To celebrate Valentines Day this year, I’ll be reading out
of my teen diary for the Mortified Doomed Valentines show. Three audiences of
400 or so mostly strangers, at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland, will hear about
my adventures in promiscuity, coming of age in a southern California beach
town, in the seventies. Yes, I’m what you could call, “privacy impaired.” It
used to be that I just didn’t have good boundaries, and a strong streak of
exhibitionism. But now that I’ve, um, matured, and even worked for years as a
therapist, there’s something more to my enjoyment of “sharing the shame,”
Mortified’s motto. When something potentially shameful is shared, it then
belongs to all of us- my personal story becomes a cultural story. As my folk
lit teacher Charles Ingham said back in the 90’s, about the diary, “it’s the
voice of the tribe, spoken through the individual.” My story is of a dorky
girl, who almost overnight was no longer a dork, (or didn't look like one anyway)
and had no training in how to
handle the lusty attention coming her way. Male lust was nothing compared to
her own, though. As 17 year old Donna says, “It’s great to be horny when you’ve
got a honey… but when you don’t, God, it’s hell!”
Ever since I was in the Mortified show 4 years ago, I've wanted to do it again. But it was a completely different experience this time. I've never understood how people can burn their journals, but when I got back into my older teen material, I was horrified. I did not like this girl. I told Susan I wasn't sure I wanted to do it after all. She understood, but she didn't let me bail. I sent her a dozen cringe-worthy pages and she cut, pasted, and most importantly, laughed her loud inimitable laugh, and somehow made that desperate sex-crazed girl someone I could look at with some affection.
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| Donna Otter & Betsy Lampert hunting for shark teeth |
There's someone important in this story, my bestie, Betsy. What do you do when your best friend gets a boyfriend??!!! Oh did I punish her, and mope and do everything I could to make her feel guilty, but I think it's time to let her off the hook, because she did end up marrying that foxy surfer dude, and amazingly, they are STILL MARRIED!!! But wait... since she was going to spend her whole life with him, shouldn't she have spent her last years of high school with me, before I ran off to San Diego to become a poet?
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| Betsy & Jim Dear at their daughter's wedding |
Man, do I feel sorry for my parents during my teen years! They'd come of age in the Happy Days Fifties and were in no way prepared for the Free Love Seventies. I think they'd just like to forget that period of time ever happened, but sadly they raised a compulsive diarist, who loves to keep the past alive. I might still burn those high school journals though, after the show.
the Otter family in Manhattan Beach...1972?
