Andrea Wachner doesn’t have fond memories of her high school years. A self-described “geek” back then, she vowed never to return once she graduated from the posh Palos Verdes Peninsula High School near Los Angeles.
So when she got an invite to her ten-year reunion, she was going to pass until she came up with another idea. Wachner, an aspiring comedy writer, decided to send a lookalike to impersonate her at the reunion. The lookalike wasn’t just anyone; Wachner hired a tattooed stripper to be her stand-in.
"It was a situation that just had bucket loads of potential," Wachner tells INSIDE EDITION.
“I was going to make a perfectly boring reunion into a real party," says the woman Wachner hired.
Wachner also hired a camera crew to record the whole encounter. She even had the lookalike, who calls herself “Cricket,” wear a secret radio earpiece so she’d be able to send prompts from a nearby room.
Cricket had mouths gaping when she actually did a strip routine for the crowd.
Afterwards she was even asked by one of Wachner’s former classmates to go back to his house to “hang out.”
For those who thought Cricket didn’t really look like Wachner, the stripper quickly informed them she’d had some plastic surgery done after a car accident. “It's not hard to believe that in Southern California that someone would have some plastic surgery," says Wachner.
Cricket even won one of the reunion prizes, although it’s not a category most people would brag about: Most Tattoos!
However, there were a number of former students who didn’t fall for the ruse.
Wachner put a video together in a film called, I Remember Andrea. Now that the secret is out, reactions are mixed.
Former Peninsula High student Barry Smith shared a table with Cricket on the night of the reunion. He says, “She certainly made it interesting. I think it's fun."
Others have called the stunt “tacky.”
“I've heard from people who say, ‘Thank you so much for doing this. If you hadn't done this it would have been the most boring evening of my life,’" Wachner admits.