BOWLED OVER BY BERNHARDT

In recent years, Barry Bernhardt hasn't wondered how to celebrate the New Year. He usually has a date with a bowl game.

The Golden Eagles director will fly to San Antonio Christmas night to prepare to conduct the bands at the halftime show at the Alamo Bowl between Penn State and Texas A&M. Then he immediately flies to Jacksonville, Fla., where on Jan. 1 he will be perched on a ladder waving a baton at the bands performing for the Gator Bowl game between Georgia Tech and Miami.

Standing before up to 2,000 young musicians before a bowl game, he has about three hours "to make them a band. Then we play six minutes of music and get off the field."

The Alamo and Gator are only two of the five college bowl games Bernhardt has choreographed this bowl season. He won't be present as a conductor, but his work also will be seen at the Liberty Bowl Dec. 31, the Orange Bowl Jan. 1, and at the national championship game between Florida State and Virginia Tech in the Sugar Bowl Jan. 4.

He has planned a swing music show for the Alamo Bowl, which will be aired on ESPN. The Gator Bowl, to be broadcast nationally by NBC, will be a millennium 2000 celebration. The Liberty Bowl in Memphis is built around a performance by blues great B.B. King, whose famous initials will be spell out. Gladys Knight will have the spotlight at the Orange Bowl, where Bernhardt's marching bands will do a bit of razzmatazz to one of Knight's hits, "Heard It Through the Grapevine."

Gospel music will be in the air at halftime during the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans.

Bernhardt started choreographing the five bowl games the week before Thanksgiving. All the work is done on a computer with a program -- Drill Quest -- he helped redesign. It is a much more precise method of moving musicians around a football field than the old hand-drawn charts.

Drill Quest allows the choreographer to animate the design and view it from any angle, a big bonus for both the choreographer and television directors. The program provides a coordinate system that tells each musician where they are on the field during the performance.

"You can be extremely exact," Bernhardt says.

Fortunately, the movement for these halftime spectaculars isn't nearly as intricate as the Golden Eagles' because these bands -- usually the two from the universities and high school bands from the region -- have only a few hours to learn their moves. Bernhardt calls such a primarily stationary show a "Park and Bark."

Preparing to conduct one of the halftime shows is exhausting because there are so many people to muster. But during the show, he confesses, "There's not a lot of conducting to it. I just try to get them to start on time."

That isn't always easy. Last year's Gator Bowl featured a champion fiddle player using a wireless microphone. With all the speakers located at the scoreboard end of the field, there was a two or three second delay between the moment the music was played and the moment it was heard in some parts of the stadium. "It was difficult to hold together," Bernhardt said.

He works under contract to Bowl Games of America, a Salt Lake City company that is a branch of a firm called Creative Productions. Another Creative Productions company called Sky's the Limit provided the streamer cannons when President Clinton held a campaign rally in Cape Girardeau in 1996.

He also has designed part of a millennium celebration for Philadelphia to be performed at Veterans Stadium.

Bernhardt has been at Southeast for 10 years. Besides the Golden Eagles, he conducts the Southeast Show Band, the University Concert Band, the Studio Jazz Ensemble and the Jazz Lab Band and directs the Southeast Summer Music Camps.

He also choreographs shows for one of his friends, University of Notre Dame band director Ken Dye. In return, Dye arranges music for some of the Golden Eagles Show. Each man does for the other what he does best.

These days, bowl-game halftime shows are not really meant to show off the bands' marching abilities.

"It's more glitzy, Hollywood entertainment. Bowls are big money for everybody involved," he said.

But unlike the regular season games, where the bands might be seen for 30 seconds during halftime, bowl-game halftime shows have become part of the package and often are broadcast in full.

Rarely is Bernhardt ever home to celebrate New Year's. His wife, Laurie, has accompanied him on a few trips but will stay home with their children this year. "They understand why I do what I do," he says. "I don't know that they like it."

They know it's necessary for him. "This is one of the few times of the school year I get to show what I do," he said.

Bernhardt's name has been mentioned to choreograph the opening ceremonies for the Sydney Olympics in 2002. It's a challenge he would welcome. Recalling the chill he felt the first time he played in a band concert, he said, "I've been doing this for 17 years as a college band director. It takes a little more to get that chill."