2010-03-31

Why I Do "Mortified."

I'm gearing up for yet another Mortified show tomorrow night. I've kind of lost track of how many times I've done this now. 5, maybe? 6? And I'm doing it again in June.

Karen and Sara, the producers, continue to ask me back, so either my teenage tomes are particularly excruciating, or I'm just a proven masochist who cain't say no.

Why do I do it? Why do I get up in front of strangers (and, sometimes, more humiliatingly still, people I actually went to high school with) and read the stuff I wrote when I was a teenager? Because it's freakishly therapeutic. Because it's an exercise in humility and total honesty, things that I need to cultivate.

And because it's wicked fun.

Also, in reading these dead-earnest and hilarious musings, I'm struck by the fact that in some ways, I was a much wiser soul at 15 and 16 than I would be later on, when alcohol dulled a lot of things. I had a better sense of the kind of people I wanted to be around, and a much more finely-tuned "asshole radar." I knew, without having the vocabulary yet, that a self-professed bodhisattva is basically a narcissist with zero self-esteem, and someone to be avoided.

"I'm scared that I'm going to end up being an alcoholic," I wrote back in 1985. That kind of breaks my heart every time I see it. I don't read it aloud onstage, because it's not part of the "storyline" that Karen, Sara and I put together, and it's not funny. Well, it's pretty funny to ME, it's ironic, but it's not anything that the happy laughing audience in front of me needs to hear.

But it's part of what I think about as I'm up there reading. I very much like this kid from whose diaries I'm reading. I forget sometimes that it's me. When I read I remember that I'm still in the process of reintegrating her into the person I am now. And with her comes all the good stuff -- the asshole radar, the knowledge that I can't drink, ever. The earnestness.

But I can do without the lack of capital letters and the really grody, pretentious punctuation.

lisamcc at 11:17 a.m.



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