Arts & Entertainment courses

A History of Music in the White House From 1948 - 2016

Join us for a survey history of music in the White House from the Truman administration through the Obama years. Fun facts: President Truman was an accomplished pianist who started piano lessons at age seven! Yo-Yo Ma was seven when he performed at the White House for Presidents Kennedy and Eisenhower. Paul McCartney was approaching age 70 when he rocked the building performing "Hey Jude" for President and Mrs. Obama and their guests. Want to learn more?

Instructor Bio: Jean Hein recently moved to Kansas from South Carolina, where she was director and recorder performer with Columbia Baroque as well as a clarinetist. She currently teaches online recorder classes for seniors. Hein has served on the board of Early Music America. She holds music degrees from Oberlin Conservatory and Northwestern University.

June 9-23, 2026, St Andrews Classroom

Broadway Musicals in the 1950's

The 1950s were a very special decade in the history of the musical with such figures as Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Frank Loesser, Leonard Bernstein, and Jule Styne writing such shows as The King and I, The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, Guys and Dolls, West Side Story, and Gypsy for the Broadway stage. This will be survey of the decade's most popular shows, the people who wrote them, and the stars who played in them.

Instructor bio: Paul Laird is a Professor Emeritus of Musicology who taught at KU for thirty years. He has published widely on the American musical theater and taught dozens of Osher courses over the last three decades.

June 24, 2026 to July 8, 2026, Osher Institute, St. Andrews Office Facility In Person

Cartoons: From Disney to Saturday Morning to Pixar and Beyond

We started watching cartoons as children, either at the movies or on television on Saturday mornings. Many of us continue to watch them, even without children or grandchildren. We'll look at the invention of the animated cartoon in the Silent Era, the creation of a certain Mouse by a guy from Kansas City and the entertainment empire that spawned, cartoons from other studios (Betty Boop, Popeye, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tom and Jerry, Mr. Magoo, Mighty Mouse), how cartoons went to war in the 1940s and how they migrated to television, both on Saturday mornings and on "kiddie" shows on weekday afternoons. We'll review the Disney renaissance in the 1990s, with "The Little Mermaid" and "The Lion King," long-running prime-time cartoons such as "The Simpsons," recent Disney competitors (Don Bluth, Ralph Bakshi, DreamWorks), and Pixar, who led the way in computer-generated animation with "Toy Story" and "Frozen". We'll also share where we watched cartoons: the movies, television, VHS/DVD/BluRay and now streaming services like Disney+.

Instructor bio: Karl Menninger is a retired government lawyer who seems to have found an avocation teaching courses on disability law, citizenship, comedy and James Bond, among other topics.

June 11-25, 2026, Beacon Mental Health (Clay County)

Osher Lifelong Learning Institute

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