Sometimes, sharing is fun. Sharing fond memories, songs from our youth and recipes are all things that most people are more than happy to share. takes a bit of a different route: Participants share journal entries, songs, old letters, home videos and stories that traumatized them when they were in their youth.
Creator David Nadelberg is celebrating ‘s seventh year with events in nine cities, a second book and a Web series.
“ allows people to share their most embarrassing childhood traumas and memories with total strangers,” Nadelberg said. “It is in its seventh year and we have spread out to nine cities including Washington, D.C., Seattle, Austin, Los Angeles and Sweden [sic]. [The Portland chapter was] started by Ean Danehy and his wife Susan. They met at a show in Los Angeles. He assumed it was a date, she didn’t think that. They began talking about their own pasts and lives and it grew into a relationship. They moved to Portland where they study human behavior for a living, interestingly enough.”
The show itself isn’t run like an open mic or set up with formal auditions.
“Typically it is run like an art event, with a curator. It’s not an open mic night,” Nadelberg said. “Not everything we wrote as kids is entertaining to hear past one minute. We have a unique process called a shoebox session.
People read us artifacts from their childhood. We listen to them, and then we help them find excerpts that tell comedic stories about their lives.”
Not everyone gets his or her story told and, unfortunately, not every story that is chosen makes its way to the stage.
“There’s a video piece [in Los Angeles] we’ve been trying to get into the show for two years. Unfortunately [the woman who submitted it] backs down before every performance. But that’s okay. These pieces are personal so we don’t mind waiting it out,” Nadelberg said.
Aside from the immensely popular stage show, has released two books, : Real People, Real Words, Real Pathetic and : Love is a Battlefield. The books take articles and stories from the stage show and share them with a far wider audience.
“Like our stage show, the books are anthologies of excerpts of people’s actual teenage writings, journals, crappy novels they tried to write when they were 15…threaded with the context of why they wrote what they wrote and a bit about who they are,” Nadelberg said. “I’m extra excited about Battlefield. If there was ever a theme or topic that stalks , it’s romance—lots of stories of teenagers with creepy obsessions plague our participants.”
Nadelberg attributes the show’s wild success to the subject matter.
“Dealing with people’s neurosis from childhood and exorcizing them as a form of comic therapy,” Nadelberg said. “You learn a lot about who people are when you are hearing the secret lives of strangers. On a micro level and on a macro level. When you hear or read a piece you see yourself. People like seeing themselves in these moments of comic tragedy.”
People really do, because nearly every single show in every city that has exhibited the show has been sold out. This is quite a feat, considering Nadelberg has not spent any money on conventional marketing.
“Not one dime has been put into traditional marketing,” Nadelberg said. “This speaks to the idea that our show connects with everybody, so everybody speaks about it with each other. People make it their own, and bring it into their own life, so stories get around and we have been promoted on a grassroots level that way. It’s different from sketch and improv comedy. It’s not about laughing ‘at you.’ It’s not trying to make you laugh with the performer. It’s like ‘laugh at me and cheer for me.’ It has a heart that most comedy doesn’t address.”
Whatever motivation people have for coming to —laughing at others, laughing at themselves or just experiencing the awkward communal misery of adolescence—Nadelberg and company truly have a unique and unifying concept and have thus far executed it quite well.