Coolidge 'Mortified' By Young Love

The day before Valentine's Day, 10 regular people from the greater Boston area shared their teenage thoughts and angsty emotions to a sold-out venue of 250 people at the Coolidge Corner Theater.

Getting up on stage and reading from a middle school diary or playing a song from a high school band may seem like some people's worst nightmare. At Monday night's show, however, enough time had passed that the presenters had turned their mortifying teenage journal entries, poetry, and other creative endeavors into comedic gold.

This performance, and hundreds like it around the country, was produced by "Mortified: Angst Written." Mortified, which began in 2002, asked people to go back into their childhood closet and pull out their old diaries, notebooks, lyrics, poetry, artwork, and share them, "to reveal stories about their lives." Mortified provides a forum for grown men and women, professional performers and total amateurs, to air out their awkward teenage thoughts and experiences, confront their past, and create authentic and great comedy.

The Mortified show Monday night was very simply put together. There was no dramatic lighting or stage props, justtwo microphones and a projector screen on the back of the stage that showed a variety of embarrassing childhood photos periodically throughout the show. The only sounds were the presenter's voice and the responding roars of laughter and empathetic "ohhhh"s of empathy from the audience.

The show was titled the "Lonely Hearts One-Night Stand-off." This meant that the performers read only one really terrible "kick in the balls story," as the program described, as opposed to a collection of stories from their childhood. The title also hinted at the show's Valentine's Day theme, or perhaps anti-Valentine's Day theme. Therefore, all the stories, which were presented with the help of journal entries, songs, lists, and artifacts, had to do with relationships, sex, love, loneliness and, of course, teenage awkwardness.

Each of the 10 participants presented their humiliating stories a little differently. One woman read an entry from her ninth grade journal, which showed the pinnacle of her frightening obsession with JC Chasez from 'N Sync. It was written just after she attended an 'N Sync concert in Foxborough Mass. After the concert she wrote multiple pages about the concert's every detail. She outlined everything from the stage design to an in-depth recap of each of the 13 songs the band played. This woman's particular presentation also included artifacts from her 'N Sync obsession, including a scrapbook of photos of JC Chasez, homemade JC Chasez t-shirts, and finally two rings that she bought at Claire's that had the initials JC on them. It was only years later that she realized that they were promise rings and the JC stood for Jesus Christ.

One man read a series of dark poems from his high school journal. He explained to the audience that after he was made fun of for playing the bagpipes, his self-esteem took a major hit and he decided to reinvent himself. In an effort to become dark and edgy and attract his crush, he composed the poems "Anger Part 1" and "On Fear." These poems contained such angsty lines as "There is red all around, is it paint? No silly, it's blood," and "Voices all around, but no one was speaking."

Another man expressed his story of teenage angst through song. He performed his high school band's chart-topping hit, "Adam wants a B—job," which had the deep and meaningful chorus of, "ya ya ya Adam wants a b—job ya ya ya."

Last to present was Boston Globe love columnist Meredith Goldstein. She explained to the audience that in high school she had an intense fictional relationship with Christian Slater. From her journal, she read an angst-filled hypothetical letter she had written to him after she had learned from watching Entertainment Tonight that he was getting engaged to Nina Huang.

These stories, in any other venue, could have been completely awkward, but with the help of Mortified, the show was an extremely enjoyable and cathartic experience for both the presenters and the audience. There was a sense of unity between everyone in the theater because, let's face it, everyone has had those embarrassing teenage experiences.

If you missed Monday's show at the Coolidge Corner Theater, Mortified has shows going on in the Boston area periodically throughout the year and has a critically acclaimed television series, the "Mortified Sessions," which airs on the Sundance Channel.