A dinner is long enough for folk to decide if they ever want to see their fellow-diners again. One benchmark that our guests have 'clicked' is Michael Jordan telling Margaret MacMillan to call him "Mike," as his friends do. Good stuff.

Now as we stand waving 'Goodbye' from our front door -- it's chilly out there -- Barb and I tell ourselves that, by and large, the party has been a success. If our guests had a time-line for withdrawing, it was late in the evening.

Then we overhear an outdoor conversation among our guests: they're lingering by their cars on the street. We could well be mistaken, but Barb and I suspect Margaret is inviting Michael and Tom Hodgkinson to visit her. At her College in Oxford next summer. (She’ll be working there on her next history, on the high-level conference with Churchill, F.D. Roosevelt, and Stalin at Yalta towards the end of World War II.)

That rendezvous probably will happen, as Oxford's not far from Tom's seaside farm in Devon. Globe-trotting Michael, of course, gets to go wherever he wants.

We sense Margaret won’t be having Tom and Michael in for coffee, but for a 'proper' high tea (whatever that is). That occasion would unfold in her special quadrangle with its dreamy, soulful British spires.

Barb and I now brood that we too weren't issued that invitation, if such a tender was made. Barb says sometimes we mishear things.

Even so, postmortem questions nag. Perhaps Margaret’s invite will be in tomorrow's e-mail? Or perhaps she was put off by my continually imitating F.D. Roosevelt with my 'excessive' “Grands!!”? Did Margaret dislike Barb’s cooking? Barb directly offered her tonight's recipes -- but somehow, maybe in the bustle of leaving, Margaret didn’t remember to ask for them. Neither, for that matter, did Michael or Tom.

Could it also be that Margaret was irked by my sucking-up to Michael? True, I did flaunt by wearing his endorsed and pricey Air Jordan brand of Nike sneakers. (Those shoes had been left behind by one of our out-of-the-house sons.) Agreed, the aura around Air may be less today than a decade ago.

And it may just be the 16-year-old within me, but among the menfolk of my family, Michael remains a saint, more immediate than any Saint Monday. Even if Michael was invited to Oxford and we weren't.

No point, though, in us hosts beating ourselves up about not getting Margaret’s call. Margaret would be a wonderful hostess and fellow-diner anywhere, but Barb and I now realize that Oxford isn't really so pleasant a place anyhow.

Sure, punting in its river would have been interesting. Still, those muddy patches on that deep river could be arduous. Apparently the mud clings to the 16-ft. poles when the punter least expects it. What's more, the old/new town gets overrun with summer-time crowds. Too many damn pushy tourists jostling around all those intimidating buildings. Screw that.

Let younger bucks do the punting. It'll be Venice for us.

There's only a shrinking window of opportunity now, but Margaret might invite us yet.

Settling again in our LR, Rick unfurls his old humiliating story about how he was 'motivated' into going online. How many times have I heard that story?

All the same, as I say while pouring liqueur, many people can date their involvement with the Net to a particular episode. I tell how my sister Mary Lou, for example, realized she 'had' to learn about the information highway one day in 1995. She was walking down a hall and happened to see two colleagues looking at a map. It was a hard copy, printed from online only a minute earlier, of the expected path for a Caribbean hurricane. "Do you think this will affect my trip to Mexico?", one colleague was worrying. Mary Lou says that moment was her trigger towards computer literacy.

After Rick declares that Tim invented e-mail, we hear that particular inventor really was Ray Tomlinson, a computer engineer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tomlinson had the idea in 1971 that it would be as easy to send messages on a computer network as it already was to send files. Apparently, 30 to 40 seconds later, Tomlinson came up with the @ sign to identify users’ and senders’ names.

E-mail’s provenance gives me a charge, since Rick and I -- together with our first-born son –- during 1971 lived only 3 miles away from that Cambridge. We rented a third-floor walk-up @ Newtonville. To tonight's guests, however, I do not brag about that 'bond.'

Ray Tomlinson should be a household name, don't you think? Do computer people have awards like Oscars and Nobels?

(Tonight is the chattiest Rick and I have ever been with masters of computerland. Once, though, we sat behind Bill Gates flying economy on Northwestern. We had seen an article indicating he flew economy class on that airline. We're fairly certain it was Microsoft Man -- we caught a frontal look too. We saw what we wanted to believe.

(Before take-off, a stewardess kept trying to prompt that red-haired, bespectacled guy to turn off his electronic device. He was as stubborn as a CEO, shutting his laptop only at the last minute.

(So Rick wrote a note asking the Man to give our first-born a job interview. A thousand air miles later, we crossed out the word ‘interview.’

(Pity, neither of us had the nerve to give him that note. When we landed, Rick handed him his coat from the overhead compartment, helping him on with it.)

