Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids
At the Garrison in Toronto on Monday
When they were children, they understood as children, they thought as children, they wrote as children. But when they became adults, they put away their childish things.
Then they brought those thoughts and reasonings back from storage. And it was cute and ironic comic gold when they did.
“It’s exactly what it says on the tin,” announces Dan Misener, the tall, bookish convener and host of the ongoing Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids, a Toronto open-mike series that has visited Winnipeg and Ottawa.
He’s explaining the self-explanatory to his young, sold-out audience of 150 at a west-side Toronto club. “Some of them are letters from camp, some of them are diary entries, some of them are journal entries.” Misener pauses, says he’s not quite sure of the difference between the latter two, and then speculates that boys do journals and girls do diaries. “I think a boy can write a diary,” he reconsiders, “but I think that says something about you.”
The first laugh of many over a course of an evening that began with a young woman reading an unpublished high-school newspaper questionnaire entitled Are You a Pervert? She had written it as a 17-year-old – not a kid at all – and the humour was coarse, asking students whether they wore no underwear under their “rough, starchy jeans” so that every time they walked, they received a “frisson of pleasure out of the chafe.”
The cheeky study-hall humour rubbed the evening’s conceit the wrong way. These weren’t Art Linkletter-style darndest things, or anything close.
I had heard a clip from a previous show, in which a man read aloud the fat-pencilled prose of his childhood. He recited a line – “I like opera” – that bewildered him all these years later. The balderdash of his youth was funny, but his head-shaking over it today was the kicker.
Same goes with the young lady Heather, the hit of the night who took to the microphone with the diary accounts of her eight-year-old self. Her exasperated entries were hilarious – “All mommy is doing is talking on the phone to people and giving me soft drinks” and “she’s been reading for at least an hour – I could have probably had 15 poops!” – but her baffled asides to the audience were better. “I don’t understand,” she laughed. “I measured time in units of poop?”
Children are fanciful and semi-coherent, operating in a zero gravity that adults attempt to duplicate by extreme measures. Kids ride unicorns, swing from rainbows and consume outstanding amounts of licorice. All with no stress of the future weighing them down.
My favourite reader was Steve, a bright-eyed 26-year-old biomedical engineering student. He read a childhood wish list that hoped for a moon dream. “Here I am 23 years later,” he closed, “and I’m still waiting for my moon dream.”
Aren’t we all.
For information on future readings: www.grownupsreadthingstheywroteaskids.com
