{"id":9269,"date":"2015-03-31T18:49:01","date_gmt":"2015-03-31T18:49:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/?p=9269"},"modified":"2015-03-31T18:49:01","modified_gmt":"2015-03-31T18:49:01","slug":"new-frontiers-of-sharing-read-your-old-diary-onstage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/?p=9269","title":{"rendered":"New frontiers of sharing: read your old diary onstage"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pressed Caf\u00e9 in Centretown Ottawa is normally a bustling place\u2014fingers clunk on laptop keyboards and people chatter\u2014but on the evening of July 6, 2014, the room is quiet. Two hundred eyes look up at a spot-lit Lindsey McCaffrey. She is about to do something most people have thought of\u00a0only in nightmares. To a roomful of strangers, she will\u00a0read aloud from her childhood diary .<\/p>\n

Cracking open the unicorn-cover diary that was hers at age\u00a012 (and which includes\u00a0a warning at the front to\u00a0her sister to \u201cstay out!\u201d), McCaffrey,\u00a0now 38,\u00a0shares about her first heartbreak. \u201cI absolutely cannot believe it,\u201d she reads. \u201cRonda just phoned me a few minutes ago telling me that Chris broke up with me!\u201d The room erupts in laughter.<\/p>\n

McCaffrey\u2019s performance is part of a stage show called Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids<\/em> (GRTTWaK<\/em>). <\/em>The show is an open-mic style event where participants sign up to read from their adolescent writings onstage at a bar, caf\u00e9 or similarly laid-back venue. The participants are regular people\u2014not professional performers\u2014who have dug through their old shoe boxes and found something funny, touching or just plain embarrassing that they think\u00a0is worth sharing.<\/p>\n

Gaining\u00a0momentum<\/h2>\n

GRTTWaK <\/em>began as a stage show in Toronto in 2007, but last summer the show\u2019s creator, Dan Misener, took it on the road, drawing crowds and local participants in all ten Canadian cities he visited. GRTTWaK <\/em>isn\u2019t the only show of its kind. A similar open-mic show called Teen Angst<\/em> began in Calgary in 2000. There are also curated diary shows across North America, such as Mortified <\/em>in the U.S. and Dear Diary <\/em>in Toronto. In the curated shows, producers meet with participants before the performance to help tease out a story within their adolescent writings (unlike in the un-coached open-mic shows).<\/p>\n

\"\"
Close to home. An all-too-relatable moment at\u00a0a\u00a0Mortified<\/em> show in San Francisco. [Photo \u00a9 Todd Hartman]<\/figcaption><\/figure>Stage shows of both varieties, curated and open-mic,\u00a0have\u00a0cropped up across North America over the last decade, and their popularity has\u00a0grown. Since Mortified <\/em>began in 2002, it has expanded to nine American cities and it also has a chapter in Malmo, Sweden. A documentary about the show called Mortified Nation <\/em>was released November, 2013. It\u00a0got some\u00a0press, winning\u00a0positive reviews from The Washington Post, Time, <\/em>and Newsweek, <\/em>among other sources. The film\u00a0also seems to have sparked a renewed interest in these types of shows. Dear Diary <\/em>started in Toronto in September 2014, after the show\u2019s creator, Alexandra Parravano, saw the\u00a0Mortified<\/em> documentary. Meanwhile\u00a0CBC Radio picked up on\u00a0public interest in these shows and commissioned Misener to produce a 10-part podcast series of GRTTWaK<\/em>. The audio episodes were broadcast live throughout the summer of 2014 on CBC Radio, and can now be accessed online at the GRTTWaK <\/em>website.<\/p>\n

Real-life\u00a0drama<\/h2>\n

Misener says he came up with the idea for GRTTWaK <\/em>while helping his girlfriend sort through boxes at her parents\u2019 house in 2007. He found her Grade Seven diary, and they spent the afternoon reading it aloud. Misener realized it was compelling, and the show was born.<\/p>\n

Dave Nadelberg, founder of Mortified<\/em>, says these types of shows are popular because they are honest. \u201cI think audiences are really hungry, on an emotional level, for things that take them on a true human experience,\u201d he said. With so-called \u201creality shows\u201d feeding audiences anything but reality (think Kardashians and Real Housewives<\/em>), people are craving authenticity in art. The way we have segregated emotions in our entertainment to different genres (dramas, thrillers, comedies) is also not indicative of how we experience life, said Nadelberg. In shows like Mortified<\/em>, the audience will find themselves laughing one moment and crying the next, much like life, certainly like adolescence.<\/p>\n

