Last night I went to the most amazing comedy show ever, Get Mortified. A great simple, real and raw concept. People get up and read their school diary entries on stage in front of their school photo. I was in fits of laughter the whole time.

Last night we had readings from the 70s, 80s and 90s. They were some good years. I was not only laughing at them, but I was also laughing because I could relate to so much of what they were saying. Perhaps not the specifics like wanting a pig to be one of the cool ag kids, writing love letters to men in uniform when you were 13 years old, and performing rap songs about the evils of tobacco. But just the naivety of teenage hope and dreams. The confusing attempts to process the thoughts of anger and happiness as your lens of the world develops. The emotional poems that you wrote to explain the wild wonders of your teenage world.

I was one of those kids. We all were. What easy and great comedy.

Each mortified soul was then followed by a a freestyle rap. Amazing. They were the San Francisco based improv hip-hop group The Freeze. There were three of them working the stage, backed by a band. Really impressive, quick and clever. After one girl read out a diary entry talking about how the chicken from Burger King was so much better than from McDonalds, the rap line that followed was ‘Chicken falling from the sky, this time the King has won, you’re going down clown’.

It was such a great night that called for some personal reflection in a really light-hearted, mortifying and musically inspired manner. When you have something in writing, you can’t change it. It is there in ink, just as it was in 1994. There is no denying that it was you. It is really great to be able to see the world once again through the innocent, and sometimes disturbing, eyes of your teenage self. As our MC for the night finished up;

‘We are freaks, we are fragile and we all survived’. 

Thanks to my great mate Dan for taking me along. I really hope that this makes it out to Australia. I have boxes of diaries and poems that would mortify me superbly.

For the month of March I am writing a blog post every day as part of #b03. Thanks to Steve for the challenge.