New York — THE diary is a 70-sheet spiral notebook with candy wrappers and a used pair of chopsticks taped inside. A picture of Donna Summer is glued to its cover next to a scratch-and-sniff pizza sticker that -- after 27 years -- still smells like pepperoni.
Its cursive-scrawled pages hold Becky Ciletti's most intimate pubescent thoughts and secrets. The 39-year-old freelance writer came to this bar on a rainy April night to read the mostly embarrassing excerpts -- food-fighting, French-kissing, babe-loving and all -- to nearly 100 strangers. She wrote the first entry in 1980, when she was 12.
Feb. 7:
Diary readings: An article in Saturday's Section A about adults reading their teenage diaries and writings in public misspelled the name of the university that graduate student Josh Gallaway attends. It is New York's Columbia University, not Colombia University.
We didn't have school because of the snow today. I miss Kelly. I don't know why, because I've seen him all week except for today. P.S. Please help me to be more mature and help me to fill out my bra.
The audience howled with laughter.
Feb. 11:
Lunch was a riot and a blast and sort of gross. We had a food fight. I threw some beef jerky and some bread. Chris
Call it comedy. Call it therapy. The crowd that gathers over beers at Freddy's Bar & Backroom in Brooklyn calls it "Cringe Night." Once a month, people mostly in their 20s and 30s read their teenage writings, which have included a long-forgotten unrequited love letter to New Kids on the Block and a song composed in a fit of adulation for Richard Marx. And then there are the real-life diary entries, such as one read by 26-year-old Maggie Jacobstein:
I hate my mother more than I've ever hated someone. She makes me feel so bad when I see her fat ugly face!
PUBLICLY reciting old songs, letters and journal entries "is cathartic in a way," said Aaron McQuade, 30, a news anchor, who said he was the pudgy kid with bad skin who didn't talk to anybody in junior high. It's not like back then, "when they're laughing at you and you're not laughing at all."
When McQuade first read at Cringe two years ago, he said it was like releasing the pent-up torment of his teenage years. He realized how funny it all was. "This is brilliant satire," he said, "but it's not satirical. It's unintentional. You couldn't write this stuff as authentically as it was written back then."
Clear-skinned and confident in his gray beanie, glasses and cuffed jeans, McQuade read one of his teenage musings on this recent Cringe Night, saying it was from his Jack Kerouac "On the Road" phase:
