years. And all those people – nearly 200 guys and women whom I had hidden my comedic interests from in high school, secretly wishing I could “show them” someday – wound up being the coolest audience I’ve had in 12 years as a professional comic.

As the night’s official party wound to a close, the band having said its goodbyes and venue officials ordering us to clear out, my class treasurer jumped onstage, waving my humor book and announcing that it’s a rare thing for a class to have an actual comedian in their ranks. And just as I gave him the “cut” sign and thought I’d better not risk a failure onstage, one classmate whispered from behind me that if I didn’t take that moment, I’d regret it the rest of my life. With that, women I thought were far beyond my wildest dreams started whooping for me and both classes burst into chanting my name: “Carl! Carl! Carl!”

The only thing missing was the slow-building applause that greeted the misfit title character in “Lucas” or helped the nerds finally feel welcome in “Revenge of the Nerds.” But as everyone laughed and clapped, I felt the weight of 20 years of bitterness, fear and bad memories fall off my shoulders like an unwanted coat. I’d made peace with my parents years before, but now I felt loved and accepted by everyone else I’d felt ignored by so long before.

I’m not gonna lie and say the night remained as noble as that moment. I wound up at an after-party in which I finally danced off all the horrible memories of those lame dances with foreign exchange students, busting moves with one of the prettiest girls at the Mount and posing for pictures that will probably prevent me from ever seeking office.

But in the end, my $500 planet ticket wasn’t just a chance to fly home. It became a chance to fly, period, in my life, knowing finally that I can go home again – anytime I want. And that you can take any bad or tough situation in your life and reclaim and reinvent it. That’s a good lesson to have even if you’re not heading for a reunion.