Looking Back, Mortified
Why would we betray our younger self?
BY ALEX BEHR
[From the winter 2010 issue.]
LAST SPRING at the Someday Lounge, a club at the edge of Portland, Oregon’s, moribund Chinatown, I saw a performance of Mortified, a revolving comedy show of adults sharing their adolescent gaffes. One guy sang his high-school-era lyrics written in the style of Rush. Another performer read her critiques of makeout sessions at Jewish summer camp. The club held about two hundred people, and the performances felt like a junior high talent show, only with booze, intentional irony, and better lighting. In the dark, I was laughing like a horse in a Looney Tunes cartoon, open mouthed, dumbstruck. On the sidewalk after the show, I recognized one of the performers, and asked how she got on the show. She said it was easy—she auditioned via the website.
Before applying to Mortified, though, I had an attitude that was part sour grapes and part total crush. I knew I had the diary goods to be on the show, because Bananafish, my friend Seymour Glass’s fanzine in San Francisco, had excerpted my sixth-grade diaries long before Mortified existed. I like to portray myself as someone with my shit together, but my teen-age diaries prove how much of an effort it is. From 1977, age 12:
Dear Diary: I’m a Brain Butt! We—the talented kids—went on a field trip to a ship. Everyone had different names. It was fun. When we got back, people called us Brain Butts but I think it’s going to cool off. Last night I read an article in Newsweek about gifted kids. One kid is 12 and a sophomore at Michigan University! I think I’m in a group where there’s a lot of peer pressure not to show you’re smart and I think my mind is being wasted since courses aren’t too challenging. I’m not bragging, either.
Entries like that fit with the anarchic purpose of Bananafish, which published found letters, record reviews of LPs with screws and dirt glued to the surface, and interviews with musicians who peed onstage. In the late-1980s and early 1990s, we took pride in being obscure. I never worried about the wrong people, i.e. my family or potential employers, reading it. In Bananafish, found letters and diary entries had the same literary value as fiction—or perhaps more so—and the found writing was often better.
Seymour was the first to publish transcripts of the rantings of two drunks named Pete and Ray, which were secretly recorded by Eddie Lee Sausage. He later put out limited-edition Pete and Ray audiotapes, CDs, and comic books, and catchphrases from the recordings permeated my friends’ conversations. (While writing this essay, in fact, I learned that Eddie Lee has made good use of the recordings—they’re referenced in the Washington Post and This American Life. Dang. Pete and Ray used to live around the corner from me in the Lower Haight. Now even radio nerd-star Sarah Vowell has made some bucks analyzing them!
Yet unlike Seymour of Bananafish, the Mortified producers knew how to profit from others’ miseries. Mortified has books, t-shirts, and other products available on its website, and has gotten good press in many publications and media outlets, including Newsweek and (hello) This American Life.
I applied. I sent a journal entry to the website—something from when I was seventeen, recounting a conversation with my then-boyfriend: “Tonight Jimmy said the police came again and were surprised at all the registered guns in the house. It’s so funny that Stuart and Vera have so much money in guns yet hardly ever use them.” And I got the response I hoped for. Egan Danehy, the main Mortified producer in Portland, emailed and said, “We’re psyched to hear your stuff.” I was thrilled to get an audition, and immediately announced the news as a status update on Facebook.
But I was also scared. Because now, I was risking the double mortification of being rejected by Mortified.
MORTIFIED PORTLAND is an offshoot of Mortified Los Angeles. Danehy operates the Portland show with three other producers (including Megan Zabel, who edited my script), and told me he met Dave Nadelberg, Mortified’s founder, in Los Angeles. When Danehy moved here for work, he started the Portland franchise, which has been such a success that it’s moving from the 250-seat Someday Lounge to the Mission, a larger theater. Mortified operates in the same cultural sphere as other spoken-word shows in town, such as Back Fence. Every show has different participants, yet the same format: the promise of laughs and empathy toward performers foolish enough to show their old warts, or, in my case, burst boils.
