the first song i ever wrote probably applies

Last night, Manda and I went to a show here in the city called Mortified where I proceeded to laugh until I had a headache.

Mortified is a show in which ordinary everyday people get up on stage and read entries from their high school and middle school journals to a crowd of strangers. 90% of the time, the things these people are reading are completely embarrassing for them to share (thus the name of the show) but completely hilarious for us to hear.

Last night we heard a bunch of good stuff. There was the guy who had grown up listening to The Cure, The Smiths, and Depeche Mode who got up and read a couple of the poems he'd written at the age of 15. Oh, they were awesome ... My favorite was once called "Gray" which was all about "a vile darkness that doesn't have the guts to even be fully darkness." The best line in it was "Do not speak to me of pastels." It was just all so ridiculous.

There was the girl who read all about the summer she went on tour with the Grateful Dead and constantly did drugs. There was the girl who read her 13 year-old sex fantasies about the members of Duran Duran. There was the guy who performed some god-awful songs from his teenage band Live Evil. And there was my friend Jennifer Kirmse who read from her middle school diary.

Jennifer is the entire reason Manda and I went to Mortified, and she was hilarious. Her diary entries were all about the boy who lived next door (named Horus) and her arch nemesis at that time, a girl named Sunshine. To hear a grown woman yelling to a crowd of strangers "Fuck Sunshine! Shit!" was awesome. As was "Then we were in the deep end of the pool and Horus grabbed my foot and put it on his penis! Then he said 'What if you kicked me ... here?' Do you think he was coming on to me?"

It was all hysterical. Mortified does shows across the country (there's one in LA, Boston, NYC, San Fran, and Chicago) and I'd recommend it to anyone. If you want to see what it's all about for your self, head over to Mortified's clips page and click the link near the top for "Mortified: Quick Clips."