This is the Moth Radio Hour.
I'm Meg Boles, and in this hour, we'll hear stories of imperfect auditions and musical successes, stage debuts and performances royally botched, and one rather distressing situation with a trumpet.
Laura Hitchcock told the story of that instrumental crisis at a Moth Grand Slam we produced at the Bridge Theatre in London.
Here's Laura live at the Moth.
When I was eight years old I decided that I wanted to learn to play the trumpet and I went to my first ever class with my new teacher and I loved it instantly and he said to me like look if you really stick at this then maybe one day your parents will buy you a trumpet of your very own but until then you can borrow mine and I've had this trumpet for 18 years so I'm trusting you to look after it.
And when he said that to me, I just felt so important because like being trusted to do anything when you're eight years old just still feels like a really big deal.
And I took it home and I immediately started practicing and I sounded horrible, but I didn't care.
And once I finished, I thought about what he said to me.
And I got out one of those yellow polishing cloths and I started like buffing it really hard with all the strength that my like twiggy little eight year old arms would allow.
And once I'd finished it looked amazing and I went to put it away only to realize that the position I'd been polishing it in had gotten the mouthpiece completely stuck in the instrument and that's not meant to happen.
I panicked and I was desperate to be able to fix it by myself and I was pulling but I just couldn't do it.
So I went to my parents and asked for their help and they couldn't do it either and my mum panicked because I told her all about how important this instrument was.
And she just looked at my dad and I and she was like, you two need to fix this because Laura, you can't go into school tomorrow unless that trumpet looks the way that it should be.
So my dad and I got to work.
We went into the garage and we were kind of looking around for a tool that maybe we could use.
And eventually my dad says, if we pull out this pipe here, then we could stick something in the other end and we could push the mouthpiece out from the inside.
That sounded like a really good idea.
So we had a look around the garage and we eventually found this bamboo garden cane.
It was about four feet tall and it was the perfect thickness.
We put it in the end of the trumpet and my dad's ready on one side because he's got a hammer and he's gonna like tap on the end to knock it out.