Singing Real Good

One of my favorite things about the Mortified performance was that I got to sing. In front of an audience. For awhile there, I ended every diary entry with David Cassidy lyrics so when we were preparing for the show I asked Susan if I should sing them. She said she always wants people to sing their lyrics (I guess it's pretty common for teens to include lyrics in their diaries) but so far nobody would do it. I couldn't see why not. It was the perfect opportunity because I wouldn't have to be good-  I would just be a 14 year old reading out of her diary. It would actually be better if I were bad. Here is an entry from when I was 11. (p.s. I definitely could NOT sing as good as the girl on Merv Griffin but isn't it sweet that I thought so?)

August 1, Thursday, 1968

            Last night when we were watching the Merv Griffin show a girl got up to sing a song with her father. She was about my age and sang real good. I knew that I could sing that good but it just made me feel bad that people couldn’t discover me. I can’t sing in front of an audience. I felt kind of bad and Mom came to me and said “How can we ever feel close if we don’t tell each other our problems.” We talked for awhile and I felt better.

            Brett has been nice to me. In foursquare he hits it easy to me and when he got me out he said he didn’t mean to. 

Anxious? Who, me?

In my 1971 diary, I wrote every day in the color of my mood. Not only that, I added a little bar of color into the outlined year on the cover page. I was careful to leave the accurate amount of white space when I didn't write. Not only that, I kept track in the back cover, of how many times I used each pen, and also which pens were lost, ran out of ink, or weren't purchased at the beginning of the year, so as to give a clearer picture of what was actually happening, with those pens. 

That fourteen year old knew what she was feeling. "Dear Diary," she writes, "I'm angry!" or "I'm happy" or "I'm worried about Mom," or "I'm muy deprisido." Susan asked if I was an anxious kid. "Not that I knew of," I told her, "but I DID have a lot of systems!"

In a mushy letter I wrote to my parents about that time, I thanked my Dad for "talking to me about statistics." It meant a lot to me. 

At first I tagged this OCD, but then I changed it to OCP (obsessive compulsive personality). Leah taught me that term. We both have it. Besides, how could this be a disorder? It's the opposite- everything is perfectly, reassuringly, in order.