Summary

The Darton Hall College gymnasium is decorated for the 30th reunion of the class of 1969. It is mid-summer, a humid Friday evening, July, 2000. The Minnesota campus is sweltering. Liquor from the open bar loosens up the alumni as they watch “the class of ’69 rediscover itself on the polished gymnasium dance floor” (4). Spook Spinelli, the feisty sexy class sparkplug still stunning after all these years, works the dance floor, first with Billy McMann, a hardware store manager in from Winnipeg, and then Marv Bertel, who dances despite his fears over his own shaky heart and his extra weight. Marv still nurses a crush on Spook. Billy for his part cannot stop glaring at Dorothy Stier, who thirty years earlier, a rock-ribbed Nixon Republican and church-going Catholic, broke up with him rather than follow him to Canada where he went to avoid military service in...