This past weekend in between slacking on NaNoWriMo and avoiding the gym, I hung out with my brother.
I’ve written before about his scare yourself every day project. Well, as part of that, he performed in Mortified L.A., which involves adults reading their angst-ridden journal entries from when they were teens and pre-teens. This weekend he went on a Bay Area Mortified tour, hitting San Francisco and Berkeley. MB and I went to the one in SF.
The day was a tough one for travel for both my brother Greg and me. He dealt with a check-in nightmare at LAX and a horribly delayed flight, while my train decided not to run that night. Not just my train, ALL the CalTrains, running north and south, because, I gathered from word of mouth and NOT any useful announcements, some bridge was out somewhere. On top of that, it was raining and I had no umbrella.
I left work early to make it back into the city to have dinner with Greg and MB before the show. I left at 4:30, at 5 decided to take the very slow bus, and finally at 7 PM was back in SF. Needless to say, I didn’t have time for dinner, and went straight to the venue. At least I made it in plenty of time for that, and by then it had stopped raining.
Although Greg has done this before (and swimmingly), I was still very nervous for him. I knew he’d be great, but I was still jittery. Maybe because he was also going to mention me.
But he did more than that. He called me out in the audience. I thought, Should I duck down and try to be anonymous? Then decided, Nah I want attention! and raised my arms. After that people kept turning around whenever Greg mentioned me.
“And I used to read my sister’s diary.”
Five heads slowly turned to look at me.
People, I know already! Plus it was like 25 years ago.
MB and I had a great time. The other readers were also very funny, but it was especially awesome to hear people cracking up over my brother’s stuff.
MB and I didn’t go to Greg’s Berkeley performance on Satuday, but on Sunday I got to have lunch with him and a couple of his friends. Aftereward, his friends had to beg off, so we walked all around.
We were sitting in Dolores Park as he tried to figure out what that day’s scary thing would be. His friends had suggested karaoke that night. I said, “You could roll down this hill right now.” Then he remembered: Hot Cookie.
If you don’t know, Hot Cookie is this place in the Castro where you can have your picture taken in red undies. Greg thought he could just buy the underwear, go somewhere to take the picture, then put it on their Facebook wall. Well, you’ll have to read Greg’s post to find out what happened!
Some people may think it’s weird that I had no problem taking that picture of him, but since doing naked photo shoots with certain friends, I’m not very embarrassed by body parts, male or female, anymore.
As long as I don’t have to show them in public myself, of course.
I’ve attended similar types of performances and was once asked to read at one myself, but I never kept a personal journal or diary during my teenage years, and I think this is true for most men. I sometimes wonder if this is why there are so many more female personal bloggers than male. Most of my fellow male bloggers tend to write more about “stuff” than day to day activities and emotion.
I wrote a lot as a teenager, but usually imitations of SNL skits or stories about women getting it on with robots — typical stuff of a teenage boy. I’m really glad I got into blogging, which has opened up my experience and made me comfortable writing about the little things in my life.
I loved reading about your brother’s project.
That’s funny you mention the SNL skits – one of that night’s performers read “climactic scenes” he had written as a teenager – not full movies mind you, but one or two line dramatic scenes. They were hysterical.