Want to be Mortified? Try reading your high school diary to a room full of strangers

Imagine how cluttered, how awkward, how utterly confusing your life was in junior high and high school. Remember all those crazy, ever-changing, irrational thoughts you put down in that journal for English class, that diary you kept under your bed or those love letters to the girl or guy who caught your eye at the last dance?

Well, imagine how embarrassing it would be if those words, those widespread insecurities from teenage life, were read aloud by somebody to hundreds of people. Now imagine that person reading your innermost thoughts from a time when everything was turned upside down was actually you.

Yikes, huh?

Well, that’s what they’re doing at Mortified, self-described as a “comic excavation of teen angst artifacts (journals, poems, letters, lyrics, home movies, schoolwork) as shared by their original authors... in front of total strangers.”

The folks at Mortified have spent years sifting through old, forgotten notebooks full of everything teenagers ponder during those troubling times when we are not only trying to find ourselves, but also just hoping to get through prom without a zit or trying to convince our parents to push curfew back by an hour.

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When they find writings they like, they hold auditions for their owners. The diary entries and letters have to be sincere, honest, able to relate to a broad audience and, of course, entertaining. Submissions come from some professional performers, like comedians or actors, but mostly from ordinary people who seek the spotlight to confront their childhood angst in the pursuit of a little self-deprecating humor. Jeff in the next cubicle. Sandy the receptionist. Sarah the bartender. They all have stories to share, stories that make you hide your head in your hands and laugh out loud because you relate to them a little too much.

For four years, Mortified has played to sold-out audiences across the country in Los Angeles, New York, Boston, San Francisco and, more recently, Chicago, and creator David Nadelberg has put out a book (Mortified: Real Words Real People Real Pathetic) of the greatest hits through a division of Simon and Schuster.

To say it’s growing from a grassroots project into what could be considered a budding cultural phenomenon is a credit to not only Nadelberg, for seeing the potential for laughing at ourselves, but for the very material people unearth from those very perplexing times that make us want to laugh in the first place.

As a writer working odd jobs, looking for that big break in Los Angeles for the last 10 years, Nadelberg had the initiative that, while simplistic in its general approach, had potential to really grab hold of an audience and not let go.

“Mortified really is the one cockroach that has survived all the nuclear winters of my career,” says Nadelberg, 32. “It’s that little bug that didn’t get scared away, and I’m glad.”

Nadelberg, some four years after hosting the first show in Los Angeles, has never paid a dime for advertising, and yet the shows, largely through word of mouth, continue to grow in size and frequency. He doesn’t like to define it as sketch comedy, stand-up, theater or performance art, choosing instead to label it as a combination of all of the above.

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Prior to a few weeks ago, I had never heard of Mortified, and was invited to share in the buzz by a friend of mine recently at the Green Mill jazz club up on Broadway and Lawrence. It was so unique, so mesmerizing, so brutally honest and hysterical, it created a desire to search through my closet back home for my own potential contributions, to see if I was really that weird, that scatter-brained back when I wore a letter jacket, cruised Main Street with friends on a Saturday night and blared Bon Jovi from my boombox.

One woman got on stage and read about bouncing back and forth between the men of her dreams one summer, how big of “hunks” they were and how upset she got when they would talk to other girls too much.

Others spoke of making out to the sounds of Air Supply, or smooching a guy with mono because he told her he missed her over Christmas break. Fights with parents who just don’t understand, a fascination with pot and Pink Floyd, patiently waiting for the party of the year that couldn’t arrive fast enough, a devotion to the TV show Twin Peaks and Sweet Valley High books, dating someone three years older because you liked his hair and he had a car, spending odd hours in front of your Atari instead of a history book. The rolled jeans, the wild bangs loaded down with hairspray, the difference between reaching second and third base, the uncertainty and nervousness of a first sexual encounter, especially when it arrives at a Lutheran college, and not being entirely ready for when someone “slips you the tongue.”

Yep, it’s all covered by Mortified. Among other things that will leave you smiling and shaking your head on the way home.

“The challenge is, we’re dealing with material not meant to be funny, and especially not meant to be performed,” Nadelberg says. “Sometimes, getting good stuff at auditions can be like pulling teeth, and other times, those teeth pop right out on their own.”

Nadelberg tells me about one of his regular performers in San Francisco who has developed almost a cult following to the point where he peddles his own CDs after a show. He created a band in high school that wrote 100 songs, the strange lyrics of which he shares with the audience. Only he never picked up a guitar and never beat on a drum. The band, you see, was all in his head. Instead of an imaginary friend, he created an imaginary band.

“I like to think that we celebrate the lazy and untalented writers of yesteryear and like to help them become marginally accomplished,” Nadelberg says with a laugh. “We give writers who weren’t sure of themselves then a second chance now. And we find quite a few Cinderella stories.”

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The shows run once enough material is deemed ready by each city’s chapter, and at Mortified, they take the audition process seriously. Nadelberg stresses that it is open casting, not open mic. You’re not allowed to add or invent language that isn’t in the diary, yearbook or letter. They’re looking for the real stuff that came directly from your mind many years ago. They want to hit the emotional chords of what it meant to be a kid, and judging by the performance I witnessed, they’re right on target, sometimes as painful as it is humorous.

“When you have a packed audience and a 70-minute show, we owe that to our audience,” Nadelberg adds. “It’s all about giving them the worst stuff in the best possible way. That’s my goal.”

And what an entertaining goal it is. Now if I could just remember where I put my yearbook...

If you’d like to be a brave contributor in this embarrassing yet funny grassroots exhibition, purchase the book or just keep tabs on the expected winter return of Mortified to Chicago, you can get all the information you need through www.getmortified.com.

Trent Modglin
Publisher
The Real Chicago
Trent@TheRealChicago.org

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