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Mortified + IDEO Stories: Live Storytelling Events
Project Type
Live storytelling events
Collaborators
Mortified: Dave Nadelberg (Mortified Founder) and Neil Katcher (Mortified Artistic Director)
Mortified Chicago: Shay DeGrandis, Katie Johnston-Smith, and Victoria Rodriguez (Producers); Green Mill, Lincoln Hall, Schubas, Promontory Point, and other legendary Chicago venues; hundreds of our brave performers
IDEO Stories: Neil Stevenson, Ben Healy, Meredith Adams-Smart (Producers) and dozens of intrepid performers
Date
Mortified Chicago: 2006 - 2018
IDEO Stories: 2012 - 2018
ABOUT MORTIFIED
In 2006, when I was the Chicago arts and culture editor for a national newsletter called Flavorpill, a guy named Dave Nadelberg wrote to me. "I produce this live comedy show in LA called Mortified. Real people read their childhood diaries in front of a live audience. The experience is, well, mortifying — in a good way! I want to bring the show to Chicago. Do you know any local producers?"
"Yes," I replied, "I can do it!" (Side note: I had never produced a live show before.)
Fast forward 12 years, by which time co-producers and I were regularly selling out 500-seat theaters across Chicago. Over those dozen years, I had produced hundreds of cringe-worthy stories, turning average people into heroes of the stage for a night.
In addition to the live shows, stories I produced also appear on the Mortified Podcast, in two anthologies (Mortified: Real Words, Real People, Real Pathetic and Mortified: Love is a Battlefield), and in the Mortified Nation documentary (in which I also appear for a hot minute).
The experience taught me all the ins-and-outs of live comedy theatre production: negotiating with venues, coaching storytellers, A/V setup, marketing and ticketing — you name it! By the time I passed the mic to a new team of producers in December 2018, Dave Nadelberg's "grassroots comedy collective" had expanded from one show in LA, to nine "chapters" in the US (including Chicago), and eight across the world including London, Paris, Helsinki, and Amsterdam.
While the show might have been mortifying to watch, my experience producing it was an amazing privilege.
________
ABOUT IDEO STORIES
In 2012, I co-founded IDEO Stories with Neil Stevenson. It was a live storytelling event where we coached fellow IDEOers on how to tell compelling personal stories. The storytelling nights, which started in our Chicago and San Francisco studios, were an immediate hit and soon spread to all nine studios, including Tokyo and Shanghai. We opened up the events to outside guests and recorded the stories to amp up the pressure a bit. We held two storytelling nights a year for six years — that's over 60 stories from IDEO Chicago alone!
The original goal of IDEO Stories was two-fold. It was meant to be a fun, social evening where people could learn more about what made their colleagues tick over some food and drink. And it was a Trojan Horse learning and development effort. If we could help IDEOers tell better personal stories — and learn the value of rehearsing and getting feedback — we thought, IDEOers would tell better stories about our projects and work to our clients.
And they did! Win, win!
What we didn't expect is that IDEO Stories nights were also talent retention moments (people routinely cited the evenings as pivotal belonging moments in their careers that encouraged them to stay at IDEO) as well as talent attraction moments (several contractors and full-time talent were introduced to IDEO at one of our Stories nights). Win, win, win, win!
I handed over the producing reigns to IDEO Stories to a new set of story coaches, Ben Healy and Meredith Adams-Smart in 2018.
