Preserving the Past THURSDAY -- The Metropolitan Historic Structures Association, representing 85 historic sites in New York and New Jersey, will hold a reception to raise money for its lecture program on conservation of historic sites and to support distribution of its guidebook "Glimpses of Old New York Housee Museums and Historic Sites".
Mr. Kellogg said he has been talking with the Y.M.H.A., which wants the theater for its lecture series; with Arts International, a New York-based organization for global exchange, which is interested in presenting an annual festival of world culture; and with the TriBeCa Film Festival, which would take up residence in May when the opera season ends.
This unique organization, known mainly for its lecture series that amounts to high entertainment for nerds, is worth familiarizing yourself with if you are not already aware of it.
The Royal Institution is best known for its Christmas lectures, which were introduced by Michael Faraday in 1825 as a way of exciting children about science at a time when organised education was not widespread.
The RI is, in part, a members' club famous for its Christmas lectures "adapted to a juvenile auditory", which are broadcast on television every year, and its Friday evening discourses (black ties, please, gentlemen), in which prominent scientists chat about their work for precisely an hour no more and no less before everyone is served tea and chocolate cake.
Arts in the Schools WEDNESDAY -- Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin will be the hosts of a black-tie dinner at Gotham Hall, 1356 Broadway (36th Street) to raise money for the New York Academy of Art and its lectures and arts-in-education programs for children in the New York public schools.
One holding that typifies this is The Teaching Company, which is best known for its Great Courses lectures.
WEDNESDAY -- For its weekly video-lecture series, the African-American Museum offers the first of two sessions on "Birth of a Nation," screening it at 6 30 p.m. and then following up with discussion.
The Dill Pickle is best remembered for its regular schedule of lectures and debates.
A marketing consultant who's had a lifelong passion for minerals, Mr. Portnoy, 46, has been president of the Mineralogical Club for four years, organizing lectures for its meetings at the American Museum of Natural History, editing its newsletter and arranging permission for mineral hunts to abandoned mines, quarries and even building excavations in Manhattan.
