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!