Oh, the Shame!

D.C. resident Sykes, 35, went in front of the panel a couple of months ago to spill her guts, hoping she'd show performance potential.

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"Sometime in high school I got into the habit of drunk journaling," she prefaces, before diving into her curled heap of spiral notebooks.

June 12, 1989, begins like this: Drank a little, watched a movie, lost my virginity and then he took me home. The other entries are laden with quotations from Madonna, with pubescent combinations of curse words, with revelations written profoundly (and now recited ironically). Sykes gets to one particular sentence that seems to echo prophetically:

I kind of hope all these journals get published after I die.

* * *

She's not dead, of course. She just grew up. Although you might argue that her adolescent self is dead. Either way, Caryn Sykes circa 1989 is getting her wish 18 years later.

"Okay," Sykes admits. "I'm actually sort of doing what I wanted to do with them then -- get them out to the public -- but I guess I wanted to be dead before that actually happened. That actually makes me feel like they have a use other than just sitting in a box."

Ruben Rodriguez, 32, preceded Sykes at the August screening session. He'd scanned seven boxes of artifacts (kindergarten report cards, notes passed during class) and loaded the images onto his laptop. He read from his college-freshman-year journal, in which he describes crying on his dorm bed to Vivaldi's "Siciliano" because of an unrequited crush on his straight resident adviser.

God, I wish I knew what was going through his mind as I passed him on the staircase.

It's hard not to look at this kind of material and connect it to your present-day life.

"Of course, you look at this and you think, 'What am I being dramatic about currently in my life?' and 'Is this me acting like a 19-year-old freshman?' " says Rodriguez, who lives in Logan Circle.

One of his entries ends with this line: Will I be able to look at this in a couple months and laugh?