Lisa Kudrow interrupts my above flashback. She says she takes pleasure in the Web’s universality. She is glad no one institution controls it with proprietary claims.

Further she praises Tim for the notion that any piece of information anywhere on the Web should have an identifier, a URL or Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that would allow users to capture hold of it?

Lisa remarks, upbeatly, that Tim Berners-Lee and Jack Kilby stand as exemplars of her proposition that it is “not just how smart you are –- but how creative you are with your smarts”.

I am about to say something about there being a whole lot of kinds of ‘smarts’ to be creative about, like hymn-singing smarts, enthusiasm smarts, happy smarts, basketball smarts like our guest last month Michael Jordan, etc. But I have already bent our subjects of tonight's conversations enough. I know that listening confers respect, and I am determined to listen...

I notice, Rick, I notice.

We’ll talk about this later.

Following Lucian Freud and Hu Jintao into our dining space, I express a Folklorist’s interest in Elisabeth Lloyd’s research. Sitting down on my right, she affirms, “Yes, female orgasm is very mysterious. Nor has science thrown much light on it. In my book, I examine 20 explanations which turn out to be completely unsupported by the evidence. They were hopelessly bad science. I like good science.”

As Hu opens the bottle of water he has brought tonight, Elisabeth clarifies that most evolutionary biologists believe that every single body-part has a purpose. For instance, those academics argue that the purpose of the man’s orgasm is to inseminate women with child. With low standards of evidence, these scientists have been resolute in asserting that females respond to intercourse in the same way that males respond to intercourse -- with orgasm.

Not necessarily so, Elisabeth says. One point is that female orgasm during intercourse is altogether variable. Fact is, only a small fraction of women always respond to intercourse with orgasm. And for three out of four women, orgasm occurs by direct hand-stimulation of the clitoris.

The scholarly phrase, I learn, is ‘assisted intercourse.”

Barb and Lucian Freud exchange a glance. They don't seem at odds with each other.

(What flashes thru my mind right now is this. As a seventh grader on the wild side, before I knew much about life -- remember, that was way back in the tame, antediluvian '40s -- I submitted to our school newspaper a smart-alecky article about our music teacher. She played organ at her church and at Wednesday Night Sing-Alongs in the local movie theater. My text referred to that teacher as an ‘orgasm.’ That was a word I’d vaguely heard bruited-about, which I must have thought had edge (although that connotation of 'edge' was then unknown to me). Maybe too, I was envious of whatever majesty that word conveyed. A friend of mine was horrified, and more knowing: she persuaded me to tone down my language and call the teacher an ‘organism’ instead. I did. To myself now, I also recall another teacher, the faculty censor. He rejected my whole article and afterwards spoke rudely to my parents.)

Back at tonight's party, I continue tuning-out something Hu Jintao is telling me about externalities and consequences. And how activities that address problems in one sector create interlocking problems in other sectors. I cock my ears, but not my eyes, across the room. There Elisabeth Lloyd, responding to Lucian Freud’s specific inquiry, is repeating that the orgasm itself appears to be strictly for fun. This time, she adds that a woman’s climax can presently be seen as “useless” for biological purposes as a pair of male nipples.

------------
UPDATE: After our guests left, Barb asked me about the girl, the "knowing friend" who'd suggested the word change in my article about the organist. Last I'd heard, Emma was a beautiful grandmother somewhere.

Munching a handful of pecans, Bob Geldof leans over to ask Billy Graham, sitting nearby: “Why do you think you were invited to this party, Dude?” That question is posed with genuine curiosity about what he and Billy have got themselves in for here.

So begins the sets of stories we tell about ourselves.

In his deep North Carolina timbre, Billy muses that evangelists are wanted wherever folk are God-fearing and seeking a new life; “the Gospel that we talk about is good news to the individual that his own sins are forgiven.” That outlook on Heaven and God's love, he says, is what’s kept him preaching, and overseeing magazines, training programs, websites, a retreat center, and more.

At first, that’s about as far as Billy will travel in memory. I don’t want to force the conversation, but… but I do. Gradually I draw out, among other affirmations, that Billy feels “I’m not going to Heaven because I’ve read the Bible, nor because I’ve preached to a lot of people. I’m going to Heaven because of what Christ did.”

I broach the subject of Billy’s revivals, and it seems that some 185 countries have provided settings for them -- everywhere and anywhere, Billy says. There’s a light in his eyes as he speaks of living by God’s rules, by the Scripture’s rules. The rules are part of what the Bible teaches; they are not just what he, Billy, believes.

Inasmuch as there’s no set of Biblical rules for racial segregation, Billy’s always refused to conduct a meeting if black and white participants were isolated from each other. He’s proud to have paid bail money to spring Martin Luther King Jr. from jail during the U.S’s civil rights tempests.

