She Wrote, He Wrote

And so begins the first entry in my 8th grade diary, dated Monday, May 4, 1992.

From the time I was able to put pen to paper I was writing in a journal. And I’ve held onto every single one of them. All these years, I’ve carted them from city to city, amassing even more as I continued to scribble down my thoughts and feelings in their once-blank pages. My personal collection of journals and diaries now line a tall bookshelf in our guest room. There are so many that I can’t imagine someone actually considering snooping into them.

There are too many to chose from. Where would they even start? With my 4th grade diary in which most of the stories center around my golden retriever Annie? Or how about my 6th grade diary — the year in which I vowed to wear a different outfit to school every day of the school year, resulting in dozens of fashion disasters? Or maybe my 9th grade journal which mostly consists of my poor and angst-ridden attempts at poetry? Or even my 11th grade journal all about the dramatic ups and downs of my first real boyfriend?

I thought of all these journals the first time that Greg took me to see Mortified at The Green Mill in Chicago. Billed as a “comic excavation of the strange and extraordinary things we created as kids,” Mortified promises that you’ll “witness adults sharing their own adolescent journals, letters, poems, lyrics, home movies, stories and more.” Yup, that’s the show. Real people get up on stage and read from their real adolescent diaries. And it’s one of the funniest and most heartwarming things I’ve ever experienced.

And the great thing about Mortified is that it’s really well executed. It’s not some kind of open-mic situation, as I feared the first time I went. Rather it takes place in a cool bar in Uptown, the performers (who have auditioned and been through a screening process) read on a stage, there’s a likable emcee and there’s even an opening a closing musical act called The Blue Ribbon Glee Club.

Last week was the third time I went to see Mortified and we took two of our friends, Erica and Elizabeth, with us for their first time. The show never disappoints. Each time there are different performers, different childhood sagas and lives and relationships and hurts and embarrassments, and each time I can’t help thinking about how connected we all are, even when we feel just the opposite.

This time around we heard from a girl who was obsessed with Rick Springfield and whose ultimate fantasy was to move to California and become a pizza delivery girl in the hopes that she would be able to deliver a pizza to Springfield. He’d be “wearing purple jeans and a pink top,” she wrote in her diary. We also heard from a girl who was a young Republican in 1988, writing passionate entries about her admiration for George Bush Sr. Her readings were peppered with her own ironic laughter now that she is a staunch liberal.

After that there was a guy who was torn between two girls who wrote of nothing but the existential terror that encapsulated this drama. He was followed by a woman reading from her high school diary about joining Weight Watchers (she wasn’t very good at following the point system) so that she could be skinny and pretty like all the other girls at school. Her entries elicited a lot of ohhhh’s from us girls in the audience, presumably those of us who have also wished to be the skinny, pretty girl at school. And finally, we heard from an Ani DiFranco-obsessed lesbian at Oberlin who wrote angst-filled songs about the straight girl she had a crush on.

And throughout each, I couldn’t help relate to something these people wrote. I couldn’t help but realize how much we all struggle to find ourselves, to fit in, to become who we are.

If you get the chance to see this show, I highly recommend it. It plays in different cities around the country.