Last Saturday night, friends came over and shared old writing intended like fine aged cheese: stinky, but hopefully tasty. The event was inspired in part by Mortified Nation, a documentary I'd watched on Netflix, but mostly from an autobiography Stephanie's mother sent back to her after almost thirty years, during which Stephanie made pronouncements about the nature of love, world peace, her personal qualities, the depth of a boy, and the other boy, the one she tossed over for the deep one. The autobiography ran thirty typed pages; but such was her writing and adolescent delusion that if Stephanie started reading, no one wanted her to stop.
So, about a dozen friends and their kids came over, with the understanding that the kids could read something but then had to disappear from our shame. This was a request from a particular couple, one of whom, we discovered, justified the request. Her contribution was a letter to one man about the step-by-step process that led to the bed of another man who eventually turned out gay. My sister read from a journal she'd kept while traveling in Granada, a place so stunning, it knocked the verbs right out of her. Another friend read a letter from her then-fiance, now-husband explaining why he wasn't going to ask her to marry him yet, which she then followed up with three diary pages from the following month describing a perfect moment that came and went when he still didn't ask her to marry him. One person shared a diary of complaints about her furniture and thoughts about her boyfriend and time spent in the day, which was poignant because twenty years have now passed but the state of mind less so.
I shared two journal entries from middle school, which reveal the sad little boy inside me, and one from high school.
1) "Alone. I hate that word. Unless I am with a person I am afraid of. Then I am even more alone."
2) From high school: "If you need a crutch, I have long bones. / If you are cold, warm yourself in my urine."
3) And the best one of all, my first dance. "Slow music is bad for your system of fun."
I'm hoping to go to Seattle's Salon of Shame soon, and see what humiliation looks like for the pros.
So, about a dozen friends and their kids came over, with the understanding that the kids could read something but then had to disappear from our shame. This was a request from a particular couple, one of whom, we discovered, justified the request. Her contribution was a letter to one man about the step-by-step process that led to the bed of another man who eventually turned out gay. My sister read from a journal she'd kept while traveling in Granada, a place so stunning, it knocked the verbs right out of her. Another friend read a letter from her then-fiance, now-husband explaining why he wasn't going to ask her to marry him yet, which she then followed up with three diary pages from the following month describing a perfect moment that came and went when he still didn't ask her to marry him. One person shared a diary of complaints about her furniture and thoughts about her boyfriend and time spent in the day, which was poignant because twenty years have now passed but the state of mind less so.
I shared two journal entries from middle school, which reveal the sad little boy inside me, and one from high school.
1) "Alone. I hate that word. Unless I am with a person I am afraid of. Then I am even more alone."
3) And the best one of all, my first dance. "Slow music is bad for your system of fun."