“Ever get arrested on your own?” Bob baits.

“No, but if saying things in public that cause spectators to heckle, slug, and throw garbage at me, I would have been in jail a long time ago,” Billy says about his years-ago pitches on street corners. “Not that there’s anything wrong in serving jail time for God’s principles,” Billy adds.

Billy bats Bob’s ‘starter’ question back to Bob: “Why do you suppose that you were invited?’ Billy acts as if he knows the answer.

Bob dithers in replying -- he tilts his head 45 degrees, looks as if he’s pondering something in his past, and slowly finishes up his cheese and cracker. Billy uses that opening to present his ‘take’: Bob and he have been invited because they each convey a non-denominational message of hope, love, and urgent concern.

That sounds god-awful holy, yet I suppose that is our justification. Barb and I aren’t hoping to ‘bond’ with our guests -- we’re far too different from them for that -- but we’d like a ‘bridge’ over to them.

(I'm of an age that ponders the Afterlife. Thus if that topic comes up tonight, Joan may draw on her present career to tell me what lies ahead. Billy may reassure or energize me about the beauties of God. And Bob, well, Bob may try to hold me to the most godly standards of altruism in this life.)

Having given Billy’s ‘Why do you suppose?’ query some thought, Bob says he’s bringing to the table assorted personas: “Which Bob do you want? Do you want Boomtown Bob? Band Aid Bob? Big Breakfast Bob? Bob and Paula?”

Real quick, Joan of Arc purses her lips, emits a half-snort, and leans her shoulders away from Bob. She had appeared to like him as Singer & Dancer for her kid -- but now Barb and I both notice she’s looking uncomfortable. If Joan deems that Bob’s various personae are frivolous, tonight we may be in for an overload of piety.

HELP!

When Joan and I re-enter the LR, everyone is sitting around munching cheese on crackers. (This afternoon, I had mixed a mild cheese with a spicy topping of pepper jelly). Bob Geldof is explaining that he has Boomtown Bob and other narratives within him. And that he is evolving all the time. “Life has widened the narrow identities I started with.”

Billy Graham appreciates that perspective, saying that certainly he too is not the same man that he was, say, 20, 30, 40 years ago. "I am still a man in process.”

To which Bob says, “Do you ever run into the hellfire preacher who used to be you?” Instead of answering directly, Billy points to Bob’s slightly chubby gut and asks, “How long as it been, Bob, since you stopped working out at the gym?”

Gazing down at his belly, Bob smirks.

But then Billy does run with the idea of the guy he used to be. He shares examples of how he has tempered his hellfire views. “I talk less about sinning and more about having an abundant life. Less about fearing God and more about accepting God’s saving grace. I talk less about satanic forces in human affairs and a lot more about compassion.”

We all go on the record as favoring compassion, yes.

Joan of Arc says that identities not only change but, worse, can be misperceived. “Case in point: I get the impression that you gentlemen assume little Francois in there,” she points to her baby in the BR, “was from my womb.”

How come Joan is excluding me with that ‘you gentleman’ bit? Of course I assume Francois is hers. And what a strange phrase, "from my womb." Melodrama.

“Yes, yes,” we all react, although now we also are beginning to wonder. “And you seem like such a natural mother,” Billy Graham smiles.

“Well, my friends in this room,” she says without resentment but with a touch of psychospeak, “like other men in History, you have misperceived me. Sorry but I cannot construct myself as a biological mother. And Francois? Ah, dear Francois, he’s the child I nurtured, up to the end of my trial. I hope you don't mind that I brought him along tonight?”…

Joan of Arc straightens her granny glasses, leans forward intently, and dials the time machine back: “Which Joan would you like here? Maid Joan, a mere lark in the skies of France, the country girl who rivaled other women in her village with the needle and spindle?"

A short pause. She must have been working-up this patter for many minutes here.

“Or Chosen Joan, with a God-given, gigantic mandate to assist her King in triumphing over English forces? Soldier Joan, ultimately the titular head of the French army’s victories at Jargeau, Meung-sur-Loire, Beaugency, Patay, Troyes, and St. Pierre-le-Mouthier? Heretic Joan, captured by English interests and declared a heretic by pro-English clergy coerced into producing a guilty verdict? Or Saint Joan, fried at the stake, only to be declared innocent 24 years later by the Pope? All right, Billy Graham and Bob Geldof, exactly which Joan is it that you want? Tell me now, which?”

Billy and Bob sort of catch on, their jaws tumble, their eyebrows wag, and something like an incredulous “No! You don’t mean…?” question begins to tumble across their faces. Rick shrugs with pretended nonchalance, as if to ask, “You were expecting someone on this side of the grass?” To suspend their disbelief and steady the ship, as firmly as I can, I profess, “Let’s all try to live in the moment, this never-before, never-again moment. For tonight, Joan is contemporary with us. That is all we need to know.”

