I would say confidence is the key. This arises from knowing what your are playing, and that stems from spending time with a tune, ie. practice. Get to the point where if you do stumble on a tune you can move on and play it through. I often think of figure skaters in this regard…how the hell can they pick themselves up after a tumble and complete the routine? You just let that part go and work the rest the best you can.
Arbo
Aha. Another fine point. Playing in a beery pub is one thing, but a captive audience is quite another.
I’d played in pubs for years, but then I was for the first time onstage in an auditorium. All very civilised and hygienic for a change, and I was looking forward to it. Why then, after all that blasé time playing in public before, was I now as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs? I couldn’t figure it out. Then it hit me that the difference was that we were no longer so incidental as scrutinised. Every eye and ear was on us. Big difference, subjectively.
Fortunately in such a situation one is able to take hold of the captive audience and speak intimately to them, and so in relevatory fashion I mentioned my nervousness, my wondering why on Earth it should be so, and my epiphany about the captive audience being a new thing for me. They laughed (sympathetically, I still like to believe), and my inner tension was defused. The rest of the gig was much more relaxed and easeful for me by far.
Ah! You were playing to people who wanted to be there.
It’s different lecturing undergrads. They don’t want to
be there.
Anyhow Kirk has been playing one year so far.
It takes more than that for me to get a tune under my belt
well enough to play it under pressure. Pressure
discovers any hole in practice–it’s that simple.
I honestly don’t think there’s a mystery. The body
has got to be able to play the tune when you
are scared. It can do it if you practice enough.
If you can’t do it, the remedy is more practice.
This comes from training as an actor. The received
wisdom is that insufficient rehearsal is the
chief cause of stage fright.
Is it different? What about those who listen not so much for pleasure than to determine just who the heck you think you are, anyway? And I don’t want to screw up in front of my well-wishers, either. That is letting them down, and possibly the worst, to me.
By the way, I have conducted classes to decidedly unsympathetic audiences, myself. Given that my qualifications and methods were fine, as far as I was concerned they could take it or leave it. It was their funeral if they wanted it that way, and not a popularity contest. So, yeah. In this case I was less concerned with their opinions of me, so maybe it is different. But somehow I suspect it’s different - for me - but not in the way you’re suggesting it was for you.
I always wonder about those stars who admit to being so nervous that they vomit backstage before the gig. Surely they are not unprepared.
I’ve lectured to people before and wasn’t that nervous because I knew the material. I guess it’s it’s a catch 22. I’m going to learn more by playing with others but I’m going to be nervous about playing with others until I learn more. 
I was struck, Nano, by something you wrote about the first situation:
‘Fortunately in such a situation one is able to take hold of the captive audience and speak intimately to them, and so in relevatory fashion I mentioned my nervousness, my wondering why on Earth it should be so, and my epiphany about the captive audience being a new thing for me. They laughed (sympathetically, I still like to believe), and my inner tension was defused. The rest of the gig was much more relaxed and easeful for me by far.’
This intimate communion is less easy if much of the captive audience is giggling and passing notes to one another.
Also by ‘stage fright’ I don’t mean being scared before the gig, but the on-stage fear where you forget your lines
or the tune or whatever… Solid preparation is the best antidote to the latter. Once you get going you’re OK.
Well, the chief way to learn more is to sit at home and play the tune slowly with a metronome, breaking it down
line by line, repeating this and that passage, and so on. Divide it into bits and practice the bits, however small.
Sooner or later it won’t much matter whether there’s an audience. You will play the tune.
The point is that the level of practice that enables you to play a tune OK alone is simply
not the level of practice that enables you to play a tune before an audience or in a session
or whatever…IF you find the tune or the breathing or…departs in that venue.
OK, I’ll stop thumping on this. I believe this is the solution.
I’ve mentioned the giggling to him for years…years, I tell ya!
Nothing like a career explaining obscure ideas to uninterested people, I’ll tell ya.
I’m reminded of the oft-quoted anecdote about Fred Astaire.. that he practiced until he could get it right.. and then kept practicing until he couldn’t get it wrong.
