Caroling, Caroling, Up and Down

I have so many stories from this past month of caroling/rehearsals/concerts/wearing my voice out, I'm not sure where to start. As anyone who might have gone onto my calendar of events might have seen, I had no days off at all during the month of December, and hardly any even in November.

My 32nd birthday came and went with little fanfare. I got a nifty Canon Powershot Elph as a birthday/Christmas present from Ray, which I'm still trying to figure out, but this little thing takes way better pictures than my phone, that's for sure. Plus, it's got an underwater accessory which I will be getting before we go to Hawaii for the wedding. (You can look forward to many super duper photos in the future!)

From the day after Thanksgiving until the day before Christmas, my caroling group sang at Large Department Store on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. I wasn't there all the time...in fact, the only one of us that was there almost every day was our bass, and to say he was tired of Christmas caroling by the end of it would be an understatement.

Most of the time, the gig was pretty easy. The first week or so we tried to settle into a routine. We were asked to sing before the light show, which played every hour on the hour, but the area where the public congregated in the middle of the store was huge, and the ceiling went up at least 60 feet. Needless to say, no one could hear us. Management then had the bright idea of having us sing up by the organ console, where there was a microphone.

That seemed like a better idea all around. Even though the microphone was unidirectional (so whoever was standing in front of the mic was the one everyone heard the most), the crowd did hear us, and they even enjoyed us. We started playing games with the audience, having them sing with us, and so on, which I think pleased the parents especially because we were entertaining their kids and giving them a little bit of a break.

However, even though we were supposed to start the shows 15 minutes before the hour every hour, there was not always someone at the organ console to let us in. Our bass (I'll just call him Bass for anonymity's sake) managed to figure out how to get us into the "locked" area, but we still couldn't figure out how to turn the microphone on. Finally, we found one of the tech guys, who very nicely gave us a tutorial on the microphone. He pulled out a secret drawer from inside the organ console (you can see that thing in the picture above; there's a lot of buttons on that thing), and pointed at some labeled buttons. Just push "Muzak" to mute the Muzak in the store, press "amp" to mute/unmute the amp to the microphone, and then turn the microphone on, he tells us. When we're done, he says, we should do all that in reverse to return the system to normal.

What he didn't tell us was that the sound track for the light show was also on that system, and that it was on a timer. So when we accidentally ran long that first time on our own, the light show started, and Julie Andrew's voice rang out, "Welcome, children to the holiday light show!" We quickly stopped singing mid-verse ("...and a partridge in a pear...oh, never mind"), turned the microphone off, hit the Muzak button, hit the amp button AND MUTED JULIE ANDREWS!

The light show kept going, but it looked really stupid at this point, with Christmas light ballerinas flashing on and off with no music or narration. We quickly hit the "amp" and "Muzak" buttons again, but to no avail. Soprano (it's really her caroling group, not mine, although we're working on the paperwork to become business partners) and I went barrelling through Large Department Store in our Victorian outfits, looking for someone, anyone, with a walkie-talkie that could get us in touch with the tech guy who showed us how the microphone worked. Bass stayed by the organ console and said, "If you don't mind, I think I might make a couple educated guesses." I gave him my blessing, since things couldn't have gotten much worse. Tenor, not knowing what to do, just stayed put and watched Bass helplessly.

We made it up to the backstage area of the Dickens Village, which is sort of Command Central for the entire Christmas area. Of course, they had no idea how to contact the tech guy, but they did get security on the phone to help us out. However, by the time they had security on the phone, Bass had fixed the problem. He had ended up pushing the big red button above the button marked "LAUNCH," which is a pretty ballsy move, if you think about it. After all, how many times have we been told to stay away from those kinds of buttons?

The whole fiasco maybe lasted four minutes, but in my mind, it lasted four hours. I don't really think anyone in the audience really noticed that it was a fiasco, either. I was a basket case for the rest of the day, and on into the night, which was unfortunate, since I was singing Handel's Messiah that night. The concert itself went well, but I kept having to refocus myself on the music almost every ten minutes.

And this was only halfway into the Christmas season!

Deck the Halls

I tried to post this on 11/26, but the post never happened. Better late than never...

Thanksgiving was much less stressful for me than I thought it would be. Since I've had almost no free time, I was beside myself as to what to prepare for my soon-to-be in-laws, since the last couple of times I got overly ambitious and they arrived 30-45 minutes early to watch me frantically put finishing touches on things in the kitchen. Ray's mom, ever condescending (but well-meaning), keeps saying, "She's just a baby. She'll learn," which grates on my very last nerve, considering the fact that they come EARLY before I'm ready for them. Last time she said that, my dad spoke up for me and said, "No, she actually did a really great job." Thanks, Dad!

