Five-year reunion, revisited

Now that I finally have a moment to breathe, I've decided to offer my take on my five-year Boston College reunion last weekend. BC invites graduates from every fifth year (2000, 1995, 1990, etc.) to attend each summer. Too many details to cover, so I'll just have to cover the highlights:

First impressions: So I get to campus, which isn't that big a deal for me, considering I had just been there a month earlier for the Acoustics' annual Alumni Weekend, which includes the current group's Final Show. So I've seen all the new buildings, shaken my fist in the air over all the improvements I never experienced and laughed at the fact that the Plex still exists.

Playing hooky: The weekend included a few Super Seminars, which I naively thought would be packed to the gills at the start and diminish as the weekend went along. Reality kicked in when I showed up late to the first one and found half the seats empty and filled with, um, lots of alumni who didn't graduate in the last 20 years. So I did my best "I have to go do something important" charades at the front door by looking at my watch and walking around campus in search of arriving friends.

Campus crawl: It was great running into all sorts of people, starting with the usual How-are-you-What-Are-You-Doing-Where-Are-You-Living prerequisite and moving onto the You-Still-Dating-That-Guy-Girl awkwardness and finally relaxing into the Did-You-Get-The-Chappelle's-Show-DVD territory. By early evening, BC hosted a wine-tasting event in Gasson 100, which seems like a nice idea except for the fact that it was a sauna in there. I got my Coppolla, downed it, mopped my forehead and headed outside to the cooler, 85-degree weather. Jeez!

Evening Under The Stars/Who's On First: So BC hosted this nice little event in the Quad as the sun went down called Evening Under The Stars. Not bad, but skewed a bit toward the older crowd (as the wedding band seemed to indicate). A vast majority of the Class of 2000 bought tickets to this event at a notorious BC bar called Who's On First, famous for its, um, "open-door policy." Anyway, my friend Tamara and three other BCers from our year catch a vintage London taxi that takes us to Who's for FREE (thanks to the good people at the Alumni Association) and we enter the dragon affectionately known as Who's On Who. Perhaps not the best night to wear my suit jacket, but it was a really fun night. It was especially fun witnessing uninhibited conversation and aggressive flirting tactics due to the brevity of the weekend.

Celebrity? So while I'm talking with a friend-of-a-friend at Who's, I meet a girl who said she would have loved to have dated me in college, but she was intimidated by my "celebrity" status. A sweet comment for sure, but amusing for two reasons. One, she's married now. Two, the perception of a singing dork as hot commodity cracks me up. I suppose we singer won't quite get the groupies that the Division-I athletes do, but it's nice to know that singers aren't exactly ignored. Especially since I still sing on stage.

Flipcup: Apparently, I am a far better Flipcup player than I remembered. As the mob returned to campus to party it up in Walsh, I came across a flip cup table in the middle of the hallway and proceeded to wipe the beer-soaked floor with my madd flipp cupp skillzzzzz. I was beyond en fuego, repeatedly landing each blue Dixie on its head on first and second attempts.

Which got me thinking. What are my best alcohol-themed sports that I've played?

1. A**hole - Not only do I dominate the competition, but the smack-talk is off the charts.
2. Flipcup - For a game I rarely play, I fare extremely well.
3. Kings - Neither here nor there, considering luck plays a huge role.
4. Quarters - A very, very streaky game for me. Just ask Mark.
5. Beirut/Beer Pong - With the exception of one Aaron Boone-esque miracle night last year, the most humiliating of my beer-related sports.

Last weekend's Flipcup wins were getting embarassing, so I decided to meander and talk with more 2000ers until about 4:30 a.m. Attempts to sleep were squelched by the worst housing-assigned snorer in history, but I held up okay the next day.

