Cringe
This Wednesday night, April 6, you should come to Freddy’s Bar and Backroom in Brooklyn and hear me and some other people read aloud from our actual real life honest to god old diaries. I would call them “journals,” because I’ve learned from Mike Toole that calling them diaries makes you a fag, but the thing about these diaries is that they’re from our adolescence, so they’re fagged alllllll the fuck out.
A few years ago I came across all of my old diaries, which I kept pretty faithfully for most of my young life, beginning in kindergarten, when I wrote in green Strawberry Shortcake marker, and ended each entry with “I wonder what will happen tomorrow!” One night I took a chunk of them from middle school over to the Byrnes’ house and read some selections to Erin while we both killed a box of wine, and then Brian came home and she made me read them to him too, and they both laughed so hard it was totally worth selling my thirteen year old self out. Then I did a brief run of Sarah’s Journal email lists, where I’d pick an excerpt and send it out in a mass email to my friends once a week. This got a huge response and the list grew to 60 people, 40 of which I didn’t even know, which was terrifying and humiliating and awesome all at the same time. Every week, right before I’d hit “send,” I would think, “Why the fuck am I doing this again? This is embarrassing!” And then all these people would write back and suddenly my new mission was to find a more humiliating entry for the next email. Which, I should be sad to say, was not hard. We shall not speak of the highlighter art on the backs of some of these notebooks.
My roommate Liz brought home some of her old zines from high school after Christmas, and after spending an evening reading some breakup poetry where rain rhymed with pain, our mission was clear: we needed to share this with the world, or at least Brooklyn. So come out to Freddy’s this Wednesday night, and please, laugh with us. Laugh at us. If you’re going to just laugh at us, though, you should at least buy us a shot before we get up there and bare our awkward souls to you.
(Also, it’s not just me and Liz reading. I don’t want to give too much away, but I know at least one person with an entry dealing with the anguish of having their 15th birthday fall on the same day as Kurt Cobain’s suicide, but also? One of their breasts is smaller than the other. WHAT TO DO.)
Cringe Reading Night
8:30 pm, Wednesday, April 6th
Freddy’s Bar and Backroom
485 Dean St.
Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
2/3 to Bergen, any train in the world to Atlantic/Flatbush