A large hall. Banners. Bubbles. Balloons. The glare of hot lights. A sound system with giant speakers and a complex equalizer. A professional MC. Costumes. Sequins. Glamour. Flashing tube lights running along the foot of the stage. Welcome to ECC Anyang Kindergarten's Winter Festival 2002!

Last Thursday night Jenny and I and all the teachers and children of ECC Anyang Kindergarten appeased the excessive and misplaced ambitions of a hundred-odd parents with a song-and-dance spectacular that was like the Academy Awards except not as short and not as limited in scale. To produce this gala affair, we have all worked for months to teach our children songs, dances, chants and poems, not to mention several inane and morally questionable skits. We have been teaching them this stuff instead of English. My students have largely given up reading and writing in favor of one more run-through of Lion and Mouse or Knock Knock, and the tedium has made all of us miserable. None of the Korean teachers had a shred of theater experience either, so it was left to Jenny and me to suggest as politely as possible that directing speeches to the back wall is a bad idea and that circle-dances look to the audience like a parade of butts.

But this, we are told, is what the parents want — all two-and-a-half hours of it, a length that was insisted upon by Annie, the kindergarten director. I have my suspicions that it is only sort of what the parents want, and that the person who really wanted this elaborate demonstration is Mr. Kim, president of ECC Anyang, who is rumored to be entering local politics. Whatever the reason, we were performing on a stage in a hall that probably dwarfs anything my director friend Daniel Kleinfeld has ever gotten to use for his shows, which have actual artistic merit and entertainment value, but which do not have tykes or hand bells.

And I couldn't help feeling irritated that such an obviously expensive extravaganza was being put on by a school that's been a week or so late in paying its teachers for three months running, and about whose financial situation the rumors have been increasingly dire. Last week there was talk of a strike by the Korean teachers, who hadn't been paid a thing or given any information about the delay, but fortunately the money came through at the last moment. Unofficial word from the top — nothing is ever official — is that the financial situation should improve in another month or two. We have no reason to believe this to be true, but we never know what's happening until it's already happened, so it won't do us much good to worry either.

Anyway, financial woes aside, last Thursday night we had a show to do. Fortunately extra kindergarten teachers were on hand to deal with the costume changes — yes, changes, plural — as our kids were quickly stripped out of one elaborate set of rented costumes and into the next. That left us regular teachers free to coach the kids through their performances, to corral the children backstage, and to stand onstage and hold the microphones in front of their faces — for all the expensive equipment, no one thought to get a boom mic. We were also therefore available to be harassed by the emcee, who set the tone by opening the show with surprise firework that had me diving for cover as backfiring cinders went shooting into the curtains behind me. For the rest of the evening, the hall was filled with enough smoke to make it resemble one of my college dorm rooms. At one point in the show he asked me some questions in Korean, which left me grinning like an idiot on the stage until he finally asked me how old I was in English. Later he did the same thing to Jenny. And when he wasn't humiliating Jenny and me, this emcee was apparently humiliating our Korean colleague Sue, who told us afterwards that he'd asked whether she was married — she is — and then asked the audience if they thought she was pretty. Personally I think she's beautiful, not to mention absolutely adorable, and one of the highlights of this whole performance nightmare has been watching her lead her kids through their choreography, as she's an awfully cute dancer. But I would hardly put the question of her attractiveness to a crowd of people, especially people who are the parents of the children she teaches.

The emcee also earned his pay by repeatedly interrupting our own kindergarten emcees, Helen and John, two bright kids who have worked extremely hard on their extensive stage banter. Or turning up the incidental music in the middle of skits. Or cruelly turning on the bubble machine while the youngest kids were performing, which is evil, because what kid in her right mind can go on reciting poetry when there are bubbles to chase? The only time the emcee wasn't around being irritating was whenever there was a problem with the sound. But then he's the sort of person who's available to emcee a kindergarten show on a Thursday night in Anyang, which is not where you find Korea's greatest entertainment stars — who mostly aren't that great anyway. It reminded me of the weird DJ DoubleClick got for one of its company picnics, a guy who dressed like Garth Brooks and played hip-hop all day, but then you don't get DJ Scribble to spin for a company picnic at a summer camp in Central Jersey on a Wednesday afternoon.