But I am learning. This year I told them to come at 5:30, planning on dinner to be ready by 5:00. They arrived at 5:15, and I was ready for them with appetizers. I was still putting finishing touches on the food, but everything was cooked and almost ready to put on the table. I was hoping she wouldn't make any more condescending remarks, but at the end of dinner, she said, "You're learning." Well, I guess she's right. I just wish it didn't bother me so much when she said it.

Now that Thanksgiving is over, Caroling season is in full swing. I started caroling at a Big Department Store in the middle of Philadelphia (I'm taking a page from Adam875's book and trying for at least SOME anonymity), and although the whole story of how I got the gig needs to be left for another post, it is actually quite a nice gig. They have a secure dressing room for us to take our breaks in, and we're pretty much left to our own devices. We have been wandering through the store, found out that although almost nobody shops in Menswear, there is a really cool place for us to stand and sing so that a good portion of the first floor can see and hear us.

Almost everyone who hears us actually stops and listens for the whole song, and sometimes even hangs out for two or three songs before they go back to their shopping. The parents are really pleased to point out to their kids, "Look, Timmy, Christmas carolers." And one of my fellow carolers commented that we were probably the only people on Black Friday that the shoppers weren't angry at. Shoppers would push and shove their way through the crowds, but when they saw us coming, they would smile and move aside.

We did have a strange incident, however, of a couple of teenagers we passed as we were walking to the escalator. They saw us and said, "Hey look, immigrants!" Immigrants? Um, how do you get immigrants from four people wearing Victorian-era outfits? Maybe immigrants who stepped out of a time machine. Those kids must be products of the Philadelphia public school system; obviously well-educated.

HallowThanksMas

Yesterday I did my first caroling gig of the season, all bedecked in my Victorian finery. We were hired by an Acme store (for those of you not on the East Coast, that's a big supermarket chain) for a grand reopening of their store.

I have to say, this gig definitely goes into the category of bizarre. Here we were, strolling through the produce section in costume, singing Christmas carols on Nov. 4. Not only were we competing with the muzak being piped through the store and the "clean up on aisle six" pages over the loudspeaker, but we had added competition of people dressed as pilgrims, hired to wander through the store and hand out what I can only guess was leftover Halloween candy.

Talk about sending a confusing holiday message.

I would say this was a pretty low pressure job, but we had also apparently been advertised in the paper, apparently, and a couple people came to the store specifically to hear us sing. Our two fans hung out by the canteloupes for a while until we strolled back to the floral department, and then they did some shopping while they were there. Hey, I don't blame them. If I hadn't been on the clock, I would have done some shopping too.

How the Grinch Stole Ramadan

I'm going to try to write this out quickly because it's midnight and I have to get up in six hours for yet another day of singing myself hoarse.

Tonight was the final night of Alexander Nevsky at the NY Philharmonic (which went very well, by the way) , and there was a little bit of panic backstage before the beginning of the concert. The chorus is usually called 15 minutes before curtain, but on nights when we get paid, like tonight, most people show up early to collect their checks. So it was incredibly strange that a handful of very reliable people did not show up at call time, or five minutes later, or even ten minutes later. A mere two minutes before we went on stage, they showed up, dripping with sweat (one of whom wasn't even in his tux yet!), with reports that someone had been hit by a train on the 1 line and the trains were suspended from 28th Street all the way up to 96th (Lincoln Center is at 66th Street, so this was clearly a problem).

Normally, we singers budget extra time in case things like this happen, because it's New York, and it's best to be prepared because you never know what new disaster might strike. And normally in situations like this when the subway service gets suspended, we all get out of the subway and try to hail a cab along with the rest of the hundreds of riders.

However, tonight is the final day of Ramadan, and about 80% of the cab drivers in the city were at prayers, so there were hardly any cabs to hail. These poor schmucks had to hoof it or bus it from as far away as 110th Street, and they barely made it there on time. Oy. I'm just thanking my lucky stars that I wasn't on any of those trains. And I'm hoping against hope I don't get stuck in traffic tomorrow when I have to zoom from my church job 100 miles away in NJ back to Lincoln Center for a different concert. Please, send good thoughts my way. Or if you happen to have something good to offer the traffic gods, I'd appreciate a sacrifice or two in my favor...