Reunions.

Nobody remembers the venue. Everybody remembers whether they stayed.

That is the only thing a reunion has to get right, and it is almost always decided in the first twenty minutes. If the room is a rectangle with a check-in table and a cash bar, people do a lap, find three friends and leave by nine. If the room has somewhere to go, they are still there at midnight arguing about a football game from 1987.

The layout that keeps people

Cocktails and check-in on the first floor. Pool, shuffleboard, two bars, room to circulate — which is what the first hour of a reunion actually is. People are looking for faces, not for a seat.

Then upstairs to The Loft for dinner and the band. Up to 250, 150 seated, permanent stage, installed sound, AV and projection for the slideshow that somebody's cousin has been building for four months.

Tell us the graduating year and we will tell you who plays it. A room full of people who have not danced in six years will dance to the music they were seventeen to. Every time.

Family reunions

Different crowd, same building. Three generations, and each wants a different night.

The kids get the LED floor upstairs and a menu where everything is ten dollars. The middle generation gets the bar and the shuffleboard. The oldest generation gets the first floor — one level, no stairs, accessible restrooms — and can hear the conversation they drove four hundred miles to have.

Sunday and Monday are private-events-only, so a family reunion can have the whole building with nobody else in it.

For the committee

Reunions get organized by volunteers with day jobs, and the venue is never the hard part. Chasing four vendors while people email you about dietary restrictions is the hard part.

One team. One invoice. Room, food, bar and staff from the same place, and one phone number when the headcount moves — and on a reunion the headcount always moves.

Ribeye, red wine braised short rib, jumbo lump crab cake with shrimp mousse, sesame-seared tuna, fresh pappardelle. Eleven signature cocktails, two full bars, bar packages open or consumption or drink tickets so the committee can price a ticket against a real number.

Per head. The menu moves it, the bar package moves it, and that is the list.

Send the date and your best headcount — reunion numbers always move, we know that going in. A real number comes back inside one business day.

Twenty-guest minimum for any room, the Lounge included — a class year of twenty still gets a room of its own. Twenty-five percent holds the date. First floor fully accessible; The Loft is second floor with no elevator — but there is a stair-climbing chair and staff trained to use it, arranged ahead — on a reunion with older classmates, tell us at booking and we will either have it ready or keep the whole night downstairs.