Every emcee duo has a problem nobody warns you about.

Ours is 42 inches long.

Katy's travel keyboard is a 67-key Yamaha. Not the full 88. The travel size, the one that's supposed to make life easier. (It does. Right up until you need to put it somewhere.)

Music is a big part of what we do. We call our style corporate cabaret: improv, banter, room reading, a little poignancy and live music threaded through the whole thing. Which means the keyboard isn't a prop. It's half the act. (Katy would say more than half. Katy is not wrong.)

For years, it only came along when we drove. Nothing fit it. Every case we found was built for 61 keys or 88, like someone had heard about a 67 once, secondhand, and guessed. So any event that required a plane got the keyboard-less version of us. Still good. Just quieter than it should've been.

It sat in the back of our minds the way a dripping faucet does. Not urgent. Never gone.

Then I'm in Costco.

I'm not there for a keyboard case. Nobody goes to Costco for a keyboard case. I'm there for what everyone's there for: a rotisserie chicken, forty-eight rolls of paper towels and the vague sense that I'm saving money by spending more of it.

And there, somewhere between the patio furniture and a pallet of protein bars, is a dual rifle case.

Thirty bucks. The label says 42 inches.

I stop. Something about the shape is familiar in a way a gun case has never been familiar to me before.

I text Katy. Go measure your keyboard. Right now.

(She asks why. She measures anyway. (She’s compliant like that.))

Forty-two inches.

The width lines up. The depth lines up. I buy it on the spot, for thirty dollars, which in music-gear money is basically free.

Home. Unzip. The keyboard slides in like the case had been waiting for it. Padded corners. Snug, not tight.

And the outside pouches, built for ammo, turn out to be sized for everything else we haul. Sustain pedal in one. Page turner in another. Power supply. Stands. Every pocket has a job. None of the jobs involve ammunition.

Stitched right on the front is the brand name: Savior.

I'm not making that up. A case called Savior saved our travel setup. (Somewhere, a marketing team is either very proud or very confused.)

Now the keyboard can fly.

Which brings us to Dallas.

First flight with the new case. We check it like any other bag. We land, and it doesn't come around the carousel, because it's been routed to oversized baggage. Here's the thing nobody mentions when you buy a rifle case to carry a keyboard: it still looks like a rifle case. Because it is one.

Katy goes to collect it. The attendant wants ID.

Katy explains there's no rifle inside. It's a keyboard.

She shows ID anyway. (Fair. If I worked baggage in Dallas, "it's a keyboard" is exactly what I'd expect someone with a rifle to say.)

That wasn't a one-time thing. It's the routine now. Katy walks through a Texas airport with it slung over her shoulder, and sooner or later some guy gives it the nod. The respectful one. The one that says we're the same, you and I.

"What you got there?"

Katy doesn't miss a beat. "Yamaha 67."

And you can watch him run it. Flipping through the mental catalog. Trying to place the caliber.

There is no caliber. It's a keyboard. It plays show tunes.

Here's why I love this case more than a thirty-dollar case deserves.

We spent years looking in the right aisle for the wrong thing. Music stores. Gig bags. Keyboard cases with product photos of smiling people who've clearly never carried one through an airport. The actual answer was sitting in sporting goods, built for a completely different job by people who've never heard of us, doing our job better than anything made for it.

That's pretty much the whole act, honestly.

Most of what makes corporate cabaret work isn't in the script. It's what happens when the mic cable is too short, the panel runs long and the room is twenty minutes behind schedule. You grab whatever's in front of you and notice that it fits. Improv isn't having the perfect tool. It's recognizing when the wrong one is perfect.

So if you're at an event and two emcees walk in with a rifle case, relax.

It's fully loaded.

With show tunes.