Good grief, Jim! Get ahold of some bad stuff? All seriousness aside, performers in the venues I work (Renaissance Festivals) rarely use music, let alone music stands. I personally feel it looks unprofessional for anything but a madrigal group.

Linda, I did use a cheat sheet with our play lists and starting notes until I finally memorized them. My singers liked to play with mnemonics, usually dredged from the gutter, but those didn't work for me (we had fun with it, though). We were up too close to our audiences to get away with notes on the hand.

Welcome to the board, Karen. Your suggestion of starting from the end and working back has merit, someting I was already considering doing on a verse by verse basis rather than line by line or phrase by phrase. I mentioned in my last post that when I mess up the lyrics, I always substitute a line from a later verse rather than repeat one froma previous verse so mayhap working bass ackwards might be the trick. I'm going to give it a shot on the next song I try to learn (I'm still working on one right now; a piece of filk called The Chastity Belt).

Jeannie