Seven years ago, my roommate Jenny stumbled across my high school diary — painfully obvious as a high school diary because it had every band an arty 15 year old in 1988 had ever heard of scrawled all over the outside of it (Love & Rockets…Tones on Tail…The Smiths!) — and began conducting dramatic readings from it to dinner guests on a regular basis. Despite my initial protests (did I really want everyone knowing about my first grope session at a New Order concert?), I had to admit: it was entertainment gold. Nothing is more universally hilarious than the juicy tortured prose of teenage angst.
Taking this premise and running with it is David Nadelberg. He’s created Mortified, a series of monthly performances in several different cities of actual people reading their actual junior high/high school/college diaries, poetry, notes and lyrics. At first I balked at the show’s premise — it sounded potentially treacle-y in a Zach Braff sort of way — but my first Mortified was the best thing I’d been to since that fateful New Order concert. I’ve now been to a couple of them. The most recent one was last Monday at the Make-Out Room and I can say that while the shows may waver in hilariousness, they remain consistent in their heavy assault of sheer cathartic value. You’ve really gone through something with the performers by the time the night is over.
Some of the performances are cringeful. The highlight of last Monday’s show was the diary a woman kept during her very naïve freshman year in college — she had been a cheerleader in high school in Indiana and an assistant coach was now pursuing her, even though she was now in college in Ohio. “Are you still tiny and pretty?” he’d asked her, a line that rings so obviously creepy now, but at the time, it blew her mind. When she came home to visit, he romanced her with romantic evenings spent looking at pictures of games he’d coached and showered her with compliments like, “all the assistant coaches think you’re top shelf.” After they had sex, he inevitably dumped her and, in response, she wrote him a 50+ stanza poem “in a language he would understand” with lines like (I’m paraphrasing) “the game is over and the crowd is bored/you’re not the victor until you’ve scored.”
At a peformance a few months ago, a small, Jewish guy was up on stage giving us background on how the lyrics to the song he was about to peform (which he wrote at 13) were heavily influenced by his heroes, Mötley Crüe, but he had grown up in the Marina and had only a vague idea of the Crüe’s fast-lane street life of lipstick, fish-nets and cocaine. The result was a poignant rhyming artifact of a thirteen year old’s idea of “get down on your knees” sexy. Again, I paraphrase: “Suck it, suck it, suck it, bitch/I got the scratch only you can itch.”
Angstier readers yield an amazing string of descriptive, angry adjectives — “everyone is a bunch of retarded, Blossom-watching, stirrup-pant wearing assholes!!” A bitter poem read at one Mortified talked about the psychedelicized, Rastafarian reality of love being like a bunk bed, which is so totally deep.
