As someone who has had terrible eyesight since my age was in the single digits, it was clear that I would eventually start to need a more complicated glasses prescription as I got older. And so a couple weeks ago I bowed to the inevitable and got progressive lenses. I was afraid that it would take me awhile to adjust and I’d gotten warnings – from my eye doctor who suggested two weeks and from my optician who predicted even longer – that it would take awhile to adjust to them. To the contrary, the adjustment process was initially incredibly quick. It may help that my last prescription never quite worked, and I spent more than a year trying to find any way to look through my (previous) glasses in a way that would let me focus. So although I don’t necessarily recommend it, spending more than a year with a terrible prescription may well have helped me learn adjust more quickly to a new set of places to look in order to see through my glasses. I had a few hours of quasi-seasickness the first day and then it was just a glorious experience of being able to see. Until I got to the end of the week and my first gigs with progressive lenses. The first of these gigs was a songwriters-in-the-round show in which we each had to write a song to a prompt; since I had finished mine that afternoon, I printed out the lyrics since I hadn’t fully learned them yet. I’ve learned to do that in fairly big type. And all was well through the first two and a half verses of a four-verse song. But then I got down far enough on the lyric sheet that I was looking through the reading portion of my lenses and I couldn’t make out the words at all. Luckily I mostly knew the lyrics, and managed to fake my way through the last verse and a half. The other thing I discovered at that gig was that I couldn’t read the lights on my foot pedal tuner, because they’re down in that close-reading section of the glasses at well. (That’s especially problematic for tuning; if I put my head straight down to be able to look at the tuning lights I can see them through the distance part of my glasses, but tuning in a gig involves chatting with the audience – and hence looking at least partly at them and speaking into the microphone – something I can’t do if I have to be bent over looking downwards.) Luckily my foot pedal tuner has been quirky of late, so I had a headstock tuner on my guitar in case the foot pedal tuner didn’t work. So I could step on the foot pedal to cut the sound to my guitar for tuning, but use the actual headstock tuner for the tuning. For my show the next night I remembered the tuner trick and so made sure to have both tuners again. But this show was a full evening solo show so, unlike an in-the-round show where I decide what to play based on what the people before me play, I had written a setlist. Which I then discovered – since I’m used to putting it on the floor – I couldn’t see at all. I knew what the first five or six songs I was playing were, but then had no idea. So I had to actually bend over, pick up the setlist, and put it on the bench beside me. At intermission I found a music stand I could put it on, off to the side, and see it. I’m going to have to figure out new ways to do these sorts of things so I can accomplish what I need to while playing but also wear the glasses that, under most circumstances, work really well to help me see. On the one hand, I’m sure other musicians have solved these issues before, so I should ask around. On the other hand, the extent to which I can’t see without my glasses (and hence through the close-reading part of my new glasses) is quite unusually dramatic, so I might have to invent some new options for tuning and reading while performing.