Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

I hung out with some old friends this weekend. We all gathered together because one friend was visiting from Chicago.

Saturday night we all watched The Matrix: Revolutions and on Sunday we ate at a hibachi restaurant.

Then we went back to one couple's house to hang out.

We had a great time, sharing stories from college about bad roommates, papers and projects done at the very last minute, film projects gone awry.

I had brought along a videotape, which contained a bunch of us when we were in the Penn State Monty Python Society. This was the unedited raw footage from the second camera from the Coke-In protest in 1993.

It was only after I was partway into showing it that I realized there were some people in that video that some of us in that room did not particularly want to see again. Namely, exes.

"Oh, there's the girl who cheated on me."

"There's the girl who broke up with me over the phone."

"There's Jenny's ex, but she's not here to complain about it."

I pointed out that Leechboy is in the video, too, lurking in the corners like a ghostly disease. Thank goodness, 10 years later, I was sitting in a room with these guys and not with him.

"Everyone in this video should die!" someone else joked. "Well, except us."

But there were some fun aspects of watching our younger selves. Everyone kept pointing at one particular guy and remarking on how young he looked. "You look like Harry Potter!"

He'd always been several years younger than the rest of us, but these years it doesn't seem as much of a difference.

Or they pointed at another friend who had just completed a long, rambling impromptu monologue. "He looks like one of the original Pythons. He looks like Graham Chapman."

"I always thought so," I said. Of course, back then when I mentioned this to anyone, they just stared at me strangely.

In a way, it was like watching old home videos.

For awhile, the guys got into an excited discussion about Dr. Who, a conversation I couldn't participate in. Dr. Who always scared me. I think it was the music.

Later on, someone noted, "We just spent an hour talking about Dr. Who."

"And I spent an hour not talking about Dr. Who," I remarked.

"Whoops. Sorry."

"That's OK. It was entertaining in an anthropological sense," I said.

It had also given me time to think. And I'd thought about the fact that this is the week of Thanksgiving, and it's the week many people go home to see their families. And this was the weekend our friend came in from Chicago. He'd flown in just to see us.

But that made sense. It did. We are family, in a way. And we even have embarrassing home movies.

Copyright 2003 by Alyce Wilson

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