Being “uncool” is kinda cool these days. Page through The Hipster Handbook, and you’ll embrace the fact that you suck at sports, read books, and wear glasses. We at Uncool Kids try to take back the word “uncool,” embracing our dorky tendencies to watch Broadway shows, promote cartoons as art, watch vampire movies, walk around with art on our head, actually enjoy taking quizzes, stalk cheesy sitcom stars, watch polo, and obsess over comic books. As a runty underdog myself, I can tell you it’s taken quite a few years to get past all the scar tissue of youth and embrace my nerdiness. I have stacks of diaries to prove it—and so do the self-derogating people at Cringe.

The first Wednesday of every month, young adults flock to Freddy’s Bar and Backroom over in New York’s safe haven for the coolest of the uncool—Brooklyn. At around 9 PM, Cringe begins as “brave souls come forward and read aloud from their teenage diaries, journals, notes, letters, poems, abandoned rock operas, and other general representations of the crushing misery of their humiliating adolescence.”

“It’s better and cheaper than therapy,” boasts the Cringe website. After all, it makes you feel better to know that you weren’t the only kid to have a “Kick Me” sign taped to your back. And that maybe—just maybe—some people even had it worse than you did. Avenue Q—I told you we like Broadway plays—has a whole song about that.

Most of the crowd at Cringe look like they aren’t all that far removed from their years of dorkdom. And, actually, quite a few of them look like the Plastics that accentuated the fact that you weren’t cool. Their idea of a cringe-worthy diary entry would be gushing over some boy who their friends later deemed as lame. The backroom of Freddy’s was crammed full of apple-faced blondes and stylishly nerdy brunettes that looked like they came to Cringe as a study break from Lit 101.

The room was so full that I was relegated to cower in the stairwell with the other unfortunate losers. It was so unbearably hot down there, I started sweating like it was down to me and one other kid waiting to see who would get picked last in gym class. The pretty girl in front of me had some sort of oriental fan. I figured she probably had been here before. The room was probably full of regulars, and here I was—by myself, in the corner.

It makes sense that there’d be a lot of regulars. Cringe has been held at Freddy’s since April 2005. Everyone from “ABC Nightline” (see the video here) and “Newsweek” to “Time Out New York” and “Spin” has covered Cringe. (“This American Life” covered a similar show called Mortified.) Next month, Cringe will be held in London.

May 9th’s reading featuring a hysterical story—slurpily told in character as her younger self with braces—about a girl who in trying to achieve her “goal to masturbate and squirt tonight” almost catches her house on fire. She waxes philosophical when her parents get her priest involved

Like it’s a sin to touch yourself. What shit is that? Catholics are crazy. Mary had a baby, and you’re going to tell me she never masturbated.

Another reader was John Sellers, author of the recently released book Perfect from Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life. …Apparently, Sellers didn’t always have good taste in music. In his 1983 journal, “document of my geekness,” he writes a whole section on how is favorite rock group is Journey. He also write about how he loves the Wizardry videogame, how inflation has affected prices at Showbizz Pizza, and how he wishes Abraham Lincoln had never lived because then he wouldn’t have to memorize the Gettysburg Address.

So yeah, it’s worth going to Cringe even if you have to stand in the back by the aquarium of frogs.