Captain's Log, Day 65: WHAT THE HECK WAS I THINKING?????

          Stages. Are. Awful.
          You'd think someone who regularly comes within millimeters of death on a daily basis would be able to cope with appearing on stage for about two minutes, but apparently not. I get stage fright like nothing else. I'm not entirely sure what was wrong with me to make me decide to do this performance, but I'm guessing it was the chicken.
          About an hour before this performance...maybe I should back up. It was a competition/performance; called "the Lip-Sync Competition;" the basic idea was that a person or a group would choose a song, go out on stage in front of approximately a gazillion people, and pretend to sing the said song, typically with actions to accompany it. A panel of judges, dressed up as famous people (in this case, Bruce Wayne, Abe Lincoln and Justin Bieber), would then select one person/group as the winner.
          Side note: "Abe Lincoln" was awesome. My favorite quotes from the night (directed at various performances) were:
                    "As President of the United States, I cannot condone this."
                    "Will someone PLEASE shoot me now?"
                    "I hate to have to bring this up, but...four score and seven years ago, that was STILL awful." (Directed at a Justin Bieber song, no less!)
          Anyway, an hour before the performance, I was in the cafeteria eating something that resembled chicken when my friend Sean approached me with a proposition. One of the guys in his group would be unable to make the performance, so would I mind filling in?
          I said yes. Why I said that, I have no idea.
          Thirty minutes later, I learned to my horror that we would be performing on THE OFFICIAL FREAKING STAGE. What would we be singing? "I've Got a Dream" from Tangled. At this point, my dream was that something--ANYTHING--would happen to prevent me from being chased out onto that stage by two of my friends wielding cardboard-and-duct-tape axes (yepp, that's how we decided to enter the stage). I fantasized about fires and lightning strikes until I calmed myself down by deciding that few people would probably be in the audience, due to a swing-dance event that was also going on that night.
          Fifteen minutes until curtain, and curiosity overwhelmed my common sense. I joined my friends in sneaking out to the edge of the curtain to take a peek outside. Imagine my terror when I beheld a full auditorium...unbeknownst to me, the swing dance had been pushed back so that everyone could watch the show! I made a quick retreat to the practice room and prayed fervently to whichever saint was the patron of theater that I would not faint or fall off the stage. Or both.
          Five minutes to the curtain, now, and I had made several trips to the restroom in an attempt to calm myself down. Didn't work. I confronted Sean to ascertain if he had put anything in my chicken, but he remained annoyingly obscure on the subject. To take my mind off it, he decided that we would make a slight change in our plan. Instead of just being part of the background group, I would now "sing" Flynn Ryder's part as well. I went back to the restroom.
          Curtain time! I had a dream, all right...to make it off the stage with dry britches. I don't think I embarrassed myself too badly; at the very least, I did not faint or fall off the stage, although my retreat after our bows may have been a little quicker than was strictly necessary.
          Now I must pray to the patron saint of the internet; that none of the pictures taken end up on Facebook...