Stanford Five Year Reunion: Saturday: Insanely Many Events

On Saturday, October 14th 2006, I once again headed down to Stanford early in the morning. After stopping by the alumni center to grab breakfast (a dense flavorless muffin, a fine piece of coffeecake, some nasty orange juice from concentrate, and some fresh fruit), I headed over to Maples Pavilion for the morning's panel.

I don't recall ever previously being in Maples Pavilion, the basketball stadium. Upon entering, it seemed vaguely familiar but that could just be from the handful of games I saw on television; I don't know why I'd have been there before. As I waited for the panel to begin, Donald, an old dorm-mate and roommate for a summer, found me, an amazingly feat given the size of the stadium. It's nice to have finally run into a good friend at the reunion.

Anxious Times Panel:
The Anxious Times Panel included an absurd number of big names, including journalist Koppel, president Hennessy, justice Kennedy, and former secretary of defense Perry. It was a fairly neat wide ranging discussion on terrorism, nuclear proliferation, bird flu, and other items commonly used to terrify the populace. I was surprised with the honesty and directness of the participants, especially Koppel (humor, curse words, and all) and Kennedy. At times it felt a little disconnected due to the number of people with opinions and number of topics covered, but the panel did get into depth in some areas. The Stanford Daily has a good article on the event; a complete video is available via iTunes from the first link in this paragraph.

Class Panel:
Next came the 2001 class panel, a panel of graduates from my year discussing life after graduation and how they got where they are now. (Actually, it wasn't strictly next; the two panels overlapped a bit so I arrived late.) Although the people on the panel were interesting, I found them slightly disappointing if only because there was no one I knew and there were no scientists or engineers. Still, it was cool to listen to random snippets of life, prompted by questions such as "what's your average tuesday like?"

The moderator asked some provoking questions worth thinking about individually. Where do you think you'll be in life at your fifty year reunion? (Actually, I think the ten year reunion question would be much more interesting.) What do you regret the most about your time at Stanford? (After watching the panel of strangers and attending other reunion events, I'd answer not meeting enough people.)

I made a neat observation while flipping through the schedule of events during the panel. Here are the names of all the class panels happening this weekend, in reverse chronological order. (While some names aren't very good, I think you get my point.)

2001	Finding Our Way in the (New) Real World
1996	The Not-So-Simple Life: Existence Beyond the Farm
1991	Shifting Priorities and Finding a Balance
1986	Making Sense of It All
1981	Choice and Chance: Reelin' In The Years
1976	From the bicentennial to bird flu, 30 years of building a stairway to...heaven
1971	Dazed and Confused: What Comes Next?
1966	Boomers on the Move
1961	Our Second Commencement: What Will We Do With the Rest of Our Lives?
1956	Back to the Future ... and Beyond!

Class Lunch:
The class lunch was similar to the previous day's. Although it was much more crowded, it was still filled with many people I didn't know. I hung out with Donald and he was better at spotting Robleites than I. Oddly, Donald generally spotted many more people that lived in Larkin during our freshman year.

As for lunch, it felt like dorm food: comfortable though not particularly good. Chicken and beef sloppy joes, burgers, caesar salad, watermelon, cookies. The wet napkins for wiping one's hand were named "Awesome Wipes." :) Apparently they're made by Armadillo Willies.

Alumni Film Festival:
The alumni film festival showed a series of shorts produced (surprise!) by alumni. Probably due to the limited pool from which to select, the program was pretty weak: certainly worse than every other real film festival I've attended. That said, two movies were good:
* Kind of a Blur: A quirky, cute comedic short about two ravers who wake
up in a cow pasture and try to determine what happened the previous night.
* Oedipus: A well-done short that tells the story of Oedipus via stop-motion animation of vegetables. Stars a potato, a tomato, and a piece of broccoli. Showed at Sundance. And you can watch it online! (The web page is pretty good, including such goodies as: "True to the spirit of 1950s cinema, we racially profiled our extras. Green olives play soldiers, black olives play slaves, and the citizens are Greek olives." "Few things elicit 'oohs' and 'ahhs' from an audience like a fifteen foot potato." "This movie contains scenes of vegetable sensuality.")

After the festival, a panel of two alumni involved with these films and a moderator who works in the film world answered questions. It was more interesting than I expected. Kudos go to the moderator for managing such a small no-name panel well and for asking and answering thoughtful questions. I learned:
* Shorts are always a labor of love. They never make money.
* Shorts usually take only a few days of shooting.
* One major reason people participate in making a short is to get a chance to work with new people, to network, and to get a chance to show off skills not expressed in past films on which one's worked.
* Oedipus takes around a terabyte of disk space.
* Oedipus could not have been made without an insider at Industrial Light & Magic getting approval via its internal creative project process.
* Oedipus had to break the southern California supermarket strike: they needed to replace "actors" as they wilted.

One Bad Apple:
By far the best event of day was the reunion performance of One Bad Apple, a musical written fifteen years ago by some students. It's about religion, belief, ethics, trickery, and relationships (both love and power). It's very witty and has catchy songs.

Even though it was only a staged reading -not much in terms of costumes or set-, the musical and the performance was great. We rightly gave them a standing ovation. It was better than what I thought could be written by students (yes, even Stanford students).

Some of the performers were the original ones that performed this at Stanford fifteen years ago. Some switched roles. They filled in a few missing parts and backup parts with friends and current Stanford choral students. Special commendations go to: the actor playing the Snake, for his ability to squirm and for putting on a tremendous physical performance; the actress playing Gabriel, for her evocation of sheer earnestness; the actress playing God, for her stage presence and singing voice.

A Cappella Concert:
After a short hike across campus, I snuck into the A Cappella concert just before intermission. Only about half of Stanford's groups were represented (including a new south Asian one that didn't exist when I went to school) so each group only got to perform two songs. As expected, it was a mixed bag. The highlights for me were the Mendicants's performance of "You Dumped Me First" and Fleet Street's performance of "Pray to the God of Partial Credit."

Many current students attended the concert to cheer on their favorite groups. It was refreshing to finally see substantially more young faces around.

Class Party:
After the concert, I wandered around in circles for a while. Literally. As I didn't want to get the party for members of my graduation class too early, I walked a very circuitous route after the concert ended to get to the party. Still, I was one of the first dozen people there.

Since it wasn't crowded and I had skipped dinner, it's not surprising the first feature I noticed was the food, which therefore ought to deserve first mention here. It was definitely odd for party food. For one, they had hot dogs with every condiment one might want. That worked well for me for dinner. Also, in addition to the standard assortment of vegetables and dip, crackers and cheese, and alcoholic drinks, they had a coffee stand that could make lattes, cappuccinos, and the like. I don't think I've ever seen one of those at a party either...

Anyway, when I'd entered I'd noticed one of the few people that arrived before me was a senior dorm-mate. I caught up a bit with her as more people showed up, then hung out with Donald when he arrived. He re-introduced me to many people that lived in my freshmen dorm that I'd forgotten about or never met (because the dorm was a big place).

The net result? Since most of the people I knew from school weren't the kind of people to go to a party like this, so I ended up feeling a little lost. After giving it a good hour and a half, I cut out, deciding it was better to leave feeling good than continue looking around the party, hunting for people I know, not finding any, and being sad wondering whether I should've met more people in school.

There was practically nothing scheduled for Sunday, so the party was the last of my reunion activities.