5/14 This girl, for example, who comes up to J in the middle of the concert and says she can’t find her music, so her performance is skipped for now, and she should look for her music carefully and slowly again, and if she’s found it after the next piece, she’ll play it then. And she hasn’t found it after the piece, and the concert is over, and the stage gets cleared for the next performance, and then she does find her music, and the piano and the microphone gets plugged in one more time, and she sits down and hundreds are watching and she takes easily half a minute to decide whether to overcome her anxiety and open her mouth, and then plays a chord and sings two notes before searching for the next chord and the next two notes for what feels like another thirty seconds. That’s how she gets through her piece, and her voice is beautiful, and the audience claps in admiration.

That boy who sits down at the plastic piano and puts his two sheets of music on the plastic stand, and the first thing that happens is that the two sheets slide off the stand and onto the keys – so J stands next to him, extends her arm and holds up the sheets, only her hands shake so uncontrollably that he surely can’t read off of these vibrating sheets, so he holds one sheet in his left hand while playing with his right hand, four or five notes at a time with no discernible melody. As he gets to the page that J is still holding, she has steadied her hand by what seems sheer willpower so much that he can continue to read from it, and he continues to read and play a few notes at a time, it’s all about getting through and not giving up, and he does it.

Also, the sound of the piano is often garbled, clipped, maybe a broken cable or a wrong setting on the amp and each performance is carried, in no small part, by the fear whether the piano will make it through.