Like a bad dream

So I'm doing this gig last night, across from a veteran of almost 20 years, someone who I respect and who can get me lots of work in the future. They've paid a lot of money to fly me here to perform for 2 days and have put me up in a downtown hotel. It's near the beginning of the night when the entire room is still paying 100% attention to the show. My partner throws over a request for Billy Joel's "Only the Good Die Young," a song I know well and have performed hundreds of times. I play the right hand introduction perfectly, but instead of landing on an F as the ultimate chord of the intro, I land on a C, which puts me in an entirely different key. So I start singing the verse, but my chords are not matching up to what I'm singing. Not even close. So after about 3 or 4 lines, I had to stop cold, and sit and figure out what's wrong. After about 15 or 20 inexorably long seconds, I still haven't figured it out so I decide to start the intro all over again, in the hopes that I will figure it out as I go along. There is sweat pouring off of my forehead and into my eyes. My face is buried in the piano yet I can feel my partner across the stage from me, wanting to be helpful but not knowing how, and of course the audience just watching to see how this will play out. Somehow my hands land on the correct chords this time and I'm off and running, and then do the song absolutely perfectly.

The rest of the night went great and I'm sure that little moment was forgotten about by everyone except me. You can never ever get complacent with this gig. I have about 200 songs that I consider memorized, and even though I have been performing every weekend, I still must (and do) practice all of these songs on my off days to keep them fresh in my memory, and yet still, some aren't there when I need them.