I wrote this for an audition for a show called "Mortified," a "play" with real(!) people reading embarrassing excerpts from diaries they kept when they were growing up, or bad poems they wrote, stuff like that.

After I read it, the real audition began. But more about that later.

The year was 1977, the place Dover, Delaware, a mid-Atlantic city that feels more like a small Southern town and has few but notable claims to fame. Among them: Dover Air Force Base boasts the largest morgue on the east coast, which received some victims from Jonestown, some of whom, according to my friend Judy whose dad was a retired Air Force Colonel, were stored in the frozen food section of the PX. The city hosts an annual Chicken Festival, the chief draw being a frying pan roughly 10 feet in diameter. Otherwise Dover is composed almost entirely of Baptist and Jehovah's Witnesses' churches, malls, farms, gun and bait and tackle shops, fast food restaurants, a chain of drugstores called Happy Harry's, a racetrack, and Amish people. The last time I visited I drove past a church with a billboard in front that read "Pray to the Lord. Jesus Reads Knee-Mail."

In 1977 I was 10 years old and had been living in Delaware since the age of four, when my family relocated there from Rochester, New York. My father, one of many new philosophy PhDs produced during the 70s, was grateful to land a job, any job, let alone the position of chairman of an entire one-person department at a small college in Dover. So we moved from New York to Delaware, my New Jersey-raised and New York City-educated parents, my brother, and I. My parents subscribed to the New Yorker, National Geographic, and Ms. Our house was filled with furniture my dad had built and my mother had painted, with candles, cats, plants, and books. We had a book about erotic massage illustrated with photographs of two scary looking skinny hippies with frizzy hair and bad skin, in various states of erotic grimace, the works of Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, a book about Open Marriage that my mother reassured me she had not ordered but had been sent for free from a book club she'd joined, a full set of World Book encyclopedias, Encyclopedia Britannica, the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Oxford English Dictionary. My dad was a vegetarian, he made candles and yogurt and grew sprouts in mason jars on top of the refrigerator. My mother made a lot of our clothes. We had a big vegetable garden, a flower garden, and an herb garden. We had a compost heap. My mom had long hair and always wore jeans, my dad had a beard. My dad gardened and cut the lawn with a hand-pushed mower instead of a motorized one. … Rumors sprang up…. There is this entry, from my diary, partly transcribed, partly reconstructed from memory:

Today Amy told me people are saying we're Communists. I don't know what that means, so I asked her, because her Dad was in the Army. She told me what she thinks it means and that it has something to do with hating America and I still didn't understand. Plus I said m parents don't hate America, they just hate Delaware. There's no way I'm going to tell my y parents about this. I might tell Justin, but he won't know what a Communist is either. Maybe I'll look it up in the dictionary. Or ask my history teacher Mr. Pritchett. He seems to know a lot of things, even though he's bald. I asked Amy why they were calling us Communists and who said it and she said people talk about my dad having a beard and mowing the lawn with a hand-mower instead of a power-mower and my mom being a writer and wearing jeans all the time and not going to Tupperware parties and stuff like that. She said Missy Mervine said it and Carolyn Barnes and Jason Alexander. But she thinks Jason only said it because he likes Missy Mervine. Also I had a bad day today because mom keeps packing me cream cheese and olive sandwiches for lunch, on brown bread. Nobody else eats cream cheese and olives. Nobody eats brown bread except me and my brother. I hate it. It's all dry and thick and crumbly and organic. And it's embarrassing. I wish I had white Wonder Bread and Cheese Whiz and Bologna sandwiches like Amy and Beth have. And Ding Dongs and Fritos instead of an apple and carrot sticks or sunflower seeds. Also why do I have to drink V-8 juice? I hate tomato juice. Also I hate grapefruit juice. Everyone else drinks Sunshine Orange Hi-C or Kool Aid. It's so stupid. Not only that but when I open my lunchbox I have to be careful to slide the sandwich out without letting the napkin fall out onto the table so people can see it. My mom gives us these big yellow paper napkins with smiley faces drawn on them in blue ink and messages like "I love you hunny (spelled "h-u-n-n-y")"!!! and "Have a Good Day!!!" with three exclamation points and lots of X's and O's. I think tomorrow, I'll pretend I'm sick.