And Now for a Moment of Public HumiliationHave you ever read an old diary from your adolescence and had vivid flashbacks to those angst-filled years? Now think about reading that diary on stage, in front of an audience. It’s supposed to be cathartic. We think it sounds mortifying.
. Photograph by Fredrik Broden.
It is one of the biggest unspoken rules in life: You never, under any circumstances, read someone else’s diary without permission. And even with the go-ahead, which you are unlikely to ever receive, there is a good chance you won’t be overjoyed at what you read. Diaries are the novels of the soul. They are where one keeps deep, dark secrets; blatantly honest thoughts; and desperately lame observations, predictions, and viewpoints. They are the place where one keeps things to themselves, things they don’t tell their friends, their significant others, or even their pets. After all, some things are better left unsaid
out loud. But what if someone were to volunteer the information to anyone willing to listen? And what if what he said was told from the awkward perspective of the vocabulary-challenged and laughably pathetic child we all once were?
This is the premise of
Mortified, a live-comedy reality-theater event that originated in
Los Angeles and has since expanded to
San Francisco,
New York,
Boston, and now
Chicago. Its creator and producer, David Nadelberg, believes that putting one’s childhood lameness out there for the world to hear is cathartic and entertaining. He even takes it one step further: Nadelberg thinks it’s slapstick comedy as well. So what once were your most embarrassing, shameful, and degrading moments from adolescence — things you only wrote in diaries or in poems or in love letters never sent — can now be transformed into a seven-minute stand-up comedy routine that is performed in front of a room full of strangers who paid hard-earned cash to wallow in and laugh along with the most mortifying moments of your young adult life. Hilarious, right?
I suppose all kids go through a diary stage at one point or another during adolescence, so I feel no shame in admitting that I kept two in the mid-1980s, though I never really enjoyed writing in them. Today, one would think that, as a travel journalist, I’d keep a meticulous travel journal, but every time I try to do that in addition to writing my assignment notes, I realize that I can’t be bothered. I’m normally paid for this sort of thing. Who wants to write down the details of his trip three times (notes, diary,
and story)? Not me. So it’s no surprise that my diary from the fifth grade is full of entries (like the one at left) that are no longer than a paragraph: short and sweet and oftentimes completely ridiculous. I guess I didn’t like writing for free then either.
But since this magazine has put me up to actually auditioning for Mortified, I find myself reaching up into the far heights of my living-room closet, looking for my fifth-grade diary. You see, fifth grade was a rather traumatic year for me. I had managed to finagle my first girlfriend, who, in an even more miraculous feat, also managed to become my first kiss. Her name was Tommy
York. Go ahead and pause here to laugh. I’ve heard it all before …
to this very day. So, as if my being the only guy in Marion,
Indiana (and perhaps in the world), with a girlfriend named Tommy wasn’t bad enough, she actually made it worse.
Transcript from my
Mortified audition: She owned me.
She was more experienced, more street savvy, more assertive. When she said, “Boo!” I nearly jumped out of my parachute pants. When she said, “Jump!” I didn’t even wait to find out how far. My mother always called her “hard,” which I’m still not sure the meaning of today. She dumped me nine times in fifth grade. NINE! But I loved her and kept going back for more.It was the most tumultuous relationship I have ever had. But was it distressing, embarrassing, or amusing enough to crack up a room full of strangers? I downed a Red Bull (without vodka, which is what I really needed) and sped off to the home of Nadelberg, where the audition was going down. As luck would have it, he had red wine.
Nadelberg came up with the idea for
Mortified five years ago, after he stumbled upon an old love letter he wrote when he was a junior in high school to a girl who didn’t know him from
Adam. It was a secret-admirer type of letter that he signed but, thankfully, never delivered. “I went home one year and dug up this old box,” he remembers. “Inside was this horrific, embarrassing, mortifying letter written to a girl. It was a draft of a love letter. I saw a window into this kid’s life, what it’s like to hear someone come totally unhinged. It’s so squirm-inducing because you feel so bad for him. Except I had the realization that that idiot was
me.”
Choice verbatim line from the letter:
By now you may be wondering just who IS this dork, why exactly is he writing me, how did he know my name, is he emotionally and/or mentally unstable, how long is this sentence going to be, and what is the most popular internationally play[ed] nonprofessional sport?Nadelberg brought the letter back to Los Angeles, where he was toiling away as a writer (he has actually sold television pilots to Comedy Central, VH1, and UPN, though none have ever aired), and read it to a few friends. They laughed their hind ends off and encouraged him to go public with it. You know what they say about the rest.
Mortified struck a chord in a town full of failed and frustrated writers, all now kicking themselves for not coming up with such an obvious idea.
