I'm pleased with the way that worked out.

You know how sometimes people will say "good job" and stuff like that after you've done something, and you can tell that they're being polite but not sincere? I didn't get any of that. People seemed to be genuinely happy with the job I did (including the rabbi). A couple of people thought I was a professional cantor. Someone who knows what he's talking about complimented me on my Hebrew pronunciation. All in all, it was a very satisfying experience for my ego. (Before the service the rabbi jokingly asked if I'd brought my "cheering section", and I told him that would be inexpedient for my first time; after all, who knows whether I'd successfully pull this off? So I guess I should bring one for the *second* time, just for amusement value.)

I believe that I made no Hebrew mistakes and only minor music mistakes (things that the rabbi would have noticed but no one else would have). I did have one disconcerting moment: one of the prayers that I had learned the chant for was one that I thought I would be doing alone, so I didn't worry about the fact that it mutated a bit as I learned it (musically speaking); the result was appropriate and who cares about minor ornaments and slight variants and stuff like that? I was not expecting the rabbi to say, at that point in the service, "we'll now join Monica in vaychulu". Oops.

It was really hard to tell whether people were singing along on things. I was up on the bima, and there was a microphone in front of me, and -- as is typical for this congregation -- almost everyone was sitting in the back third of the chapel. That was too far away for me to be able to watch people, and the loudest thing by far that I heard was me. On the first song (yes, everyone knows it) I thought it was that I'd picked a bad key for them; they probably weren't expecting an alto. But my choice of key didn't seem to have much to do with the observed results, so I stopped worrying about it.

When I met with the rabbi right before the service to go over some logistics, he noticed that I'd inserted transliteration for some of the Hebrew into my book and he said this made him unhappy. There were two reasons I sometimes used translit: (1) for anything where I had to notate music, because I haven't trained my brain to read music right to left yet, and (2) for places where there was risk of failure because it was text I had just learned for this service -- crutches, in other words. I know from past performance experience that sometimes your IQ simply drops 50 points when someone sticks an audience in front of you, after all. I was pleased that in most cases I didn't need to look at the translit; I'll have to report back on this when I next talk with the rabbi. (He told me afterward that he definitely wants me to do this again.)