Sunday, October 16, 2011

Mortified

Mortified is the name of a comedy show of sorts springing up in cities nationwide.  Regular people share "mortifying" events of their past with old diaries, illustrations, letters, videos, and other mementos of traumatizing events.

I wasn't sure if I'd like it.  It turned out to be a hilarious evening.  Some highlights:

Speaker 1: Was raised by hippie feminists.  Her mother taught her about sex, including body parts and male arousal, at age 4 using the graphic feminist book, Our Bodies, Ourselves.  This inspired her to draw lots of pictures about sex on construction paper.  This included body parts and men and women in pajamas with cigarettes in bed.

Speaker 2: Decided in elementary school that she wanted to marry Indiana Jones and formulated plans to follow in the footsteps of his lover in Raiders of the Lost Ark.  This meant becoming a journalist with an expertise in archaeology until she finally met her Indiana.  She thought she found this person - the editor of her college paper - and joined the paper and became a hard working assistant editor.  She lied to get him to give her rides home.  At one point she was interviewed by the paper and she decided to playfully reveal her lifelong crush on Indiana Jones and how the editor was her Indiana.  It didn't come across as funny, but creepy.  She had to quit.

Speaker 3: This speaker brought in letters to his parents - and his goldfish and his bike - from camp at age 10.  The letters to the goldfish and the bike were funny enough, but there were also reports of what other boys were claiming to do with the girls.  One of them got his "nuts fingered."

Speaker 4: This speaker drunk-journaled in high school.  She'd steal her dad's liquor and write journal entries about a friend who might have been more than a friend, and who claimed to be a magic user.  She lost her virginity to this guy at age 17.  More mortifying, she revealed this at a previous Mortified.   As the first Mortified in DC, The Washington Post printed it and  her grandmother read it.

Speaker 5: Revealed his love for the Nintendo entertainment system, showing video clips of him playing Mario brothers.  He wrote letters to Nintendo about how he couldn't afford the second Nintendo system and they should give him one.  They wrote back about strategies that other kids used to buy one, including paper routes, etc.  Nintendo said "many customers report enjoying the product more after working to earn it."  As soon as he saved up for the second version, the third version came out.  However, he now reviews games for a living, so the story has a happy ending.

Speaker 6: was a gnome enthusiast in elementary school.  For his 5th grade science diorama on an endangered species he did gnomes.  This made him unpopular with other boys, so by junior high he had a new obsession - Barbara Streisand.