I have to admit that the kids in their costumes really were adorable. Most of the girls and more than a few of the boys had makeup on, and there is simply no way that a five-year-old in a sailor suit or a cowboy costume or a marching band uniform is not going to look just spectacularly cute. And the kids performed their skits and songs and chants and solo poems admirably for the most part. And in fact the general incomprehensibility of the children during their skits and poems wasn't really a problem because hardly any of the parents speak English anyway — which must have made it that much more boring to sit through all the plays and poems that didn't have your kid in them, but there it is and I just work here. At least they got to see a kid in a gorilla suit.

My big number was Shadow Interview, in which I asked each member of Koala class, the kindergarten's youngest, a few questions while the kid was hidden behind a screen, and then asked the parents to stand up if they could identify their child. The kids did pretty well, though a number of them answered "What food do you like?" with "I like tiger!" or "What animal do you like?" with "I am hamburger!" or "How old are you?" with "I like five!" And the parents did pretty well too, identifying all the kids who actually managed to speak instead of just shrieking. I was the only one who really fucked up, shouting, "It's Cindy!" when it was in fact Michelle. Unfortunately Cindy, Michelle and Susan all sort of blur together for me as the Koala-girls-without-personalities, and they all look alike. (No, not all Koreans, just these three girls.) But nobody seemed to mind, and everybody loved it when Jack, who has a big, wide, always-grinning face and has to be one of the cutest kids the world has ever known, giggled and squealed through his answers. He was the last kid, and his uber-cuteness made me look good at the end, but that was when the emcee started asking me questions in Korean, and I ended up wandering off the stage in confusion after informing the audience that I'm 27. So much for a graceful exit.

Personally, I got a kick out of the various musical performances. There were a couple of melodion bits, which looked to me like some kind of twisted medical experiment as each kid blew through a white plastic tube and worked the keyboard intently. The xylophones were similarly amusing, again mostly for the incredibly serious concentration on the faces of the children banging out Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. It brought back memories of violin recitals I was in when I was, like, five, which I now realize were primarily interesting because I looked good in short pants and a sport coat, and not because of my ennobling performances of melodies from the Suzuki Method repertoire.

Then there was the performance on "rhythmical instruments" by Koala. It's sort of a misnomer, as the children proved that there's nothing inherently rhythmical about tambourines, triangles, castanets or a big bass drum. This particular number was near the end of the show, and once the gaggle of four- and five-year-olds who can barely write the letter O were all assembled onstage with dangerous percussion equipment and ready to go, the emcee decided that this was the moment to launch into an extended distribution of raffle prizes, which thus took place under a steady low-level barrage of thumping and dinging. When the kids finally had their chance to go at it, they were as awful as our rehearsals had led us to expect, but it was hysterically funny watching them all whacking away in patterns that may or may not have been related to the bravely accompanying piano. It came out sounding sort of like if Chinese opera just happened by accident.

My favorite bit, though, was the hand bells. I've never seen that before, and it so kicks ass. They all line up, and each kid is responsible for one note, and they shake their bells at just the right moments to make a song. How cool is that? It's like dweeb gamelan! Jenny tells me hand bells are a church thing and that it makes her think of adult hand-bell choruses, where each socially inept thirty-something Methodist single is responsible for an entire octave. This, I admit, may be going beyond the aesthetically worthwhile limits of the instrument — being really good at hand bells is pretty lame, like being an Alp horn virtuoso or something, and it's way less cool than being able to play the saw — but I do think that a hand bell chorus playing Nirvana tunes would liven up the intermissions of downtown theater performances (Daniel, are you listening?). In any case, hand bells are cool and Methodists are weird.

After the show the parents seemed happy enough, although it's hard to tell whether they were just happy it was over. A lot of them wanted pictures of Jenny and me with their kids. I was being photographed with kids I don't even teach, all so the parents would have adorable pictures of their little ones with the funny-looking creatures from far away. I felt like an ostrich at a petting zoo, and there was no sand anywhere. "This," Jenny reminded me, "is what they're paying us for, in some ways more than for being in the classroom with the kids." And it's true. All this extravagant hoo-haw was meant to impress the parents, and I think it worked, and if that's what it takes to sell the product, then I suppose that's what you do. ECC Anyang is a business, after all. I hope the Winter Festival made the parents happy enough that they keep spending their money and paying our salaries. And I hope I am never involved in any such thing ever again.

Except the hand bells. I could go for more of that. "Here we are now, entertain us ..."