If you've ever dug out your old diaries and read through them on a rainy afternoon, you'll know firsthand what ridiculous, pathetic, self-centered, comical and, yes, sympathetic creatures we all were as adolescents. Now imagine taking those words and reading them aloud in front of a roomful of strangers, exposing all your petty comments about schoolmates and the momentary crushes -- it makes you blush just thinking about it. Well, apparently there are folks all around the country who want to reveal their 12-year-old selves in public, and they do so, if chosen, for performances of a live show called Mortified.
The idea for Mortified started in the late 1990s when executive producer Dave Nadelberg ran across a love letter he'd written in high school but had never sent. Upon reading it and sharing it with friends, he realized the wealth of material these old diaries and journals hold -- material that almost never sees the light of day. So he and co-executive producer Neil Katcher formed Mortified in 2002 and started working with people willing to dig through their own unearthed material to present before an audience.
Fortunately for the audience, Mortified performers don't just stand up onstage and read raw, unedited material. Katcher says he and Nadelberg put people through a curating process. "It is much the same way that a documentary filmmaker or a museum curator might look at a collection of materials and fine-tune it down to a specific collection."
Working with diaries, love letters, poetry and photographs, they pull out the funniest bits and tie them all together into a sharply focused, 8-12 minute narrative. In the end, Katcher says, the experience can be cathartic for both the contributor and the audience -- to experience once again the comic tragedies that consumed us as adolescents and to be reminded that we have, in fact, survived even the most painful and embarrassing of life's events.
Mortified performances are held in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Portland, Austin, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Malmo, Sweden.
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