Bostonista Endorses: Cringe


1222960647So we’re pretty sure the real tragedy of FacebookTumblrTwitter has nothing to do with mind-boggling indiscretion, nor with the irretrievable loss of an hour at the hands of your freshman algebra classmate’s Italy photos.

The true problem, clearly, is that social networking has robbed an entire adolescent generation of the opportunity to scribble overwrought prose in dinky-locked Lisa Frank diaries.

Luckily, writer/blogger Sarah Brown has been working diligently to salvage those soon-to-be cultural relics.

After discovering her own diaries during a trip home to Tulsa, the New York-based Brown decided that all that pent-up, top-secret angst really needed to be set free. And so Cringe, a monthly event in which now-well-adjusted adults read their most mortifying teenage memories to a roomful of strangers in a Brooklyn bar, was born.

The event proved so popular that Brown turned the stories into a book. And now, as her book tour of sorts, she’s taking Cringe on the road.

First stop? JP’s Midway Cafe, next Tuesday. Email her (cringe.reading@gmail.com) if you want to share your own love letters/heart-rending poems/desperate entreaties to God.

And if you’re not sure how funny decades-old screeds can be? Consider:

“I want to grow up, I need to grow up, I need a boyfriend to fool around with. I don’t want to act trashy or low-class. I just want to be mysteriously seductive, the same way Carol Seaver was trying to do when she told everybody she went to bed with Bobby Wynette on Growing Pains… Can’t I be the height of voluptuous femininity, singing Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets, or Open your heart, I’ll make you love me, or Diamonds are a girl’s best friend? How come I have to be the short 14-year-old girl who doesn’t know how to have the ANIMAL MAGNETISM that makes people want to DO things with her. Do, meaning DO. Erica Kane is my idol of the day.”

(Excerpt from January’s Cringe, via Paste magazine.)

Cringe at the Midway Cafe, 3496 Washington Street, Jamaica Plain, midwaycafe.com. 10/7, 8 p.m.