Lay Lady Lay

Any true professional musician will tell you, “the show must go on!” Never have those words been harder for me to live by than at my duo gig with Nathan this past Friday.

All was going rather well. Tips were coming in. The bar was 3 deep with people waiting for a table, and almost all of them were clapping along and making requests. It was one of those rare nights when even people who had finished eating moved back to the bar, and ordered another drink so they could stay and listen to us.

So, as I said, all was going rather well…that is until the 60-ish-year-old lady made her way out onto the “dance floor,” on which the only current occupant was a 3-year-old boy.

I must point out that at first glance, this lady did not appear drunk. However, after about 10 seconds of smiley, happy, hoppy dancing around in circles with the boy, the lady stumbles, teeth-first, at full speed, into the solid-wood hostess stand. Fortunately for her, the 3-year-old boy was there to break her fall. Not so fortunate for the boy, nor his parents sitting at the bar witnessing the whole thing.

Meanwhile, Nathan and I are in the middle of the Rolling Stone’s “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” looking at each other like, “is there ever an appropriate time to stop the show as a professional musician, and if so, is this that sort of time?” And as I didn’t stop, nor he, the show went on. But then, the dreaded giggles ensued.

Mind you, this was one of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen in person in my entire life. The sound of teeth on wood at 40 mph, combined with seeing where there once was a tiny boy, there was now nothing but drunken, 60-year-old woman horizontal across the floor was too much for my professionalism to handle. So the longer I played, the more difficult the giggles became to control. All I could think was, “don’t look at Nathan! Don’t look at Nathan!” At which, of course, we both instantly failed.

Thankfully, not too far into the unnecessarily long third verse to that song, both woman and boy had been helped up, somehow unscathed, and by the time we started the next song, the kid was back on the dance floor, and the woman had been escorted to a cab.

Of course I wouldn’t be lucky enough to have had someone filming at the exact moment this EPIC FAIL occurred, however, the following video is as close a representation as the “intarwebz” could provide me. Just flip this entire video upside down, and imagine that the giant blue ball is a 60-year-old drunk woman, and  it’s like you were there. Needless to say, I’ll never hear “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” without thinking about old woman faceplant boy smash, 2013.