“Mortified:’ Sharing the shame to entertain

In the late 1980s, an 11-year-old girl (on the verge of 12) started a diary. The theme, if there was one, can be summed up in four words: “Desperately seeking a boyfriend.”

It could have been any pre-teen girl in America, but in this case it was Amanda Janik, growing up in a house with four older brothers and a younger sister in tiny Gobles, Michigan. After high school, the diary, with its blue flowery fabric cover and broken lock, wound up buried in a box that moved from place to place across the country, until one day when Amanda, by then in her early 30s, opened it in a house in Santa Rosa she shared with her husband.

“I started reading them and I thought they were hilarious,” she said. “It was this completely other version of myself, but it’s still me. I thought, ‘Did I really feel that way?’ For a little while I felt a little sad for that person - that Amanda. I was so desperate for a boyfriend. I wish I could have been stronger and more confident in myself.”

At this point, the story is not that unusual. But where most people might just keep the diary to themselves or share with only a few close friends, Janik had an urge to tell her story to more and more people.

After Facebooking her find, someone mentioned the “Mortified” website and she discovered a community, a cult of nostalgia, that revolves around sharing super-embarrassing childhood memories. Founded by David Nadelberg after he unearthed an awkward love letter in the late 1990s, “Mortified” is now a movement, with its own mottoes: “Share the Shame” and “You’re Not the Only One Who Had an Awkward Phase.” There’s a documentary (“Mortified Nation”), TV show (“The Mortified Sessions”), books (“Mortified: Love is a Battlefield”) and a weekly podcast filled with strangers sharing the most god-awful - yet somehow redeeming and hilarious - secrets.

“You contact them through the website and you meet with a producer that’s in your area and you bring everything with you - shoeboxes of stuff like diaries, poems and photos - whatever you’ve found,” said Janik. “And you work together to try to curate a piece that will work. It’s all really stuff that you wrote in your diary; you don’t make anything up.”

So two years after rediscovering her 11-year-old self, as she was going through a divorce with her husband, Janik began discovering who she was at 33, taking the stage with others at San Francisco’s DNA Lounge to read from her diary for the first time.

“It was very therapeutic,” she remembered. “It’s sort of relieving you from the burden of thinking you were such a freak as a kid, because you realize, ‘Wow, that person felt the same way I did.’ I can take a deep breath now and laugh about it and not feel so embarrassed.”

Now, at 37, after doing over a dozen shows from Los Angeles to Portland, she’s bringing “Mortified” confessional therapy to Sonoma County and producing the first ever “Mortified North Bay” Friday, Feb. 27 at Christy’s on the Square in Santa Rosa.

Janik, who lives in Santa Rosa and runs Sprout kids’ clothing shop in Healdsburg, will read from her diary along with at least four other daring souls from around the Bay Area. One guy will share dark, angst-ridden poems and song lyrics he wrote in high school.

Another will describe the torture of coming out of the closet as gay and attempting to go back into the closet. And a woman will read from her journal about trying to console her mother, who was going through a divorce, by helping with her new housecleaning business.

“It’s such a shared experience that people have,” Janik said. “You think that your feelings and emotions during that time are so unique and individual and that’s what makes it so embarrassing because you think no one else would ever think this way. I have to keep it to myself. And then once you start hearing these things, you realize a lot of it is very universal.”

Today, Janik still occasionally writes in a diary, she said, but it’s not quite as embarrassing, at least she doesn’t think so now. And the themes are a little different, since she’s happily found a boyfriend.

“He’s a big supporter,” she said. “We always joke that he’s my Stedman (Oprah’s longtime partner), because he comes to every show.”

Although her kids have never seen her show, she encourages her 8-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son to keep diaries.

“My son’s not so into it,” she said, “but my daughter will occasionally write in hers and she’ll leave it out and leave it open, and of course I’ll come across it and I’ll have to read it and it’s so funny.”

Just wait until she reads it out loud to a crowd of strangers a few decades from now.

Bay Area freelancer John Beck writes about entertainment for The Press Democrat. You can reach him at 280-8014 or john@beckmediaproductions.com.