This caroling can be tough business

0 Comments | USA TODAY, December, 2007 | by Craig Wilson

Caroling professionally might not be as jolly as you think: Just ask Nancy Armstrong.

She has been a professional soprano in Boston for 30 years, performing everywhere from Beacon Hill to Brookline. She won rave reviews when she sang with the Boston Camarata, an early-music group.

She also caroled professionally with a quartet for four years in the late 1980s and early 1990s; they performed in department stores such as Jordan's and Lord & Taylor, singing 40 minutes straight with a 20-minute break.

"Glamorous it was not," she says. "We came in the back entrance. There was never really a place for us to change. We were often in boiler rooms, staff coffee rooms.

"The office buildings were the worst, especially the ones with revolving doors...