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Stage fright, with its ties to both terror and shame, inspires a powerful desire to hide. “I was always looking for exits, literally looking for ways to escape,” the singer and songwriter Carly Simon, who suffers from chronic stage fright, told me. “It felt claustrophobic being in the spotlight and being expected to finish a song. So I left myself the leeway of being able to leave the stage at the end of every song. What I tell myself now is ‘If I just get through the song, I’ll be able to leave.’”… On tour in 1995, Simon discovered that another way to handle her stage fright was to lie down onstage. “I had a couch onstage so that I could be languorous…I could ease my way up to the mike. I do it in stages. I’m lying down on the couch, then I put my knees around and I sit up, and then I stand up at the end of the first song.” These days, Simon says, eighty per cent of the time she has beaten her stage fright before she’s vertical. As part of her arsenal of attack, she keeps a hairbrush under the couch cushions so that she can brush her hair during the set, a gesture that helps to calm her palpitations. Simon has found that physical pain often trumps psychological terror. “If you have something that’s hurting you physically, the pain is the hierarchy,” she said. To that end, she has been known to take the stage in tight boots, to jab her hand with clutched safety pins, and even, just before going, to ask band members to spank her. As a celebration for President Bill Clinton’s fiftieth birthday, at Radio City Music Hall, in 1996, Simon, terrified of following Smokey Robinson, invited the entire horn section to let her have it. “They all took turns spanking me,” she says. “During the last spank the curtain went up. The audience saw the aftermath, the sting on my face. I bet Olivier didn’t do that.”
-- John Lahr, The New Yorker
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