Sports Huddle cameo: So because I had no trouble getting up due to the public address snorer Housing assigned to the same room as me, I grabbed perhaps the greatest sausage-and-cheese omelette in history at the dining hall and headed up to Devlin to catch the athletic director talk about the future of BC sports in a well-attended seminar. The AD is a very well-respected man among the alums, from what I can tell. So it was particularly cool to see Lesley Visser, a BC alumna, and her husband Dick Stockton stroll in to the lecture. Visser spoke for about three minutes at the end and I reintroduced myself at the end; we had met about three years earlier and shared a couple of laughs at a BC Sports Nite function in NYC. She's very cool and definitely a pro. I successfully resisted urges to drop to my knees and beg for a sports commentator position at CBS, but it wasn't easy.

Meditation: After the Sports Huddle seminar, I headed toward the Burns library lawn, where the school built a labyrinth that was dedicated in 2003 to the alumni who died in the 2001 World Trade Center attacks. The labyrinth is said to be conducive to medidation, especially when followed with a deliberate pace, so on the beautiful sunny day, I turned off my iPod and slowly strolled in circles with the path taking me on a 20-minute journey that, as the crow flies, is about 10 yards from start to finish. I wasn't quite in the right frame of mind to meditate, but it was a nice, peaceful moment to myself in an otherwise hypersocial weekend.

Plex Party/Casino Royale: Okay, so remember those high school dances that brought everyone to the campus gym that wasn't air conditioned and featured a dance floor empty other than 10 drunk girls and two of their unlucky dates? That was pretty much how the party at the aforementioned Plex went. Don't get me wrong, it was a lot of fun, but it was way too hot, nobody danced and it was way too spacious for people to interact. It also featured a fake casino in the back, which lacked the real money and scantily clad servers that make the experience complete. I fared very well, actually, doubling the fake chips I went in with. But then I realized I was neither winning actual money nor hanging out with people I may or may not see again at the 10-year reunion. So I bailed on that and got in as many laughs as I could before they shuttled us out the door at 11:30 p.m. for more Walsh partying.

Hallway madness: Okay, so remember Friday night? Saturday night was even crazier. The entire third floor was a river of Bud Light and everyone was covered in an equally thick layer of sweat. And it was SO much fun because there was no room for cliques or BS. It was just grab-a-beer, catch up and talk some smack. Continued to catch up with old friends and meet up with new ones, but frustratingly, my sophomore-year roomie Mike stopped by to look for me and didn't have my cell phone number. So now I owe him a few beers during my next Boston visit, because that was an awesome, unannounced gesture on his part.

Aces Up My Sleeve: So someone bought Class of 2000 playing cards that had fallen on the hallway floor. Leave it to me to pick up a couple of aces and tuck them under the rolled-up left sleeve of my purple button-down shirt. It was funny to see who understood what the hell I was doing and who was downright confused -- and who was both. But I got a kick out of it. And strangely, I was sober at the time. Went to bed at about 4:45 and the snorer had stopped snoring, miraculously! Got some sleep that I had missed the night before.

Duck Tour with John Lennon: So while most of the alums who remained on campus the morning after headed to see the Sox-Angels game, I opted not to punch myself repeatedly and instead go on one of those Duck Tours that I had heard so much about during my undergraduate years. So we get to Copley, where our regular bus drops us off and an amphibious vehicle lets us on. Because all of the drivers/sailors dress up as characters or celebrities, I cracked up as our tour guide was a DEAD RINGER for John Lennon, complete with the wire-rimmed glasses and pink suit from the Sgt. Pepper's era. The tour was awesome and something I wished I had done years earlier. Highly recommend it for history and sight-seeing buffs.

Cookie Karma: If you're still with me, here's my last tale from the weekend. The Duck Tour dropped us off at the Hard Rock Cafe, where the Duck Tour ticket purchased me a cheeseburger (big surprise, I know) and these absolutely melt-in-your-mouth cookies for free. Since no one else at the table wanted the cookies, I got to take all four of them with me in a take-out container. Somewhere between claiming my bag at Walsh and taking the T to South Station, I left the cookies behind. Expletives followed.

Fast forward three days to Wednesday night's Unsung Heroes rehearsal, where the ultra-sweet Juliana approached me at the end of the night and said she had a thank-you gift for taking her to a Garbage concert earlier in the year. She hands me a bag of awesome, home-made cookies. You gotta love that. I sure did.

And that's all I have to say about that.