Still, her scores were glowing: 5.6 to 5.8 for technical merit, 5.8 to an astonishing 6.0 (given her slip-ups) for artistic impression, the first perfect score of her career.
"It's just so crazy how my brain works," Eldred, who was already coping with the aftermath of prior relapse after three solid years of recovery, told me when recalling her slip-up in 2016.
Meredith Vieira filled in for Kathie Lee Gifford on the fourth hour of Thursday's "Today," and it didn't take long for her to slip up and create a memorable live TV moment.
She's forced into the confines of what men want of her and from her, never slipping up with an emotion of her own or, god forbid, a need.
"Uncle Tom's Cabin," by Mark Twain's postbellum neighbor in Hartford, Harriet Beecher Stowe (who in her dotage would slip up behind him and let out a "war whoop"), provided an incisive analysis of the economics and horrors of slavery at a time when that peculiar institution was still legal.
Even if you've spent a good deal of time researching a potential buyer's needs and putting together proposals that meet her interests, you could slip up by failing to present your offers in the best possible light.
Her roommate, Eleanor, did slip up a few times after admitting she was an alcoholic, but she eventually joined Alcoholics Anonymous and has been working on her sobriety for over a year.
Most of all, of course, she sends up herself, as a woman who hoped for Broadway, sequins and dancing girls and ends up in her slip camping it up and camping out in a tent under Hungerford Bridge, in the shadow of a purple cow.
