Last night’s Salon of Shame was the best so far. When I first read about Sarah B’s Cringe events in New York, I knew I wanted something similar in Seattle. Since no such thing existed, I shrugged and supposed I’d try starting one. I wanted a place to read my old diaries! It would be fun for me and possibly entertaining for other people.

What I didn’t know is that the Salon of Shame would attract My People. Funny, whip-smart folks who love to wallow in creative self-deprecation. People who get a thrill and a cathartic release from saying, “Hear this thing I did? IT WAS AWFUL.” Us creative types often risk taking ourselves and our work much too seriously. The satisfaction from standing up shedding all the pretense is totally drunk-making. (Or is it all those cocktails from the hot redhead cocktail waitress?)

The best part, of course, is that most Salon readers have grown from perspective-lacking precocious-but-ridiculous teenagers into some of my favorite people in the world. Sometimes at the Salons I’m torn between laughing until my stomach hurts and wanting to run around hugging everyone until they pop.

*sniff* I love you fuckers.

Anyway, last night’s Salon was a raging success. We got blogged yesterday by Cienna Madrid, a writer who works with The Stranger (non-Seattleites, The Stranger is the Dan Savage’s alt-weekly), and her post got people totally riled up (how could it not?). Cienna’s reading of her adolescent romance novel, “The Flames of Passion,” would ultimately be the tent-pole of last night’s Salon … although Ben’s epic Poe-esque poem about the ants was amazing too, as was Dawn’s recounting of losing her virginity as a born-again Christian.

You can listen to a portion of Cienna’s reading here … it’s a video file, but there’s nothing to see and honestly even the audio isn’t pretty bad because although I was trying to stay quiet, I couldn’t stop saying UH MAH GAH! UH MAH GAH! as Cienna read about Captain Jack’s Dalmatian telepathizing “do it!” to Jack’s long-haired lover. It might be a “you had to be there” thing — but as you can hear from the audience response, those of us who were there pretty much fell out of our chairs. You can read the full transcription over here. Oh and there are more pictures over here.

Now would be a good time for me to pay homage not only to Cringe but also Get Mortified, the two diary-reading events that were around looong before The Salon of Shame. Get Mortified tours across the country, so if you’re not in Seattle, you might want to check and see if they’re coming to your town. If they’re not, maybe you should consider starting your own reading series. If your experience is like mine, not only will you be supremely entertained, but you’ll end up fostering an environment that brings out the very best, most funny, most fantastic grown-up geeks, weirdos, goths, and former romance novel writers.