The medicine, plus a steady stream of Mountain Dew, worked pretty well for a while, but the throat tickle nearly derailed a run-through of "The Boxer" (the downside of a head-mic is you can't turn away to cough), so I took some more cough syrup, and then more sips as the tickle came back, again and again. I managed to keep the cough at bay, but the medicine (I drank nearly all of the 4 ounce bottle by the end of the night), plus the alcohol therein, the sugar and caffeine in the Dew, and the adrenaline and serotonin, all snuck up on me after a while.
I'd had "loopy" gigs on cough medicine before, but this time I was refusing-to-ride-on-double-decker-busses Out There. And since it hit me while I was playing, I had to just keep going. Part of my brain was able to sort of "watch from the outside" as the automatic, muscle memory part kept playing the songs and singing the words, and a third part was asking, "Did I just play that right? Am I the one making this music? Do I still have pants on? Is my tie on fire?"
But people kept coming in and hanging around, so I guess I was playing OK. It was "standing room only" for most of the night, and people stayed so I played until almost 1am (by which time the effects had pretty much worn off so I could drive home). Fortunately, I had brought a stool to sit on (expecting fatigue, not loopiness), so for a while when the world felt like the slant-floored Knott's "Haunted Shack", I could sit down before I fell down. If this is what drunk/high feels like, I'm glad I've been avoiding it all these years.
They'd set up an exhibit of custom playhouses in the space where the stage usually goes, so they moved the stage over where the big fountain was right behind me. That was good because it put me closer to the furniture/people than any other arrangement has, but terrible because the fountain makes a huge amount of white noise so I could barely tell what I was doing. But I had a couple of big Kid Dance Parties, sold out of the new "Favorites" CD plus some of the others, and made $116, so I guess the audience could hear, and must have liked what they heard. I had surprise visits from two old Toshiba friends (Linda Ta and Bill Damron), and I'm pretty sure I had a great time, overall, but I'm a little hazy on that...
