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Can You
Believe
It's Been
10 Years
Already?

P hoto by Brett Mou n

Fine At Appraisers and Auctioneers — Since 19'27

By Ben Falik

he brains, athletes, basket cases, prin-
cesses and criminals of the Class of 2000
celebrated their 10-year reunion late last
year.
"Reunion-iting" inevitably stirs up memo-
ries and emotions — some charitably fuzzy,
others painfully sharp — but some things
stand out among the "Remember when's?"...
"She did what's?"... and"Ben who?"This was
an unusually unusual decade to come of age.
The Class of 2000 graduated from high
school at a moment of"irrational exuber-
ance." People were buying very big cars and
filling them with very cheap gas while hap-
pily paying by the minute to use America
Online. Just being the millennial-marking
"Class of 2000" seemed to vest us with a
mandate to take over the world.
During freshman year of college, we
voted in our first presidential election and
then gathered around small dorm-room TVs
waiting for results, which would not come for
weeks. We had just returned to our campuses
for sophomore year — feeling older, wiser
and preparing to declare our majors — when
the World Trade Center was struck and then
struck again. We watched smoke billow from
lower Manhattan on marginally bigger TVs.
During spring break of our junior year,
we were treated to live broadcasts of"Shock
and Awe,"followed by a hasty declaration of
"Mission Accomplished" by final exams. As

T

WILLIAM TROST RICHARDS, OIL/CANVAS,
1887, 'CLIFFS OF CORNWALL'

PABLO PICASSO, ETCHING,
1967, #136/200, 11 3/4" X 10"

KPIVI. BERLIN PORCELAIN PLAQUE,
C. 1900, 8" X 13",TWO CHILDREN

MARC CHAGALL,
COLOR LITHO,

"DANS E USE": FRENCH 1869-1954

17 3/4" , X 13"

STE UBEN AURENE ART GLASS VASE, H 11 3/4"

'What s

HENRI MATISSE, LITHOGRAPH,
C. 1930, 11" X 18" IMAGE,

*NM

your

FRANZ HAGENAUER,
POLISHED STEEL DOG,
#1297 WIEN, C 1925, 10" X 10 1/2"

Attic...?

Ind out the value of your treasures at DuMouchelle's free appraisal clipt
Wednesdays and Saturdays from Ipm-fpm, we will be
pleased to accept artwork and antiques for our upcoming monthly auctions'

r, MI 48226
409 E. JFA FRsoN, 1)i
TEL.: 313.963.6255 \\. w.DUMOARTA

four years of college culminated, we com-
menced with the rest of our lives amid Swift

Boat Veterans for Truth, Enron-executive

indictments and Abu Ghraib photos.
Fast-forward through our first"grown-up
jobs" and advanced degrees — and you'll
end up headlong into the near-collapse of
Western-style capitalism, a historic presi-
dential election and the birth of the Tea
Party movement.
Of course, the Class of 2000 shared these
experiences with everyone. But there was
something especially formative about
developing a worldview in a world that
changed at an ever-increasing rate.
The Class of 2000 has already begun to
realize its potential through professional,
creative and civic accomplishments, but the
forecast is foggy after taking the world by
storm during such a stormy decade.
Then again, you never really graduate
from high school. You could argue that
technology has made reunions obsolete
or rebut that online communication has
heightened the importance of physical hu-
man gathering. Instead, I think of modern-
day reunions as a mere change of scenery in
an ongoing, online experiment: What if high
school continued indefinitely?
Pop culture promises that, after high
school, marginal kids go on to lives of
intrigue while popular kids work at car
washes: The geeks shall inherit the earth.
There does appear to be a collapsing of
high school hierarchy — both caused and
evidenced by Facebook — with mostly
positive results.
After all, high school's typical social
structure derives primarily from the ability
to exclude people and withhold informa-
tion.The online world is, for better or for
worse, an experiment in inclusiveness and
transparency:Those who seek"exclusivity"
risk being excluded themselves and back-
stabbing invites boomeranging.
So, what distinguishes the Class of 2000's
10-year retrospective from those classes
preceding us? While a few made it off the
grid, we generally knew who was gay, mar-
ried, divorced, bald — or gay-married to a
divorced bald guy — well in advance of our
vaunted reunion.
And this accessibility has cultivated a
sense of humanity, if not solidarity, among
the Sportos, the Motorheads, Geeks, Sluts,
Bloods, Wastoids, Dweebies, and Dickheads
of today. In other words, Mr. Rooney:The
kids are all right.

-,-

8 January 2011 I

RED TIMID

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