Good cheer and cold, hard cash

In their Victorian hoop skirts and top hats, they may look like wandering townsfolk out of a Dickens novel. But those merry bands of costumed holiday carolers that seem to turn up everywhere this time of year -- warbling at a used car lot, shivering near the valet parking outside an entertainment industry party, or at the mall in front of half-off cashmere sweaters -- are hardly a ragtag bunch of amateurs drawn together by the Christmas spirit to express themselves in song.

Instead, the quartets and octets who appear roughly between Thanksgiving and Christmas are likely to be professional singers, sent out on the town by organized caroling companies to have some fun and earn a little extra money during the holidays.

“When you think of caroling, you think of, ‘Hey, let’s all get together and put on our scarves and carol through the neighborhood and then have hot chocolate at my house,’ ” says soprano Susan Mills, a soloist with the Los Angeles Master Chorale who also has been a singer with the Music Companie caroling group for 15 years (she also has the distinction of having been the anonymous soloist at Frank Sinatra’s funeral). “But what it is is big business -- like everything else in entertainment in L.A. With all of the seasonal stuff, I can rake in an extra $2,500 at least.”

That’s probably the high end of what a singer might earn during the holidays. With average pay ranging between $50 and $100 an hour per singer for each gig, other carolers estimate their seasonal earnings at between $500 and $1,500. It all depends on how well a performer can juggle caroling with his or her regular schedule, or if he or she can be available for the higher-paying jobs on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Or, offers one wry performer, how willing the singer is to be a “gig slut,” taxing the vocal cords with four or five jobs a day.

Pat Loeb, director of the Music Companie, says she sends small bands of singers from her pool of 50 to 60 singers on 100 to 150 jobs during the season. “We’re like actors. We don’t have a steady gig. Some ... really depend on it for their rent,” she observes.

She adds that oblivious holiday shoppers may be listening free to concert-quality voices whose owners can command several hundred dollars an hour as soloists. “They are really getting an incredible bargain,” she says.

Baritone Roberto Gomez has been busy this year with a career that has taken him to Stockton Opera, San Francisco Opera and Opera San Jose, among others. But December brought him home to Torrance -- and back to caroling with the Music Companie. “I’ve been able earn a couple thousand on my really busy years. This year it will be not much more than $500 or $600,” he says.

“But that’s enough for presents for my sister and her five kids, my cousin and his three kids, my entire family.”

Leanna Brand, a singer with the Master Chorale, is also director of the caroling group A Little Dickens Holiday Entertainment (not to be confused with Dickens and Company, run by another Master Chorale member, Kevin St. Clair).

“It’s funny, I started out with four singers from a church group to earn a little pin money, but now I have 30 people and about 100 jobs,” Brand says. “I rack up my credit cards in the summer and pay them off in December.”

Families of carolers get used to the fact that these singers are virtually never home for the holidays. John Revheim, a tenor with Angeles Chorale, has also sung for 20 years with the Caroling Company, which was founded by Diane Burt, daughter of Christmas songwriter Alfred Burt (“Caroling, Caroling”). Company members sing in locations as varied as the lobby of the Hotel Bel-Air, a Glendale dentist’s office, a Hollywood children’s home and, tonight, the home of Charlton Heston. “I take gigs on Christmas Day, because you know what? There’s no work on the 26th,” Revheim says.

Still, Los Angeles area carolers can find that it’s Christmas in July -- or any other time of year -- because the movie and TV industries call on them to play carolers on screen.

Soprano Mills recalls being part of a group of carolers on a “Murphy Brown” episode: “We had to stand outside a window and sing, but the window was 2 feet off the ground, so we did it on our knees, wearing knee pads,” she says. “So when we came out to meet the studio audience after it was over, we came out on our knees.”

Belinda Wilkins, a mezzo-soprano in the Los Angeles Opera chorus who sings with the Music Companie, managed to avoid too much overlap this year between caroling and her rehearsal and performing schedule for the opera company’s two November-December offerings, “Lucia di Lammermoor” and “Orfeo ed Euridice.”

“What’s tough is when you do a day of caroling and then the next day you have a matinee performance, when those two run together,” she says. “And when you are outside, you have to be careful not to over-sing.”

Wilkins admits that, if she didn’t get paid, she would carol only for friends and family. But, like most carolers, she says that the job is about fun almost as much as profit. “I enjoyed it quite a lot this year. You always carol with fun people. At some of the bigger parties you are standing outside the front door when people are getting out of their cars. Some of them are big celebrities,” she says. “And even if they’re not celebrities, the clothes are beautiful. It’s a fashion show.”

Wilkins and other members of her caroling group particularly enjoy one annual assignment far from Hollywood party glitz: the so-called “green limo gig.”

For nine years, group members have spent two days a year traveling around town with Ramon Coro, vice president of sales for Mercado Latino, a food distributor, importer and manufacturer catering to the Latino market.

The “green limo” refers to a 1976 Lincoln Continental limousine, complete with a wreath on the front, in which Mercado Latino chauffeured the singers until two years ago, when the aging vehicle was put out to pasture.

The carolers spend a long day stopping at various food stores, including Food 4 Less and Albertsons locations, for 15 minutes of song in both English and Spanish. This year, at a supermarket in Echo Park, a woman who worked at a nearby child-care center asked if the singers would drop by and sing. They did, with the blessing of Mercado Latino.

At the risk of sounding like a Scrooge, Nicole Baker, an alto who teaches music at Cal State Fullerton, says she gave up caroling after one of her students recognized her singing in costume on Catalina Island.

“There I was, wearing my little Dickens bonnet, and I suddenly hear, ‘Oh, Dr. Baker!’ ” she says. “I thought, ‘That’s it. I’m never doing this again.’ As a professor, you feel weird about being seen in a hoop skirt on Catalina.”

As it happened, the student shouldn’t have spoken up -- she had asked Baker for an extension on handing in a paper, claiming she was sick; instead, she was visiting the island on a holiday cruise with her family. “So we were both busted,” Baker says.