APRIL 11, 2025 – (Cont.) Yet another bash—my swan song—was what I dubbed, the “2001 Party”—anticipating the distant year of our 25th reunion. If in high school George Orwell’s book, 1984, applied to the distant future, in 1976, the year of my college class, the start of the next millennium seemed to be so far off as to be a matter of science fiction.The party anticipating the year 2001 was held the night before graduation, and the advance instruction in my advertising was to “dress as though you were coming to our 25th reunion.” Mimeographed notices of the event (plastered everywhere), promised a cash prize to “the most successful person” but with the parenthetical caveat that “(wealth and status will not necessarily be criteria)”.
The results were as fascinating as they were amusing. My good friend Jeff M. appeared in attire that anticipated Indiana Jones. In fact, he would go on to get his PhD in archeology and command his own dig for Etruscan artifacts in Tuscany[1]. Another classmate, Andy A., whose next step in life was an Ivy (as I recall) MBA and who would enjoy considerable success in private equity, attended the party wearing his best dark blue three-piece interview suit. He’d pinned to his right lapel a piece of paper the size of a small index card bearing the word, “ASSETS” and a corresponding one on his left lapel that read “LIABILITIES.” I liked the simplicity. Others wore medical gowns with stethoscopes around their necks; or lab gowns with beakers in hand; or a black robe with a gavel for a prop; or a tweed sport jacket, a textbook in one hand, and a professor’s pipe in the other; and so on. Several people took seriously the “wealth and status will not necessarily be criteria” part and showed up wearing camping clothes and wielding canoe paddles.
Me? Naturally, given my political ambitions, I “wore” a large cardboard campaign sign for Mo Udall (who for a time had been a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president). I accomplished this feat by cutting out Mo’s head and name (next to “for President”), then fitting the sign onto my head behind my ears.
You’d think I could remember who won the “cash prize,” but I can’t. Maybe that’s because I considered everyone in my class to be an exceptional human being; a “winner” by any measure.
Sad to say . . . no . . . Strike that. “Very happy and wholly relieved to say,” I never ran for anything after closing out my senior year of college and with it, my single term as a . . . politician (of sorts). I would have various stints as “president” of several small non-profits and our more sizable church—back when I was a churchy person—but those didn’t count as “politics.” They weren’t cases where I had to “run” or “campaign” for the position. They were instances typical of such volunteer organizations where inevitably your record of “showing up” leads to your conscription.
I have no regrets, because the requisite effort and sacrifices associated with winning and holding public office would’ve resulted in unacceptable deficits in other critical parts of my life. A lifetime after college, however, I did manage to produce a series of winter house concerts that drew sizable crowds. These recitals, complete with elaborate PowerPoint displays providing light-hearted history and context for the music, were fun and rewarding for everyone who participated. During my stint as a corporate manager, I also used “highly unusual entertainment techniques” to inject humor and color into what were otherwise typically dry, boring, large-scale business meetings. My short-lived “political career,” as it turned out, provided an excellent footing for my future “event-planning career.” These shows were far more gratifying than politics ever could have been.
But I have one more tale to tell about my brief political career—the part that went “international.” (Cont.)
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
[1] What he couldn’t foresee at the time was that by the year 2001 he would leave the field of ancient pottery shards and join the private equity world.
