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New York ? The diary is a spiral notebook with candy wrappers and used chopsticks taped inside. A Donna Summer picture is glued to its cover next to a scratch-and-sniff pizza sticker that – after 27 years – still smells like pepperoni. The diary’s cursive-scrawled pages hold Becky Ciletti’s most intimate pubescent thoughts and secrets.

On a recent April night, the 39-year-old magazine writer read the mostly embarrassing excerpts – food-fighting, French kissing, babe-loving – to nearly 100 strangers. She wrote the first entry in 1980, when she was 12.

Feb. 7:

We didn’t have school because of the snow today. I miss Kelly. I don’t know why, because I’ve seen him all week except for today. P.S. Please help me to be more mature and help me to fill out my bra.

The audience howled with laughter.

Call it comedy. Call it therapy. The crowd that gathers at Freddy’s Bar & Backroom in Brooklyn calls it “Cringe Night.” Once a month, people mostly in their 20s and 30s read their teenage writings.

Publicly reciting old songs, letters and journal entries “is cathartic in a way,” said Aaron McQuade, 30, a news anchor, who said he was the pudgy kid who didn’t talk to anybody in school.

When McQuade first read at Cringe two years ago, he said it was like releasing the pent-up torment of his teenage years. He realized how funny it all was.

“This is brilliant satire,” he said, “but it’s not satirical. It’s unintentional. You couldn’t write this stuff as authentically as it was written back then.”

McQuade read one of his teenage musings, saying it was from his Jack Kerouac “On the Road” phase:

Real revolves around subconscious on another level. Seriously, real is no fun.

Today’s teens regularly broadcast their thoughts to the world on Internet blogs. But the yellowed pages of journals people bring to Cringe Night were never intended for show. They are relics that capture a culture of kids from the 1980s and 1990s, before YouTube and MySpace.

“There’s no way you can get up and do this and sound cool,” said Sarah Brown, 29, creator of Cringe Night.

Six years ago, she stumbled upon her old diaries. She invited her best friend over and read passages aloud:

January 5, 1991:

Jennifer and I were in Musicland, playing “Stairway to Heaven” on the keyboard and laughing. I was laughing and my hair (thank GOD I curled it today!) fell over my shoulder and for once I KNOW I looked good. Then I looked up and there he was, five feet away, like he was waiting to say something, and I know if he had said something, it would have been, “Sarah?”

They couldn’t stop laughing. Brown sent excerpts to her e-mail group.

The list expanded as friends forwarded her diary entries. In 2005, Brown moved from Tulsa, Okla., to New York. She invited a group to the first Cringe Night at Freddy’s, her neighborhood bar. She wrote about it on her blog. Word spread. Now, the monthly event is standing-room-only, even when it snows.