Fresh from White House, Palatine choir now headed to 'Early Show'

From the White House in Washington D.C. to the Pentagon Mall - and finally, to the CBS "Early Show," the Palatine High School choir will have entertained tens of thousands of people before the holiday season closes.

The choir hadn't even gotten home from their four-hour concert at the White House on Monday and another appearance inside the Pentagon City Mall, when they were invited to sing this coming Thursday morning at the CBS channel 2 studios.

Steve Sivak, the Palatine High School choir director for nine years, said a 35-member group of singers called Indigo Jazz will make the early morning trek to Chicago Thursday to sing live on air between 6 and 7 a.m. He added that a smaller group of young men, who call themselves The Guys!, may also break out from Indigo to perform a few seasonal pieces a cappella.

It was a happy group of musicians, directors and parents who rode buses back from the East Coast Tuesday.

The White House experience was "great," Sivak said. He took 74 kids to the White House, even though only 52 could be officially in the choir, which performed for visitor tours. The other 22 kids stood close to the performance area and sang along.

"We had about 50 minutes of music," Sivak said, and the choir performed two, 2-hour concerts. But because the tour groups kept moving slowly along, no one was subjected to repeated material.

Later, at the shopping mall, all 74 sang together as one, he added.