Cringe

Waaaaay back in December, I went to an event called Cringe in Brooklyn. I'd emailed Sarah Brown, who runs the event, for more information after reading a bit about it on Dooce. I put in my subject header: "I wanna Cringe!" thinking this might stand out a bit.

Then a few days before the event, I got an email: "Do you want to read?"

And, clear glutton for punishment/sucker for spotlight/attention-grabber I was, I said I would.

Cringe is like Get Mortified in that sane adults get up in front of a crowd and read their teenaged/adolescent journals, poems and notes to the group. (Get Mortified is a lot less ad hoc, and I've never been as the readings cost money.) The process — the reading, that is — is surprisingly cathartic and at the same time wonderfully hilarious.

Thus invited, I went through my old school journals and notes and came up with what turned out to be a side-splitter about my incipient love life (that is, nonexistent) in tenth grade, where a group of my friends and me all hooked up with a group of guys and hung out together all year. The blow-by-blow (not literal) commentary is both cringe-inducing and hil-freaking-arious.

And the crowd thought so, too. Fortunately, no one leaned forward to say, "Why is your leg shaking uncontrollably?"

There was a New York Daily News reporter on site, and she talked to me afterwards; when I picked up the paper that Sunday and the article focused on someone else who had been there I just shrugged and moved on.

Little did I know that the Web article would be utterly, utterly different. And have a photo.

Now I have new reasons to cringe. For the sake of girldom.