Oh, the Shame!
Adults Revisit Their Teenage Traumas and Dramas to Create Compelling Performance Art

By Dan Zak
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 28, 2007

This is about a kid who simply wanted to _______.

Fill in the blank. Try to parse your adolescence into a couple of words.

Kiss a girl.

Be valedictorian.

Win the 100-meter dash at the all-county track meet.

For the past few months, several D.C. area residents have been trying to extract meaning from things they wrote when they were kids. Sappy stuff. Boy-crazy stuff. Dark and depressed harangues against society. Stuff that was for their eyes only.

Until now. Seven adults will publicly recite material that never was meant to be read by anyone -- let alone performed for an audience -- next week at HR-57, the Center for the Preservation of Jazz and Blues. They not only must read it aloud, but also hope they've packaged it together in a style that lets audience members laugh or squirm or nod their heads knowingly. It has the potential to be a twofold humiliation.

* * *

Caryn Sykes has the shoe box.

She sits on a stool as a panel of five people regards her with interest. She opens the shoe box and produces a photo of herself from freshman year of high school. The 15-year-old Caryn sports a horrendous Reagan-era hairstyle, the kind of backward-mullet swoop mainstreamed by Mike Score of the '80s synth-pop group A Flock of Seagulls.

The five people in front of Sykes gasp, then buckle with laughter. They are the producers of Mortified, a comic excavation of adolescent writing, art and media shared by the authors in front of strangers.

Mortified has established itself in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Boston and San Francisco, and now a group of Washington residents is preparing its capital debut Nov. 6 and 7 (details, see http://www.getmortified.com).

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.

"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?

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.

* * *

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."

* * *

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.

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.

"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."