It was a warm spring night as I stood in line outside Mussey Hall awaiting entrance to the first of Hugh Briss's lectures, Doing Your Homework. I was, of course, familiar with Mr. Briss, both personally (I have worked for him for some years) and professionally (I have written about him before) but somewhat surprisingly perhaps, I had never seen him lecture.

There was a good size crowd already inside by the time I took my seat. It was a surprisingly mixed crowd. There were folks who looked to be old age pensioners and a number of young people that I took to be students. I wondered how they had all come to be there. Surely they weren't all regular readers of PERSIFLAGE?

As I awaited the start of the lecture I chatted a bit with the man seated next to me. He was, he said, a professor of "Natural and Revealed Religions" at a small mid-western American women's college. I was going to ask him how it was that he had come all the way to Mussey Hall to hear Briss speak but I was curious about the Natural and Revealed religion thing and I asked about that first.

My neighbour was still explaining the intricacies of his rather odd and anachronistic discipline as Briss clambered up onto the stage to deliver his talk so I had no chance to inquire about the man's purpose there. And he more or less bolted from the auditorium at the conclusion of the lecture so I never did find out.

I still don't really know why or how anyone came to be there and I am afraid that includes me. But at any rate I did manage to record the thing. So here, in its entirety, is Mr. Briss's first Mussey lecture: Doing Your Homework

The First Mussey

Sally Kind