Our culture now places a high value on vulnerability.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nadelberg also says the popularity comes from how universal and relatable adolescence is. Even if audience members can\u2019t directly identify with a participant\u2019s life experience, Nadelberg hopes they can still relate to the emotions. \u201cI want to have an audience member who grew up as a total Mormon goodie-two-shoes boy, and I want him to totally connect to some punk rock girl who\u2019s reading her lyrics on stage,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Mortified<\/em> participant Garry Davis shares his struggles with growing up feeling like an outsider. [Photo \u00a9 Allana Taranto]<\/figcaption><\/figure>The connection comes not from having gone through exactly the same thing, but in understanding\u2014through your own experience\u2014the other person\u2019s\u00a0feelings. One\u00a0participant in Mortified<\/em>, Garry Davis, shared about growing up as a gay, black male from a religious family in the Southern U.S. Nadelberg says he couldn\u2019t directly relate to Davis\u2019 story since he\u2019s straight, white and from the Midwest. \u201cBut I do know what it\u2019s like to feel misunderstood,\u201d Nadelberg said. \u201cI do know what it\u2019s like to feel different.\u201d<\/p>\n

Parravano of Dear Diary<\/em> says the show creates a collective experience for audience members. \u201cAt the end of the show, everyone feels like they\u2019ve gone through something together,\u201d she said. For the audience members, the performers seem to guide a process of looking back. While viewers might come to the show to hear other people\u2019s embarrassing stories, they come out talking about their own. The audience and performers\u2014who were strangers at the beginning of the night \u2014 feel like they know each other at the end, she said.<\/p>\n

Who would do this?<\/h2>\n

But the whole trend\u00a0invites the question: Why would anyone want to read their diary to a bunch of strangers?<\/p>\n

\u201cI loved it,\u201d said Diane Finkle Perazzo, a participant in Ottawa\u2019s GRTTWaK<\/em>. \u201cI loved that they were laughing.\u201d Perazzo says the experience was therapeutic for her, because of the support she gained from the audience. She said one of her friends didn\u2019t like the show because she thought the audience was making fun of the performers. But Perazzo is quick to assert\u00a0that she was being \u201claughed with\u201d rather than \u201claughed at.\u201d<\/p>\n

GRTTWaK<\/em>\u2019s Misener, \u201cThe dirty little secret of all of this is that when you are listening to someone onstage read from their childhood writings, you\u2019re really not laughing at them; you\u2019re kind of laughing at yourself.\u201d The performers can sense this support and realize they are not the only ones who experienced these things. There\u2019s a new perspective gained on problems that may have seemed so large at the time.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Lindsey McCaffrey reflects on how she\u2019s changed since she wrote her diary and how, in a way, she\u2019s still the same. [Photo \u00a9 Emma Brown]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\u201cIt was a good reminder to me of who I used to be,\u201d McCaffrey said. She realized she didn\u2019t give herself enough credit as a kid because she was actually \u201cpretty awesome.\u201d McCaffrey found herself turning to her childhood writings during her 20s, while she was searching for a sense of identity. Performing for an audience was a way for her to celebrate her younger self.<\/p>\n

But one of the most poignant reasons why adults want to read their diaries aloud is this: deep down they are still that kid who just wants to be heard. Teenagers often feel like nobody\u2019s listening to them; no one understands them. Nadelberg said, \u201cWhat I\u2019ve always liked about getting to do Mortified<\/em> is this idea that all these years later a room full of strangers are sitting in the dark and they\u2019re listening.\u201d<\/p>\n

Back at Pressed Caf\u00e9, McCaffrey finishes her reading with her record of\u00a0happenings at a middle-school\u00a0dance:<\/p>\n

\u201c1: Phil asked me if I wanted to dance with John to a slow song. 2: I danced with John. 3: Phil said, \u2018You and John look good together.\u2019 4: Brian said, \u2018You should go out with him.\u2019 5: Eventually, I decided to ask John out. 6: Brian told Phil. 7: Phil told John. 8: John thought. 9: John said yes!\u201d<\/p>\n

The audience cheered. They cheered for 12-year-old Lindsey. They cheered because deep down we\u2019ve all hoped \u201cJohn\u201d would say yes to us. They cheered because they understood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Would you stand before an audience to read aloud from your teenage diary? This growing trend turns embarrassment into art. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":9283,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9269"}],"version-history":[{"count":41,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10498,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9269\/revisions\/10498"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}