Fat Tuesday! Time to stuff ourselves with doughnuts and alcohol, and to carry on with mad abandon. Tomorrow the streets will be strewn with bottles and bodies, and Lent will be upon us.

Get ready to live hard, this afternoon on The Classical Network, as we present music appropriate for the day, with a veritable orgy of carnivals, dances, and masked balls, and ample depictions of beloved characters of the commedia dell’arte.

We’ll hear Edward Joseph Collins’ “Mardi Gras,” Hershy Kay’s arrangements of music by New Orleans-born pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk into the ballet “Cakewalk,” Robert Schumann’s “Faschingsschwank aus Wien” (“Carnival Jest from Vienna”), and Igor Stravinsky’s ballet “Petrouchka,” about love and jealousy among puppets at the Shrovetide Fair.

This level of intensity can only be sustained for so long. On the other hand, a sustaining membership to The Classical Network could go on in perpetuity.

This week is Sustaining Member Appreciation Week at The Classical Network. I hope you will consider making a monthly commitment to the station in the form of automatic withdrawals from your debit card, credit card, or bank account in whatever amount you decide. It could be $5, $10, $20 – you fix the amount. The donation will continue, once a month, until you tell us to stop. This will save us paperwork, it will save us man hours, and it will save us from losing revenue during the period after which a traditional, yearly membership will have lapsed. You can cancel or change your sustaining membership at any time.

We also encourage those of you who are already sustaining members to consider bumping up to the next level. If you’re already committed to $5 a month, do you think you can bump it up to $10? I mean, you’ll be abstaining from something during Lent anyway. Think about it – for the price of a doughnut and a coffee, you could double a $5-a-month investment in The Classical Network. You’d be strengthening the classical music service you love – and it’s a lot less fattening!

Call us now at 1-888-232-1212, or visit our website at wwfm.org and click on the “We love our Sustaining Members” link at the top of the page.

Thank you to all of you who have kept us strong over the past 35 years. I hope you’ll join me today – as a sustaining member – for a carnival blow-out, from 12 to 4 p.m. EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.