Voice of the Tribe

Last night was dress rehearsal and I got to meet the other Mortified performers and hear their stuff. As one woman said, "my face hurts from laughing." It's all great... I love diaries, and no other age surpasses the painful honesty, overblown emotion, obsession with appearance, romantic obsessions, and overall angst, of the teen years.

 I still have work to do in the next two days. My reading turned out to be 17 minutes and it needs to be 12, so there are some tough choices about what to cut, and the intro has to shrink too. I'm impressed with how the Story Producers have teased out the stories from multitudes of badly written pages, blending just the right amount of tenderness in with the hilarity.

In between doing important things like working on the performance, my website, and homework for my business foundations class, I'm watching "Winnebago Man," a documentary about "the angriest man in the world," Jack Rebny, whose outtakes from a disastrous commercial went viral a couple decades ago.  Somehow I'd never seen it until now, have you? At first I thought, "who would want to know more about this guy?" (and he thought that too) but I'm fascinated with what people are fascinated by. I'm only halfway through the documentary but it looks like the filmmaker is getting a lot more than he innocently bargained for. I'm already cringing.

Funny, how "found footage" has become its own genre. Stuff that was never supposed to be seen. (Like diaries) At Whistle Stop Bar in South Park, they used to do a found film night, where they'd bring in old reels from garage sales & trashcans, set up a couple musicians with a violin and a keyboard, who'd not seen the films, and go at it. I remember a medley of the Rose Parade, homemade porn and baby's first steps. And of course, there's the Museum of Bad Art- stuff that was on its way to the landfill.

I wonder what will become of all this? I'm thinking back fondly on my Folk Lit class, taught by Charles Ingham at SDSU in 1991. The only reason I took it was I needed a cross cultural elective on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. What a surprise- it became the culmination of my undergrad degree and ruined me for further academia. I'll never forget hearing Charles say, "the diary is the voice of the tribe spoken through the individual and a legitimate form in its own right."

If so, teenagers are a very special tribe indeed.