On handbells and hobby-horses

[jennaria]

I spent most of today at a handbell retreat, by which I mean a day-long rehearsal that covered most of the music we'll be playing for the rest of the season, with occasional breaks to stretch our legs, and a nice potluck lunch. Our first performance is tomorrow's service (11 AM, Old South Church in Boston! - come, see me try not to tear out my hair as I play more handchimes than any sane person would attempt!).

We've also got a fair number of new people, so the other point to the retreat was to start to get to know these people. The 'getting to know you' question proposed was this: What's the subject that just gets you going -- that your friends laugh whenever it comes up, because they know you're good for a twenty-minute monologue on it? I came up with handcrafts (and proved it by going off on a rant about machine-made quilts vs. hand quilting).

On my way home, it occurred to me. Some of y'all I could guess at an answer for that question, but not nearly as many as I might. So, to anyone who's interested: what's the subject (or subjects) that get you talking?

x-posted to LJ and DW

Comments

[stranger]

Opera and music history. I never quite got over have a music MA which turned out to be entirely recreational in practice. Still, I wanted to know about it, and now I do. It's a remarkably interesting window into European history for several centuries, but one does wind up feeling there wasn't really life before counterpoint. Which is wrong; after watching SG-1 and doing some background reading about linguistics, it became clear there wasn't life before Linear B. Before that was, you know, the Big Bang, indistinguishable fossils, and then writing. And there was light. Then a few centuries (give or take a few millennia) later, there was sound. And life as we know it.