But that was 30 years ago, when they used to have a show

There is nothing quite so sublime as experiencing one of the most utterly ridiculous moments of one's life while entirely cognizant of its ludicrousness and yet all but powerless to stop it from reaching its mortifying conclusion. Fortunately, when you're a foreigner living in a mid-sized Chinese city, this level of sublimity lies well within the bounds of what is achievable. All you need to do, evidently, is maintain a minimal level of cordiality with a friend's Chinese tutor, who happens to be a tad overzealous about promoting the website she works for, and POOF: you will find yourself dressed in traditional Chinese garb, on a stage in front of a hundred Chinese people expecting to derive their Thursday morning entertainment from your ability to recite a few choice lines of Tang Dynasty poetry, while a recently-materialized young woman dances solemnly and a piano twinkles somewhere in the distance. This narration of events may seem inadequate, but I assure you that Shakespeare himself would have been hard pressed to limn the transcendent pathos associated with conducting a post-game interview with a local TV station while wearing an all-white Mao suit.