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By DCist contributor Elena Goukassian

Every Mortified Live event ends with a summary of “what we learned.” Among the lessons at last night’s show at Town Danceboutique: True love is seeing her Saturn in the parking lot and not caring if she gave Dan a hand job, you can always edit your boring life into something more exciting, and if you’re sick of your boyfriend, just get Joanne to break up with him for you.

If these revelations sound ridiculously immature and oddly specific, that’s because they’re from the rants of teenagers.

Self-described as “a comic excavation of the strange and extraordinary things we created as kids,” Mortified invites adults from around the world to share excerpts from their teenage diaries, bad poems, and movies they created in high school, as well as any and all other hilariously cringeworthy documentation of their adolescence. Mortified has published books, and made a documentary, TV show, and weekly podcast. Local chapters in more than a dozen cities in the U.S. and Europe organize the live shows, which means that everyone on stage last night lives in the D.C. area.

The evening started off with Anna Husain reading from her journal about her middle school boyfriend. Gems like “My maturity level seems to skyrocket when I think about him,” “He wasn’t such a good kisser; I can change that,” and “I need $60 for lingerie before I can have sex with Ken” fall between very specific time stamps. Reading her journal entries, Anna notes that they all start with how many hours (and minutes) have passed since the last one—9 hours and 15 minutes later, 14 minutes later—only adding to the absurdity of it all.

After Anna, five more people took turns on stage. One showed high school films he had made, complete with fight scenes orchestrated by his siblings and their friends. Others shared more awkward sex and relationship stories. (“He put fingers in places I’m sure you can imagine!”)

Then there was Adam Ruben. One of Mortified DC’s producers, it seems teenage Adam fancied himself a young Charles Bukowski, writing poems with opening lines like “To have sex with a mountain” and “Up and left, and up and right, and right and wrong.” He even wrote a poem made up entirely of punctuation marks, claiming in earnest that it was “about fish.” When Adam’s high school English teacher reprimanded him for writing poetry that had no rhythm or rhyme and made no sense, he came up with a brilliantly passive aggressive rewrite titled “On Being Told That My Poem is No Good Because it Does Not Rhyme.”

Talking to a few audience members after the show, it seems I wasn’t the only one reminded of my own adolescent antics, and, in the spirit of the evening, people couldn’t wait to tell me about them.

Christian, 28, remembered how in 7th and 8th grade he was really into rap music, inspiring a notebook full of lyrics and the screen name cashmoneychris88. He now works at a local NGO.

Earlier on stage, Erika Ettin read from her journal as a college freshman, telling us how she got dumped after Thanksgiving break, when the guy she was dating got back together with his high school girlfriend. The story resonated with Sean, a 26-year-old engineer in the audience. “There was so much angst involved with Thanksgiving break, when you have to sustain these intense relationships,” he told me after the show. Sean went on to admit that he had also gotten back together with his high school ex during Thanksgiving of his freshman year in college. He found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to break up with the person he was seeing at college, who lived on the floor below him. “I did it either over text or AIM,” he says, but he still sees the wronged college ex on his Facebook feed.

“I host brunch every four months, and I break out my journal from when I was 13,” says Cate, 28, who works at a local coffee bar. She remembers a specific section about how she got her first period. She was infatuated with a boy named Jake at the time and wondered why her feelings were so strong. Once she got her period, she concluded, as she quotes from memory from her journal, “All these feelings [for Jake], I thought they were real, but it turns out I was just becoming a woman.”

Sexual discovery and figuring out how to break up with someone or tell them you love them are always common themes in adolescent journals, but the connections made at Town last night also represented a very specific time. Packed with people who grew up in the 80s and 90s, references to AOL Instant Messenger, Mariah Carey’s “Dreamlover” video, and John Hughes films produced knowing smiles and nudges among audience members. They do all have the equivalent of this picture lurking in their parents’ houses, too.