"Whatever Happened to the Class of '56?"

"Whatever Happened to the Class of '56?"*

February 16, 1982

C+

Even though this gathers a few of the girls' classmates that we saw in earlier seasons, I don't feel like much is done with the long-awaited reunion.  Paul Willson returns as "Eraserhead" and apparently now has a wife or girlfriend who dresses like him.  Carole White is again Rosie Greenbaum, still brash, redheaded, and over-dressed, but she surprises Laverne by acting nice, at least at first.  Judy (Ervin) Pioli reprises her role as Terry Buttafuco (now with one C), but she's been retconned to have weighed 400 pounds the last time the girls saw her, when it was more that she was tall and a bit butch.

Ervin's sometime writing partner Paula A. Roth apparently had to explain yet another Lenny & Squiggy absence (I'm not sure if McKean was yet filming Spinal Tap, but that may've impacted scheduling), so we're told that the boys aren't going because they didn't go to graduation.  And then it turns out that they lied about the girls and Carmine being "famous," apparently in ways that no one has actually seen.  I can't help thinking that if Lenny and Squiggy were in the episode, there would be a better pay-off, and more complexity to Laverne and Carmine embracing the lie and Shirley wanting to tell the truth.  The message in the end is that everyone wants to look successful at a reunion, but I believe that this was handled much better in "It Only Hurts When I Breathe" at the beginning of the season.

Lynn Marie Stewart's seventh and final role on the show is as Marsha.

*Amusingly, this apparently was the title of a 1980 episode of Little House on the Prairie, as in 1856.  The phrasing I believe is a variation on the popular 1976 book What Really Happened to the Class of '65? by Michael Medved (yes, him) and David Wallechinsky.