After a two-year hiatus, Melissa Errico is performing a slew of gigs honoring the composers Michel Legrand and Stephen Sondheim. As long as she gets to the airport (which airport again?) on time.

Alone in a Florida hotel room, I reach around the back of my (rented) red lace minidress. I find the zipper but can’t pull it up all the way. The dress is on right, I can see it in the mirror, but it’s gaping open. I do what every “girl singer” — as Stephen Sondheim called our kind, whatever our age — has learned to do on such occasions: I step into the hotel hallway, listen for voices and hope for the zipper-kindness of a stranger.

Caught in the same fix in Indianapolis a few days earlier, I turned to two British men, each one about 30, still in wet bathing suits; one held the zipper and the other pulled. In Florida, I find a well-dressed couple in their 70s emerging from the elevator. I ask the lady to zip me in, trying to suggest professionalism rather than oddness. She does, and later that night they come down to hear the show. A double score for a wandering singer.