Cheryl Burke has a great piece in Until Monday about Cringe, a reading series at Freddy’s Bar & Back Room 485 Dean Street, where folks willingly share their adolescent embarrassments and adventures as recorded in their private teenage journals. I just missed one – it was on December 5th. Can’t wait for the next one.

This series, which began in April of 2005, takes place the first Wednesday of every month at Freddy’s Back Room. Cringe has garnered some major media attention including a segment on ABC’s Nightline and mentions in both Newsweek and Spin Magazine and was recently taped for a television pilot to air on TLC in early 2007.

Cringe creator and curator, Sarah Brown answered a few questions for me about the series and what it’s like to make an audience cringe.

Why did you start a series based on readers sharing their adolescent journals?

Back in 2001, I found my old diaries at my parents’ house, and spent an evening killing a box of wine with some friends of mine, reading them aloud. Their reaction led me to send the most painful excerpts to all of my friends in a weekly email. Eventually that list grew to about 60 people, and I didn’t even know half of them. The response was insane. So when I moved to New York a few years later, it sounded like a fun thing to do live.

How do you find readers for the series?

For the first show ever, I lined up a lot of friends. But since that first one, there’s been no shortage of readers. People will get up and volunteer at the end of the scheduled show, and I get a lot of great readers for the next show that way. It’s a pretty unexhaustive market, since everyone was a teenager. People who admit to me that they burned their diaries break my heart.

Read more at Until Monday