My Disaster Story

I don't know much about sound systems. But I do know this.

Your microphone pack is not supposed to fly off of your body in the middle of a performance, hit the floor and split into two parts. I am sure of this.

OK, OK. I MAY have clipped my battery pack to a quarter-inch string of ribbon on the front of my dress. I MAY have had it like that when I got to the part in "Going to Kentucky" where you "turn around and turn around until you make a stop." Only in my case, it was "...turn around and turn around and---- uh oh."

The "uh oh" was the point where the pack spun off of my body, unclipping the lav mic from my collar. The pack hit the floor and split in two.

Now, it could have been a lot worse. It could have hit a kid. Or a parent. Or a grandparent. It didn't. It just hit the floor. But I didn't think of that. I simply stared at the casualty that had resulted from my enthusiastic spinning.

I picked up the microphone and a dad in the front row promptly leapt to his feet as well. I turned on the mic and it still worked. Fortunately, the pack had broken where it was designed to; the cover had just come off. But there was a latch on the pack and I couldn't put it back on my own. I had decided to clip the pack to my guitar strap and keep going and deal with the problem later. But this dad was determined to help me, bless him. He fiddled with the pack and I watched over his shoulder as my audience started to leave.

"It's OK, it's OK," I said, "I'll fix it later."

He insisted he could do it. So I waited as he slid the pieces back together and returned the pack to me. I continued with the set, praying that the families who had left would be replaced with more. I did a few songs with hand claps and when I picked up the guitar again, I clipped the pack to the strap.

It lasted for three or four more songs. Then, as I was asking the children if their ears hung low, my microphone decided to do just that. It dropped and shattered again, in the same place.

Engineer Dad to the rescue - he decided to concoct a system where the pack would be firmly attached to the guitar strap. I saw people begin to leave again, so I improvised a few verses of "Ears" as he worked. Seriously - made 'em up on the spot. "Can you clap your hands, can you clap them on your head..." Not too bad, considering the circumstances. (Engineer Dad was still standing to my left, holding the mic to my face as he twisted the cord around.)

When the mic was finished, I decided to go on to another hand-clapping song. Which is when I discovered that I couldn't put the guitar down. The cord was wrapped around the strap. That's where it starts to get blurry. Flustered and embarrassed, I tried to control my wavering voice, at the same time as I attempted to figure out whether or not the microphone was actually working. And at the same time as I prayed that the parents in the back weren't thinking, "What's wrong with this person??"

This happened less than a week ago - last Saturday, to be specific. It's almost funny by now. And it already makes a good performance-disaster story. (Right?) At the time, I wanted to find a nice little hole to hide in for a few hundred years... but I'm getting over it.

And heck - it's kind of like a badge of honor or something. A kind of rite of passage, if you will.

Not at all proof that I forgot all about that silly thing called gravity.