One hundred years in a night

Tonight's Classical Music Fans meetup went so well -- first we screened Leonard Bernstein's "Omnibus" lecture on modern music (which I had never seen before and is awesome - clever, funny, smart, insightful and info-dense; it's pretty much a nonstop 45-minute monologue with Lenny pausing only to play the piano and conduct the orchestra he's standing in front of). There was, fortunately, a break at that point so I didn't have to follow him immediately, and then I and Ricky Der took up where Lenny'd left off, at around World War II, and gave whirlwind tours of ten later genres of 20th-century music. The entire evening ran almost four hours, and everyone except one who had to leave early was not only still there and awake at the end, but interested and participating in good group dialogues. It was a lot of prep (even more for Ricky than for me) but very worth it!

Friday's lecture, on Egypt and the Arab Spring, will be much easier, since I'm not the one giving it -- I just have to introduce Prof. Ghannam, who is. :^)