I’ve also heard that Bing Crosby claimed he wouldn’t perform a song in public until he had practiced it so many times that it made him sick to his stomach.
Yes, I read once (FWIW) that Astaire and Rogers, in those gorgeous dances they did,
often had blood in their shoes.
So to quote Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite I need to “know the product backwards and front”. Here’s hoping I Iive long enough. 
Thanks
Kirk
I had a professor in college who taught the History of Far Eastern Art. We has quite brilliant but his delivery was boring to say the least. He looked like he had just removed a British Pith Helmet, had the handlebar mustache and spoke in a low monotone voice. On top of that the class was at 8:30 AM. Needless to say, there was a lot of chit-chat and/or sleeping going on in the background. Several weeks into the semester he stopped mid-lecture and said, “People, really now, this business of talking in class… sh!t, God d@mn it, don’t the f$%k do it any more.” Several of us damn near fainted.
I have a background in improvisational theater, in fact I was trained by the Second City Company in Chicago. And there is a tradition in Chicago of using philosophy for improvisational comedy. So I did. I told jokes and stories to the stories and did dances and funny voices. Sometimes I sang to them.
One scenario you teach is the skeptical question, how do you know you’re not a brain in a vat being fed these experiences by scientists?
So I did it this way:
Peter Lorrie voice:
Master, master I brought you a brain!
Bela Lugosi:
Good Igor, put it in the vat!
Peter Lorrie:
Master master the electrodes are all attached!
Bela Lugosi:
Good Igor, give it the New Orleans tape (I was teaching in New Orleans), the one about the philosophy lecture about brains in a vat… mad laughter…
And so on.
Some of the students liked it a lot. Most of the teachers were asleep at the switch and here someone was actually trying to teach them something, really giving it his best shot.
The rest thought they were being wronged. Their other teachers didn’t treat them this way! They could snooze through the classes and do all right.
I hear you. One of the major the keys to learning retention is getting the student engaged/motivated. If the student isn’t interested in the material then you have to find ways to make it entertaining enough to sit through. I build e-learning courses for a living. Some teach product knowledge and others revolve around change in the organization. Most people hate change by nature so trying to get them to sit through a course concerning something they’re fighting to begin with is a real challenge.
- Kirk
Okay, gotcha.
I had a history teacher (a teacher’s teacher, in my estimation) in a community college who really had a talent for breaking through that and grabbing the class’s attention. But his talent was that of personality, of illustration by one-man theater, comedy, playing on the student’s discomfort, the left hook, and masterful timing: one outstanding if extreme example I only caught in part (and I think I’ve told this one before) was the time I walked into his class on WWII history, and there he was standing on a chair in a hachimaki headcloth and goggles, illustrating in burlesque the kamikaze pilot, firing an imaginary machine gun, and screaming in Japanese*. Of course every student in the class was riveted. A little pale, too.
(*He was Hawai’ian Nisei and witnessed the bombing of Pearl Harbor as a child, so naturally he could get away with that sort of thing. But he was at the same time all business, too.)
One of the darker moments (sorry, I’ll stop after this):
I was teaching Freud’s Totem and Taboo.
I said:
OK, so here’s Freud’s picture. Humanity once lived in primal hordes, small groups ruled by a dominant male.
The young men are driven out by this male, who is their father, when they get mature enough to
be a potential rival.
OK, so one day these young men, driven out of the primal group, band together. They come back
into the group. They kill their father and eat him. That’s right! They eat him. Then they rape all the women,
their mother’s and sisters! OK, that’s Freud’s picture. Are you with me?’
Students:
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…
Me:
‘Hey common. I just gave you murder, cannibalism, paracide, rape and incest in under 30 seconds!
What do you want, anyway?’
Students: ‘I donno. It’s boring…’
Me:
'Well what if I added that they raped their father before they killed and ate him? Would that
help? Spice the thing up a little? ’
Students:
‘Maybe we can read something more interesting, huh?’
I presume you didn’t pantomime it. Probably just as well. 
Jim, putting a slightly Irish twist on your difficulties teaching Freud:
One of my favorite quotes from James Joyce.
“As I was Jung, and easily freudened. . . .”
Bob 