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.