Opening Up

Yesterday I was thinking about one of the most embarrassing moments in my life. I wondered if I would write about it in his blog, and ta-da! here it is.
What makes this hard to share is that is not one of those kinds of embarrassing moments that involves falling, or spilling a drink on an important person, or any kind of accidental turn-red-in-the-face moment. This is more humiliating and shameful because it involved a failure in front of my peers. Back in college, all vocal music majors had to give voice lessons to two students for a semester as part of our training. All of our students would then perform a solo at a recital. Well, most of my music major friends were going to accompany (on piano) their students during their solos. I felt like I should do that also. However, I was reluctant because I was not as good a pianist as most of my friends, and I was deathly afraid of messing it up. I can't even remember how my boy student's accompaniment was done- it must have not been done by me. It was the girl student's piece that I was responsible for playing as she sang. I practiced like crazy. I had the entire piece memorized in fact. But I always had trouble getting through the piece cleanly because one slight mistake would throw me. I didn't have that ability that every good accompanist needs: to just keep it going without missing a beat no matter if wrong notes are played or the roof caves in, or whatever! So the day came, and the song began. My girl was singing well. It was going well...until half-way into the song. My biggest fear was realized. In front of all my friends, and the music faculty, I lost my place in the song. The piano came to an abrupt end leaving the poor girl hanging and completely ruining her performance. I had to ask my own voice teacher (who was also the most brilliant accompanist in our department) to come up and play it, and my student started her song from the beginning. I really don't think I have ever felt such a deep sense of failure. It haunted me for weeks, and obviously it still comes to mind every now and then. It's hard to look incompetent in front of others, especially in one's chosen field, and especially for a perfectionist like me. Since then, my perfectionism has relaxed quite a bit, as has my need to please others in order to retain a good opinion of myself. If that same incident happened today, it would still be embarrassing, but I doubt it would wound me as deeply. My priorities have changed since then. I am older and wiser. In fact, it probably wouldn't happen these days since I am smart enough to ask someone else to be the accompanist and avoid the whole mess altogether!