This weekend, I will be at a friend's house, engaged in a shamelessly extravagant literary pursuit.
About six of us will be having tea and cucumber sandwiches as we do a sit-down reading of Oscar Wilde's famous 1895 play, The Importance Of Being Earnest.
We are reprising the roles we played on stage 17 years ago at the old Drama Centre in Fort Canning. We were all in the annual production put on by Hwa Chong Junior College's Drama Society then.
I'm excited about the meeting, partly because of the delightfully random way it came about.
Maya, one of the actresses in the play, was going through her old things and dug up a copy of the play's programme which we had all autographed.
She promptly scanned all the pictures into digital format and posted them on Facebook.
Ah, the wonders of modern technology and social networking sites. Most of us were truly mortified. I mean, instead of dotting my 'i's the usual way, I drew childish little circles.
And the comments came fast and furious.
'The hair! The hair!' I wailed, looking on with horror at the floppy fringe obscuring one lens of my thick glasses. 'And how much did I weigh then? 600 grams?'
'The hair! The hair!' wailed Jennifer, another actress who has since relocated to the United States. 'And do you remember that we got most of our costumes from Yishun Broadway bridal parlour?'
'Whatever happened to us? I miss some of the old days...' she added wistfully.
Then the play's director Dawn said: 'If we were all in the same country, I would be extremely tempted to organise a read-through for old times' sake!'
A chorus of 'YESes' later, the meeting was arranged.
At this momentous event, there will be two people who have flown in from the States, and I'm seeing old friends I haven't met even once since the day I graduated.
Gosh, I hope my hair looks all right.
It seems to be reunion season for people around my age.
Even the bands we used to listen to - like Yazoo, OMD and Level 42 - have put their differences behind them and re-formed with original group line-ups from 25 years ago.
Just two weeks back, I reunited two ex-classmates from Catholic High School - one is my best friend and the other a close friend who has spent much of the last 20 years in New York.
After dinner, we sat down to talk. And we didn't get up from our seats till about two in the morning.
It's amazing how people can recall the tiniest details from incidents that happened in school so long ago - from the English teacher who paired lime green T-shirts with black fishnet tops, to the Finzy Kontini song that was playing when we learnt to cha-cha one afternoon on the school stage.
Why is everyone enjoying getting back together only now?
I guess it has to do with the fact that 20 years seems about the right amount of time to have passed for people to want to do this willingly, and with grace.
For starters, they've had enough time to settle into the careers and families they were busy building after school. They're more secure and less defensive about what they've achieved.
Then there is the curiosity factor. If you think back to five years after graduation, you'll recall still seeing some friends - and hearing news about others - at least several times a year.
But 15 or 20 years later, people's lives have probably diverged far enough for friends to have lost touch completely. You'll want to know what so-and-so looks like now and how he or she is getting on.
Finally, the passage of so much time heals wounds and makes these reunions a lot less barbed than they should be. Time dissipates the tension between bitter enemies with longstanding grudges or the awkwardness felt by former high school lovebirds.
This is why I am looking forward to celebrating the 20th anniversary of the first day of school for my junior college class in January next year.
No one's really planned a reunion party of any sort and I'm wondering if I should just start the ball rolling.
After all, the names of my classmates are all listed in the high school yearbook, and, nowadays with Facebook, it shouldn't be that difficult to get everyone together.
It would be great to see how my classmates have changed. And more interestingly, how they've not changed.
Will we unconsciously organise ourselves into our old high-school cliques?
Or will we break through the old barriers and finally get to know classmates we never really spoke to, even though we sat next to them day after day in lecture theatres and classrooms?
Googling the subject of high school reunions on the Internet, I found plenty to chew on.
Japanese-American author Keiko Ikeda characterises the high school reunion as 'a roomful of mirrors'.
'It offers the participants the opportunity to tell and reflect upon their lives, and in the process they may also construct new stories about their lives,' she says.
It can be traumatic, for sure. One website advises that you should never go to a high school reunion without your best friend from school.
And a British friend of mine told me that three marriages broke up in the aftermath of his own high school reunion held a few years ago.
But reunions can also be liberating, even inspirational.
My favourite scene from the movie Romy And Michelle's High School Reunion is when the class nerd (played by Alan Cumming) arrives at the event in his own helicopter.
He may have been bullied in school but he has since become a millionaire. He takes centre stage with fellow class outcasts Romy and Michelle in a ridiculous interpretive dance, before whisking them away in his chopper - the ultimate fantasy act of revenge on his cool classmates.
Okay, my old classmates may not quite be so dramatic but I am nonetheless expecting a few surprises. After all, one of us did become an internationally famous porn star.
I've changed a lot myself, so I'll be plotting my own grand entrance.
The hair, the hair. I believe it's all in the hair.
This article was first published in The Sunday Times on July 6, 2008.