According to Mortified’s website lore, Nadelberg got the idea for the show in the late 1990s, when he passed around an old love letter he’d written. Eventually, he began staging people’s readings of saved notebooks and other ephemera, “all in the noble pursuit of self-degradation.” The first Mortified shows were staged in Los Angeles in 2002, by Nadelberg and a co-producer, Neil Katcher. The shows’ popularity led to similar shows in other cities, including Portland, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. Nadelberg used savvy marketing and staging skills and the psychological insights of audiences and performers to make Mortified a money-producing octopus.
The show’s success is obviously due primarily to people’s interest in self-disclosure—producers get thousands of potential entries, and participants are like guests on David Letterman’s “Stupid Human Tricks.” They appear one time, for two nights, and then the next show is different. The producers guarantee humor (Mortified is billed as a comedy show), and performers don’t get paid, except for drink tickets and comps to future shows. They are, to most of the audience, anonymous strangers—the crowd roots for them as generic failures, people compulsive enough to hold onto the diaries, home movies, scripts, and fiction we created in our most vulnerable years.
There is, however, a second draw to Mortified: our willingness to view vernacular culture as authentic. When I laughed at someone reading her diary entries about smoking pot and eating an apple that felt like it was “chewing itself,” I felt like a drunk cultural anthropologist. In this way, Mortified operates in the same vernacular world as projects set up by David Greenberger, publisher of Duplex Planet, which produces spoken-word performances and a long-running fanzine based on the words of people “who are old or in decline.” As Greenberger writes on his website, “Humor has always played a key role in my work, and this is for a most simple reason: humor is a step by which we get to know another person. Humor is the first socially acceptable level of emotional exchange.” The deeper attraction we feel to projects like Duplex Planet and Mortified, then, may stem from the fact that through humor, they offer us an understanding of strangers that can feel sublime.
I MET the four Portland producers at Danehy’s work, an outpatient clinic for clients diagnosed with schizophrenia. And I felt crazy, to steal that word, reading aloud from my diaries—the real deal, the red-bound diaries with warnings on the outside to my siblings to “keep out.”
I was accepted, though I was too much of a good thing. We chose earlier years than seventeen, when I most struggled to fit in. Megan Zabel, my editor, eventually read thirty-seven pages of typed diary entries to cut and shape. A marketing coordinator at Powell’s by day, she worked on the script to shorten it to the best bits, keeping, for instance, my pop-culture references. (On going to a Bullets game in D.C.: “Larry Bird looks stupid but boy can he sink those shots!”) Short, snappy quotes worked well onstage for a comedy crowd, and Megan made a story out of days and years of suburban banality. She helped me, a shy, scattered person, create a story arc. At the time, I was in graduate school pursuing an MFA in creative writing, and it was mentally freeing to give her unaltered material, as opposed to working through grueling rewrites, as I had to do for my degree.
And though I don’t have qualms about exposing certain embarrassing moments from my life, I wasn’t sure how I would perform onstage. Despite being a musician, I’m an introvert. Also, I feel physically ill rereading my handwriting, which has devolved over the years from precision to sloppy loops. It’s difficult to read the entries and not feel an existential pang. The New York Times recently complimented Michael Chabon for not “pimping out” his children in his collection of parenting essays, and that phrase resonated with me as I tried to figure out why I wanted to stand in front of strangers and read my childhood diaries aloud. Pimping yourself out is different from pimping out your offspring, but it still seems like a betrayal. My past self couldn’t emerge as a hologram and smack me across the face, but I was risking a secondary form of humiliation: that people wouldn’t laugh, or worse, that they’d turn into a crowd of bullies, like ones from my past, and heckle me. I wanted to give my teen-age self some balls and emerge victorious—the winner of a cage-fighting bout with all the junior high assholes.
When Megan and I met to go over the final script, she said, “You can’t say, or indicate, that your material is funny” and “Don’t act, yet try to be the character you were then.” At first I practiced in a sing-songy voice that wasn’t working well; it grated on my husband, so I found a voice that worked: the voice of anger. I could be steady, like reading a children’s book to my son, but in my story, the main character gets her hair pulled by “jerks.” I channeled my inner Diamanda Galas, a scary performance artist who looks like Morticia, if Morticia ate children’s fingernails for breakfast.
