When you are learning to play an instrument, you spend an awful lot of time playing it by yourself. And that’s a good thing–in another post I’ll talk about practice. But at some point you need to venture outside of your living room…or at least invite some friends into your living room…and play in front of someone other than your husband or your accordion-loving dog. Easier said than done.

Stage fright is a weird beast. I never thought I had it. I acted in plays all through high school. Plus I often speak in public for my job and can practically do it standing on my head. Sure, I get the occasional dry mouth or the tiniest flutter of stomach butterflies, but basically I don’t get rattled.

I get rattled when I play in front of people. Really rattled. But here’s the catch. The only way to get used to playing in front of people and to get over that feeling that you want to be killed immediately, is to actually play in front of people…over and over again. Son of a bitch!

So I started out slow. I learned Happy Birthday for my friend Andy’s 40th birthday and performed it at his party (this required a public do over). I even played in front of my colleagues at the staff meeting, which definitely required shutting the conference room door and later an apology email to HR. But no matter how much I’d nailed the song in private, I’d always choke in public, even if my public was two friends over at the house for a beer–it’s always best to wait until they’ve had more than one.

Then I came up with the idea of learning AND performing the song You Are My Sunshine at my niece’s wedding reception. Seemed like a splendid idea at the time, but the closer I got to the wedding, the more I freaked out and imagined a meltdown in front of 100 wedding guests staring awkwardly at their feet. I shared my anxieties with the splendid musicians of Happy Lucky Combo and the boys were gracious enough to let me do a dry run with them at one of their Saturday morning farmer’s market gigs. I was way excited. My first public gig! With real musicians! Plus I had mastered the song in my living room at that point, so I imagined people smiling and tapping their toes and thinking to themselves, who is this chick on the accordion? Look at her fingers fly!

Um…it didn’t quite fly that way. When I arrived that morning it was 110 degrees under the Richmond city sun and I had flop sweats worse than Nixon. My hands were shaking so hard I could barely find the keyboard and I seriously questioned whether my bagel would stay down. And that was all before the playing started. Omigod…I sucked. In the picture above I’m looking at the music in sheer panic because it suddenly made as much sense as a sacred hymn in Sanskrit. Honest to God, it was as if I had never seen a note before. But God bless my friends. They came. They watched. And they clapped. And I survived. I went on to play AND survive at my niece’s wedding and things went considerably better. You can watch this performance if you want. Thankfully there is no video footage of my farmer’s market debut.

So the moral of this story is: grab your instrument and get out there and play it in front of someone. Anyone. And then do it again. It hurts–I’m not gonna sugar coat it. But it does get better. I promise.