February 7, 1984: I asked Tommy if she would go with me (to her face) at the talent show. Do you know what she said? “Yes!” After the talent show, we kissed. Now that I did it the first time, I will do it a lot.I’m standing in Nadelberg’s living room, reciting personal accounts of my life, wondering how my first kiss could have warranted a mere one sentence in my diary. Nadelberg and coproducer Neil Katcher are listening intently. I willingly read my ridiculous words from 22 years ago that, when written, were never under any circumstances intended to be revealed in any way to anyone who was not me. More wine, please.
Nadelberg and Katcher occasionally crack up at how I would be pining away for Tommy in one sentence, then seemingly out of nowhere, toss in a hilarious non sequitur like, “Tonight Van Halen’s ‘Jump’ takes on Billy Idol’s ‘Rebel Yell’ on
Friday Night Video Fights,” and, “Tonight I watched the movie
Footloose. It was really good.” A story possibly fit for the
Mortified stage was emerging, but my performance needed work.
Because this is Los Angeles, after all, it would make sense that many people who audition for
Mortified have ambitions as stand-up comedians or actors. I mean, everyone in this city harbors those ambitions, whether they admit it or not. I’m of the latter ilk. I’m not here pursuing a career in television or movies or comedy clubs, and I’m doing just fine here as a writer, but anyone who lives in L.A. occasionally fantasizes about being plucked from the lip of their soy latte at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf and put onto the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Anyone who tells you differently is lying.
As a result of my lack of both stage presence and flair for the dramatic, my somewhat funny story is bogged down in monotonic purgatory. An actor, I’m not. “Let me interrupt real quick,” says Nadelberg. “You’re almost reading it in a way that makes it hard to get invested in it from a stranger’s perspective. You’re reading in a way that a third-grade kid is instructed by his teacher to read in front of the class. I feel like you’re not necessarily in tune with it yet. Try to bring out you more in terms of your personality. If the emotion behind those words was enthusiasm or sadness, try to show that a little more.” I continue on but don’t improve much. Doesn’t the material speak for itself?
February 8, 1984: Today, Victor told the whole fifth grade that I kissed Tommy, and he also told my math teacher, and he said he was going to put it in the newspaper. If he does, I will put something mean about him in it. I think my relationship with Tommy will last longer since I kissed her.Well, not always. Though Nadelberg and Katcher don’t write any of the material — it’s always taken verbatim from childhood scribbles — there is an editing process. This is entertainment, after all. So funnier stuff is extracted and condensed to a quick and concise dialogue until the producers are convinced it will not only hold an audience’s attention but keep them in stitches as well. Therefore, wannabe actors and comedians have a leg up on social workers from
UCLA and writers from
American Way.“Though the idea is deceptively simple, we are in no way an open-mike, teen-diary free-for-all,” says Nadelberg, who goes by the title of creator-producer-angstologist. “And while our show is certainly not rocket science, there is a lot going on behind the scenes in terms of shaping each piece for the stage. We craft each piece into unique autobiographical tales that we call a ‘diagraphy.’ It’s a very odd transformation process — comedic, cathartic, and creepily voyeuristic.”
Steve Scaia, whose writing credits include
Judging Amy and
Jericho, was in similar shoes to mine when he auditioned for
Mortified. It was clear that he was better off out of the spotlight. But Nadelberg and Katcher worked with Scaia to extract a story from two years’ worth of childhood letters he had written to Mr. Belvedere (yeah,
that Mr. Belvedere) and ensured that Scaia delivered it on stage in a humorous way. It’s now one of
Mortified’s most popular routines. Seems like a no-brainer — after all, what 12-year-old would spend two years of his or her life writing to a fictional television character? Hysterical.
“It was a school assignment,” says Scaia. “The teacher had us keep a journal and told us it would be easier if we kept it as a letter to a friend. But — this is where it’s pathetic — I was a fat kid. I didn’t have any friends. All I did was watch TV. At the end of every episode of
Mr. Belvedere, he would write in his journal, so I locked into that and started writing to Mr. Belvedere.”
Scaia, no longer overweight and now an I-told-you-so Hollywood writing success by the standards of his Midwestern upbringing, felt vindicated after performing for
Mortified. “When I was a kid at my most miserable, I remember thinking, ‘Someday I’m not going to be like this. I’m going to be a somebody. I’m going to build a time machine and go back in time and find my fat little crying self in my room all alone and say, It’s okay. You’re going to grow up to be this.’ Reading the diary, I thought, ‘Wow. I really did do this, everything but the time machine.’ I got a standing ovation.”
Mortified has been so successful that Nadelberg has inked a book deal with Simon Spotlight Entertainment, a division of Simon & Schuster.
Mortified in book form, due this November, will anthologize most of the best material from the shows, as well as diagraphies of teen spirit thus far unperformed.
Who knows? Maybe mine will end up there, because it’s clear my performance needs months of fine-tuning if I intend to ever present it on stage. In the meantime, I’ve been paid for this article, so I suppose all those diary entries weren’t written in vain after all.
For more information on Mortified, or to find a show near you, visit www.getmortified.com.