Woman Hires Stripper to Impersonate Her At Reunion

Andrea Wachner, like many other people, was dreading her high school reunion, so she decided to have some fun and hire a stripper to impersonate her. Wachner, a freelance comedy writer, made a documentary about it called, "I Remember Andrea." Some of her classmates didn't think the prank/film was funny, and when she posted clips on YouTube from her 40-minute documentary, there was an outcry from '95 alums. "There's definitely a contingency of people who hate me because of this," she said, adding, "I can't think of one thing you could do there where you weren't competing against hundreds of other kids. I didn't really relate to a lot of what the others accepted as the norm, and I was OK with that — it just didn't make it great. Most of the girls I knew had eating disorders. A huge percentage. I'm not scarred by it. It wasn't torture. It was not a miserable experience. But I think high school in and of itself is kind of awful."

Comments

Good Idea

[Logical Zebra]

I think I'll hire an engineering geek to impersonate me at my high school reunion.

Oh, wait. Never mind.

Would the real Andrea please stand up....

[JWSmythe]

    I think the real Andrea was much cuter. Actually, much more like me. Too bad I never met her while I was out there, I think we'd actually have been good friends.

    I just went reading around a little bit. You can read a little about her on her site.

    I sympathize totally with her. I can count the people that know me from high school on one hand. But, folks have been coming out of the wood work that didn't have two words to say to me for all the years I was in school with them, and are adding me on the social networking sites. I guess they want to be famous because they have friends. Ok, I've obliged them. Still, the number that I've had actual conversations with since high school are in the single digits.

    I thought about going to my reunion. I was going to bring a beautiful close friend of mine, and ... well ... quietly express my disbelief of anything any of them said until we left. As it turned out, my class was populated with other people who could care less too. Only 3 RSVP'd, so they canceled the reunion. That's ok, I didn't feel like driving over 100 miles to see a bunch of people I could care less about anyways.

    I think she was a little too ambitious, but from watching the preview, she was definitely entertained. As I've learned, if I can't entertain myself, no one will be able to either. I would have loved to be in on her prank. It could have made it more convincing if her "boyfriend" was there to reinforce the con. err, I mean stunt. err, I mean social experiment. Nah, I would have preferred to be in her control room laughing along. :)

Re:Would the real Andrea please stand up....

[AliasMarlowe]

It could have made it more convincing if her "boyfriend" was there to reinforce the con. err, I mean stunt. err, I mean social experiment.

And the "boyfriend" would have to be a male stripper who's hung like a donkey...

Re:Would the real Andrea please stand up....

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I was the ultimate undiagnosed Asperger's geek in high school. Now as a diagnosed Asperger's geek with some social networking skills, I'm heading up the committee for the 20th reunion. Crazy. And amazing how badly the person who "kinda wanted to help", a social butterfly from high school, can't handle the task I've given her to do the missing classmates search.

Re:Would the real Andrea please stand up....

[JWSmythe]

    Well, it's usually referred to as hung like a horse, so I guess I qualify.

    But hey, it's too late now.

Ugly and Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

A "contingency" of people!? She's a writer ... in what language I wonder.

Re:Ugly and Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

She obviously attempted to combine "contingent" and "constituency" into a single word. Just so happened that the word she "coined" already existed. So, she's an idiot on a couple of levels, at least.

School Reunions are stupid

[master_p]

We go to school because we have to. Do we really need to meet those suckers again?

Re:School Reunions are stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

You won't have to for another 10 years.

Re:School Reunions are stupid

[floodo1]

no you dont have to go. let the people that still actually care about the people that they went to high school with goto the reunion.

Not everyone has cut all communications / interest with people from high school. Personally I'd like to see a select few people and find out what happened. It wasn't by choice that I lost contact with some people.

Re:School Reunions are stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe if you didn't think of them as suckers, you might have made more friends.

Re:School Reunions are stupid

[Kell Bengal]

Depends on what you've achieved since then. I'll wager most geeks have a decent job and are doing well for themselves. My 10 year reunion was an absolute blast.

I went along with my transgendered friend who got the op just after leaving - most people had /heard/ but very very few had ever /seen/ - she was my date for the evening. We'd both done well for ourselves in live: she'd run her own company and now conducted research on plant tobacco mosaic virus, and I'd just completed my PhD in aerial robotics. We'd found ourselves and were far happier than the awkward outcast kids who were persecuted at school.

Everyone else? Boring jobs, boring lives, one or two divorcees, one or two successes. The bullies who gave us a hard time were all losers. But us? We were happy, and everyone there knew that in the game of life, we'd come up winners.

And don't ask me how many times I was asked if we were actually a 'couple'...

If you don't think you want to see the suckers who gave you shit at school, reconsider - you're probably doing much better than they are.

Re:School Reunions are stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't think you want to see the suckers who gave you shit at school, reconsider - you're probably doing much better than they are.

But I don't care about those people. Knowing how much better off I am than them isn't important to me, because I don't care about feeling superior to them. Showing them that they're a failure next to me isn't important because I don't care how they feel. I'm not angry and bitter and trying to rub it in their face. I just simply don't care. They mean nothing to me. Comparing myself to them for my benefit (or their detriment) doesn't mean a damn thing.

PV Peninsula. Oh dear God.

[Mal-2]

PV Peninsula! No wonder she hated the place.

I did school photography for a while, and PV Peninsula was one of my assignments. While they gave us lots of space to work and lots of parental assistance (more like chaperonage), the kids were a bunch of fucking snobs. The parents wouldn't lift a finger to move any gear (even if it meant they'd get out the door quicker), that's just "not what they do". I won't say it was awful. Nobody got assaulted or anything, there were no pile-ups in the parking lot, and nobody accused any of us of doing anything improper. I did fuck up my knee, but that could have happened at any school. But I contrast this with the job at Dorsey high school.

Dorsey is not known for being in a particularly good neighborhood, and we sorta got corralled into a tiny space where there was only room for three camera rigs at a time (as opposed to the eight we were using at Peninsula). But the kids were nice, the parents were not "above" moving a piece of gear now and then, or even helping us load our cars after the shoot, and they made a point of seeing to it that we got lunch. Some of us were not too pleased to be assigned to Dorsey, and took the job with reservations. Then we got there, and everything went so well that every member of the crew said "send us back tomorrow".

It took me a while, but I realized the difference. The Peninsula kids are there trying to live up to their parents' inflated expectations. Most of them are not particularly happy. The kids at Dorsey, on the other hand, have lots of opportunity to get themselves in trouble, but they don't. They're in school because they WANT to be. And that makes all the difference.