All the World's a Stage

With roughly two hours to spare, I give you...a blog post.


January has been a busy month. The students are on winter break from their elementary schools, which (of course) means that many of them were spending more time with us, and there was a corresponding increase in classes to teach.

In addition to the so-called "intensive" classes, we also had the annual kindergarten concert. Picture, if you will, dozens of Korean six- and seven year-olds singing, dancing, and acting their little kinderhearts out. My Watermelon class unleashed a performance of Snow White and the Six (not seven, six) Dwarfs that would have blown your minds, while my Strawberry class offered an interpretation of Beauty and the Beast that left the audience gaping and gasping in awe. Perhaps the most interesting adaptation, however, came from Lemon class. The Wizard of Oz is a theatrical classic, performed annually on countless stages around the globe.

I am willing to venture a guess, however, that this was the first-ever performance to feature none of:
-the Tin Man
-the Cowardly Lion
-the Scarecrow
-Toto the dog
-the Munchkins.

Parents were apparently unwilling to have their children cast in these roles (I must confess to not quite understanding the reasons why, although I believe it had something to do with the costumes not being sufficiently attractive for the parents' liking), and so instead we saw Superman, Batman, Tae Kwon V (a Korean superhero roughly on par with the first two), and Toto the younger brother. As for the Munchkins, they were simply omitted entirely, but I think this may have more to do with the challenges of performing an entire play in six minutes than out of any editorializing.

In addition to kind of (but not really) emceeing the show, I also had several other roles: the magic mirror in Snow White, the narrator and Servant 1 in Beauty and the Beast, and as a dancer (along with the other waeguk teachers and two kinder classes) to the following song. You really should have seen it. We were awesome.