Mortified

Last night Summer and I went to see Mortified in New York. Every performance is slightly different, but each night nine or ten people read extracts from their teenage diaries, locker notes, poems, or - last night at least - rap lyrics (by a 14 year-old white farmboy) and a draft screenplay for a porn flick (by a 12 year-old Jewish American Princess).

For the web geeks among you, this show is user-generated theater; not open mike like YouTube, but filtered and edited like Metacafe.

It's cringe-making, painful, embarrassing, and incredibly funny. Anyone can submit a piece and the producers in each city - so far L.A., New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Chicago - hold open auditions to find new material. Some of the best pieces from the last few years have been published as a book, just in time for the holidays.

Thoroughly recommended.