Hell on stage

On Friday I was at the gym, working the lower leg machine when my phone rang. It was a call from the club in New England that I worked at 3 weeks ago. The Entertainment Director, Bill said he had a mix up in the schedule and asked if I come up and work the following night. I agreed, and 24 hours later I was onstage with 2 players I knew, and one I that I never met until he came up on stage opposite me.

It was a decent crowd, and we were all putting on a good show. After an hour I was relieved and stepped down for an hour. After a Chicken Caesar and a Corona, I was back up onstage when I noticed that my piano was playing wrong notes. The pianos, as with most dueling piano shows are actually digital stage pianos that sit inside a wooden shell built to appear like a grand piano. Not only was it playing some wrong notes, but the notes that were wrong, were also inordinately loud, which made the instrument impossible to play. The only person that could correct this was Bill who was, at that moment, on the piano opposite me, playing a rousing rendition of Sweet Caroline. I wrote a note to him on the back of a request slip telling him the problem. Then when he finished, I began doing an accapella version of Queen's We Will Rock You, getting the audience to stomp their feet and clap their hands while Bill went over to my piano and tried to fix it. He realized quickly that it needed to be replaced, so he brought another digital piano out of the office and we installed it into the wooden shell while one of our other partners came up and played on Bill's piano.

Once that was done, I again sat back at my piano and began playing Dancing Queen when in the middle of my song, this second digital piano completely cut out. I powered it off and back on again (think ctl+alt+del), while still singing, and the piano worked...for 30 seconds, before it cut off completely again. Bill came back over as my partner took over the show, and we installed yet a third keyboard into my piano shell. This one worked, but this was a much cheaper instrument and the keys were not weighted and the piano sound was not very realistic. As I began playing on this junky keyboard, the wooden finger guard (the clapboard) for the piano shell fell down from vertical to about a 45 degree angle, hanging over my fingers. I pushed it up and it immediately fell back down. I guess as we had a different sized keyboard inside the shell, the mechanics were different and the clapboard was no longer supported vertically. I was afraid it would fall on my hands, breaking my fingers, but I found out later that it was designed only to close halfway. Finally my hour set was over, and I practically ran to the bar.