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Okay, as an OPRF grad, it was weird enough watching High School Reunion. But it was even weirder seeing Tim Gittings on the show. During my senior year, I don't think I was acquainted with more than three or four freshmen, but Tim was one of them. We were in a student-run production of The House of Blue Leaves together -- my appearance as "Head Nun" was brief; his was even briefer as the "Man In White Suit" who carts one of the main characters off to the loony bin. But hey, we had fun. After the first HSR recap, Tim emailed me to say hi; he suggested we get a beer sometime, and agreed to be interviewed as well. We met up last week at one of the old-school Irish bars in Forest Park (because you can't drink in Oak Park), and between swapping stories about stuff like that one theatre party in that big-ass Forest Park mansion where someone stole the plastic tongue from that creepy taxidermied bear, he answered a bunch of questions.
Oh, and before I start: HOLLY AND DAVE ARE TOGETHER. They're TOGETHER. They broke up but they got back together so THEY'RE TOGETHER. Now shut up.
Wendola: I guess the first question I have is how this all got started. Like, how did OPRF get involved, and whose idea was this?
Tim Gittings: First time I heard about it -- that any of us heard about it -- was through the ten-year-reunion website. [The producers] contacted the people who were running the website and were like, "Hey, this is a new show idea that we're trying to get started; please send this link out to all the people on your mailing list." And they sent out this link and it was to this whole application thing -- it was all these questions. It was kind of like a Cosmo quiz.
Oh, yeah, I think I remember seeing that application. So then what happened?
Well, you'd fill out your questionnaire, and then they'd email you back�they started emailing me a lot, and they'd be like, "Hey, can you loan us one of your yearbooks so we can check this stuff out?" And then at one point, as they were narrowing down people, they sent out a list of all these different girls, and they asked for my thoughts about all of them. I guess the girls got sent a similar list. And they kept trying to get me to talk a little more shit about people, but I wouldn't fill out "who's still the most likely to be annoying" or "who I wouldn't want to see at my reunion." I would tell them, "Dude, that's ten years ago."