As a stage prop for Mortified, I put my typed script of teen-age journal entries inside a high school folder I’d saved, green and ratty and covered with writing. An anarchy sign formed the A in my full name, Alexandra, although in the early 1980s I was still called “Sandy.” I was Sandy Behr, the former Brain Butt of Falls Church, Virginia. I also wrote a quote from Slaughterhouse Five: “I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”
It’s ironic I quoted Vonnegut on my folder, because I just write in a diary to keep my emotional shit together. There’s no wider moral purpose, as PBS attributes to that Vonnegut quote—that Vonnegut, in his words about the present, “sees a real potential for individuals to be guided by their moral courage.” I document my life in the journals, preserving my worse traits: my pettiness, my score-keeping, my gossiping, and my often-curious choice in companions. Nonetheless, because my teen-age journals are funny, the producers of Mortified were going to allow me to go onstage and read from them.
ALL DAY BEFORE my first show this past November, I was sure I would transform onstage into Stephen King’s Carrie, and someone cool would dump pig’s blood on me. I wanted people’s approval—I wanted, especially, my friends’ approval—but I had no idea how people would respond. Although I’d seen a show before, I wasn’t sure how my script would fly, since my story was about my failed attempts to fit in. And now I wanted to fit in with the Mortified institution, comprised of people defining the cool crowd of mainstream, “safe,” alt-culture.
And sure enough, the Someday Lounge was sold out that evening. People lined up in the rain for more than an hour, hoping to get the last of the tickets at the door. I walked with my husband to the front of the line (hello, entitlement) and entered early, setting aside good seats for my friends. The club seats around 100, and the remaining 150 or stood in the back and along the upstairs balcony.
Onstage, third up, I could see nothing. The spotlight nullified people’s faces. But I played on their laughter, because I had ten minutes, like the space before a commercial break, of increasing the shame/horror and getting huge applause at the end. I grew up in a small town in suburban Virginia, and when I went to middle school in the late 1970s, my elementary school friends became popular and dumped me. From ninth grade, the fall of 1979:
And finally after watching Holocaust Part 1 I wonder at the waste of mortality, the plunder of love and seeing and touching and hearing and feeling and being by a gas pellet or a metal bullet. How could a man degrade himself so low as to pull a trigger on a defenseless child! What gives a man the right to control the length of life of another? And where do I fit in? What could I have done? And why do people worry about who their gym partner is and is that the purpose of school? A false front of lies about your worth? Join the pep club? When children are starving in India?
I shared the stage with five other acts—all funny. The audience wanted to root for us and see validation that our shit worked out in the end—they wanted a drunken catharsis for their admission. Onstage, we each subconsciously competed with each other. We rooted for each other, but also wanted to kill. The last guy, handsome and preppy, read teen-age diary excerpts in faux gangsta style about wanting to fuck Heather (he loves her!). He ended each entry with what he wore (Tommy Hilfiger shirts, Nike hats) and ate (lemon chicken) and the phrase “Peace. One love.” Everyone loved him.
After the show, a friend said she laughed so hard at my script that she wanted to vomit. To me, that constituted success.
THIS MONTH, I’m flying to San Francisco, home of the late-fanzine Bananafish. For almost fifteen years, I played in obscure bands in endless dive clubs throughout the city. I’m going to read my script, my ten-minute tale, at one of those dives in the Mission District, the Make-out Room. I remember playing there, feeling mortified by a heckler who yelled the name of the next band, Fuck, while we were performing. But I finished the set.
And though with Mortified I’ll feel nauseous and full of self-doubt, I will finish with a belated message to that heckler—a spell of sorts. It’s as apt now as it was when I wrote it in 1979, at the end of ninth grade:
Dear Diary: I accepted, reformed, and converted to the idea that I’m the one who has to change and so with that in mind I braved the cold winds and harsh breezes with the thought that the sun will shine again. School’s better because I’m not expecting anything from anybody and the people there are not important. I can talk to girls I couldn’t talk to yesterday. People who don’t like me can go fuck themselves.
My date for one of the shows will be Seymour Glass of Bananafish, coming full circle from our lives in obscurity. For years he’s called me Stumpy, in honor of my nerdy youth. I will give him my drink ticket, as thanks.
Alex Behr is the author of the story collection Planet Grim (7.13 Books). Her writing has appeared in Salon, Tin House, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and is currently working on poetry and creative nonfiction for fun and profit.
