Carol Contes graciously hosted a dinner party for the Los Angeles contingent of Catalina's class of '68, shown above. During the party, we made Allison, who graduated from Catalina three years later than the rest of us, an honorary member of the class of 1968. Several of our significant others attended as well.
     The get-together was held at Carol's apartment in a beautiful old building on Wilshire Boulevard, in one of the few urban high-rise neighborhoods in Los Angeles. On the same evening, the Golden Globe award ceremony was being held a few blocks down the street at the Beverly Hilton. Carol made a wonderful Greek dinner for us.
     It surprised me that all of these LA Catalina classmates are professionally involved with the media.The four women in the photo above are (or in Nancy's case, recently were) in the movie business. Larry works at the LA Times, and I, Dean, publish and sell computer multimedia.
     The strangest aspect of the thirtieth reunion's aftermath is the light it sheds on memory. My high-school relationships with these people ranged from "knew her pretty well" to "heard the name a zillion times but never talked to her." I remember so many names of high-school classmates that I never met, and these names mean something, evoking Catalina of 30 years ago.
     I've come to realize that my Catalina classmates are a bit like family to me. I didn't choose them, and didn't like them all, but now we have the bond of significant shared experience -- attending Catalina in the turbulence of the late sixties in a class that seemed (to some of us at the time) the "best and the brightest," full of dreams and promise. And we shared knowing the several hundred-odd other Catalina family members and our teachers, at a time when our social life was becoming like an adult's. It was very intense.
     We had a great group of people at our L.A. mini-reunion. I would have liked them and connected with them even without the bond of Catalina High School. 

--Dean Wallraff, Jan. 26, 1999