George Antheil
Your pianos travel with you. So does your manager. You have no time for girls. Your manager sees to it that no young predatory females get very far.
You crawl over the onrushing piano passages in slow motion. Your fingers are in ten little steel strait-jackets.
You become afraid lest too much perspiration will wet your hands too much, make them slide on the black keys, which are too narrow; you are playing at about a hundred miles a minute. But somehow they don't. As long as they don't you know you're all right. You're going good, well-oiled like an engine. Not too much sweat, not too little.
The sweat - great slithering streams of it - pours down you. It runs down your legs, down the leg that is pedalling the sostenuto pedal, down the other leg. It oozes out all over your chest, flows down the binding around your middle where your full-dress pants soak it up. It flows everywhere, down your arms, down your hands.
Quite a number of observers have commented on my coolness during various riotous concerts which I performed at during those first tumultuous years of the armistice between World War I and World War II. The reason is very simple: I was armed.
It's only when you suddenly stop perspiring that your forearms go dull.
In the intermission, between group one and group two, you go to your dressing-room and change every stitch you have on you: underwear, shirt, tie, socks, pants and tails. Your other clothes are soaking wet.