Oh, the Shame!

They talk about how Prendergast made a habit of trying everything (to impress boys), how she became a daredevil (to be cool), how she goes in different directions on each page of her journals. It's a frustrating, laborious process to try to make sense of one's adolescence.

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"Nothing ever gets nicely resolved, so it's hard to pick a spot where everything gets worked out," Prendergast says to Gabrick after a while. "It's my life. It's really hard to figure out what's the theme of it. I'm really nervous about this."

* * *

Does adolescence have a narrative, or is it just fits and starts -- a span of time without an arc, without exciting revelations or satisfying conclusions? Do we enter it rudely and slide meekly into adulthood?

For the District's inaugural Mortified show, Michael O'Neill plumbed the travel journal he kept while exploring Europe as a college student. You'd expect a notebook stuffed to the gills with the ponderings of a young man who was getting his first taste of the Louvre, the London theater scene and the concentration camp at Dachau.

Instead, the journals are filled with short, petty, uncultured thoughts about trying to find the nearest McDonald's. They are, frankly, the work of a 20-year-old ignoramus. O'Neill readily admits this.

"I'm mortified by the stark nothingness, or even who I thought I was at the time," says O'Neill, 41, of Columbia Heights. "These are entirely embarrassing. They show nothing about who I am today." (Proof: He's now fluent in Spanish and works at the World Bank.)

And as far as O'Neill says he has come from those travel journals, sometimes looking through old writings reminds us of how we haven't changed.

"Outward appearance is different, but in some ways that little girl is still in there," says Robin Katcher, 35, a Silver Spring resident and performer in the show. "There's something liberating about saying, 'I'm the awkward adolescent who didn't know what to do with herself.' That is where the laughter comes, and that's where the catharsis comes from."

Catharsis. Narrative. Change. Mortified is really just an unusual storytelling mechanism.

No kid at the time was thinking about the bigger picture, says Sarah Grace McCandless, the organizer of the D.C. chapter, but a bigger picture does reveal itself after reading through materials and hashing things out during one-on-one sessions.

"For me, I thought all relationships were going to be a movie, where Lloyd Dobler was going to be holding a boombox outside my window," McCandless, 33, says of her own material. "I was always trying to create that moment in my life. I think that speaks a lot about me being a writer now who writes about dynamics between people. It's those 'Aha!' moments we're looking for."

* * *

In the end, this isn't really about being mortified. "Mortify" means to subdue or deaden, and to subject to severe and vexing embarrassment. If anything, Mortified is about both reveling in our former angstiness and celebrating how it has informed who we are today. It's about delighting in our outdated perspectives of the world, in our kid logic.

Next week is a kind of epilogue, then, to the story of Caryn Sykes's drunken journaling, to Sally Prendergast's risk-taking crusade to fit in, to Michael O'Neill's travelogue of utter banality, to Robin Katcher's saga of dealing with puberty, to Kylee Coffman's angry, horribly poetic punk-rock phase.

"I think that I had to live through those kind of crazy, chaotic, self-mutilating sort of experiences to come out on the other end," says Coffman, 25, who lives in Alexandria. "All of us are looking for that redemption. By coming together and just laughing and getting out these old horrible experiences we've had, we can just kind of -- overcome it. It's over."