Oh, the Shame!

Months, no. Years, yes. Rodriguez is currently preparing his material for Mortified's second D.C. show, tentatively planned for right before Valentine's Day.

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One of the continent's foremost embarrassment experts chuckles for a good seven seconds when the concept of Mortified is explained to him.

"It's bold," says Rowland Miller, a professor of psychology at Sam Houston State University and author of "Embarrassment: Poise and Peril in Everyday Life," "but almost certainly entertaining. Perversely entertaining."

Embarrassment (and therefore humiliation and mortification) happens when unwanted information about ourselves is revealed, causing us to feel anxiety about how others perceive us. The act of sharing the private follies of adolescence isn't necessarily embarrassing, though; if anything, it provokes an empathetic response from audience members who may have gone through a similar experience. But there is a certain degree of shame in admitting how obsessed, awkward and/or antisocial we once were.

"Even if we have changed a lot, I guess it is a little bit embarrassing to admit, 'Yeah, I was creepy back then,' because that thing does potentially affect people's perception of you now," says Mark Leary, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University.

But both Leary and Miller agree that time is a great equalizer.

"By dredging up the silly drama of their adolescence, they entice and entertain other people and score adult points for doing it," Miller reasons. "What happens is we've got a mix of nostalgia for the issues, and the drama of days gone by, and we have in the audience mild empathic chagrin and embarrassment. There's also a mark of maturity in being able to look back with wry detachment at things that caused us so much -- well, emotion."

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At Mayorga Coffee in Columbia Heights earlier this month, a large flat-screen TV shows a Discovery Channel documentary. Archaeologists brush dirt off partially unearthed skeletons. In front of the screen, Andi Gabrick and Sally Prendergast pretty much do the same thing. Spread in front of them are the bones of Prendergast's grade-school years: a frayed marble journal, a rainbow-colored notebook held together with tape, a lockable journal with "DIARY" emblazoned on the front.

In these books are notes on Model UN, cheer camp, her Wiccan phase, her Christian phase, her vampire slayer phase, her first time getting a bra, the time she smoked toilet paper to be cool -- mostly written in bubbly, purple lettering, sometimes on pages that are pocked with decade-old tear stains. Gabrick, a Mortified producer, and Prendergast, a 25-year-old soon-to-be performer from Columbia Heights, are both trying to find the story hidden behind the words.

"What we're trying to figure out is, 'This is a story about a kid who wanted blank,' " says Gabrick, 31, of Mount Pleasant.