After some exclamations and reassurance from Rick and me, the guest Dudes abide. Our male guests come around to preferring Crusader Joan -- the campaigner atop a white horse brandishing an ancient sword (or was it a white banner?), galvanizing her troops while articulating her faith: “ “Help yourself and God will find you!”

Billy is gazing at Joan now with newfound appreciation. He too was a farmer’s child, and these two discuss their common roots. Joan has her favorite Pope, and seems to find pleasure in what Billy says about his wonderful personal friend, another Pope (John Paul II) -- “he taught us that the Lord is working when we die...Very few people have allowed the press to cover so much of his last hours. And I think that was a tremendous encouragement to Christians, because almost everybody thinks about death.”

Billy announces that while our modern enemies certainly differ from Joan’s, we need to honor her dynamism in the face of opponents. Joan shares a pleasant facial expression, but opts instead to honor the visions of her voices.

Bob and Joan chat brightly on how they share something of a preoccupation with voices: she heard them and twice he organized them for the world to hear. Bob says that Joan’s ‘Help Yourself’ credo might be a useful part of everybody’s DNA. Then comes the highest praise: he could use her help to convince the well-to-do to aid Africa.

Joan seems to have changed her attitude towards Bob. I wager that if I were to ask her now to characterize the guy who three hours ago called her sweatshirt's message “ballsy,” I wager she would say he is great. And that she always has thought so…

I step out to the porch, descend a step, and watch Danica Patrick exiting her Mercedes Benz 30. A host gets to greet warmly.

I was going to type here that she looks into my eyes confidently. Everybody engages in private thoughts all the time, and right now my thoughts are that her eyes are a mix of self-belief and vulnerability.

Danica’s brunette, evocatively dressed, and (I’d guess) 100 pounds. Her relatively low body weight must help in auto-racing. Maybe it’s the lighting, but I’m floored at how gorgeous she is.

Danica reminds me of another young and spunky brunette, also a mind-booster, who works at a local donut & coffee shop. She beams as she gives us our coffees, and chaps like me tip her directly. That is, we used to tip directly. That practice ticked-off other servers and they successfully insisted all tips go into a bowl by the cash register. Now tips are fewer.

Danica and I do not converse about her spouse. He’s at home tonight. Frankly, I don’t exactly remember what we do converse about. For all I know, we might have even considered whether the U.S. downturn (as mirrored in today's announcement of job losses) would affect other nations' economies. Less or perhaps equally pretentiously, we might have chatted about Bret Favre's retirement from the Packers. I don't remember. Whatever, our talk was a neat couple of moments for this septuagenarian. She appeals to younger ages too -- she won Nickelodeon Kids' Choice awards as favorite female athlete in a poll that drew nearly 87 million votes.

James Dean’s eyes are aglow, he’s got a cheesy smile, he’s leaning over toward Danica Patrick’s armchair, and he’s clearly trying to wow. Let the record show that she doesn’t flirt or bat her eyes back.

When she alludes to her teen-age years, however, Danica does look at James, cursorily. She says that, like James, she chose to leave home as an adolescent. (Offhand, I’m amazed that she knows that much about James. After all, he was a goner before she was even born.)

Danica’s need was for seat time with open-wheel racing in England…“Definitely England is the most competitive area. Everybody that’s great from every country comes to its concentrated 'formulas.' From the airport leaving to go over there, I remember my mom and dad and sister, and they were starting to get choked up. My dad said, ‘I couldn’t imagine you not going and not having this opportunity.’”

Behind Danica all the way and aware she'd be going at speeds in excess of 200 m.p.h., they wished her “luck and safety.”

“Luck and Safety, we all need that,” James chirps. “Don’t forget you need Clear Goals,” Barb adds, “especially after several iterations.” Now if I had rewound Chris Peters’s earlier statement about iterations like that, my words would have smacked of sarcasm. In Barb’s manner, however, that sally sounds mellow, as if she and Chris were goal-keepers for the same team.

Joshing ensues between the champion of Luck’s Vagaries (mainly James) and Get-Up-And-Go (mainly Danica, who says that “Man, people need to take personal responsibility for their situations”).

So far, those touchstones are the closest anyone tonight has come to explicitly sorting out prescriptions for our "Life As A Race" theme. Nobody so far has mentioned the necessities for Perception and Ambition -- qualities that I associate with each guest.

There’s no recitation either of qualities honored in bowling, like Playing Fair, Being Ready When It’s Your Turn, & Confining Your Bowling To Your Own Lane. Chris also hasn’t alluded to the imperatives for ‘making it’ as a Microsoft manager, like Keeping Technical & Business Considerations In Mind Simultaneously, Embracing & Acquiring & Sometimes Bludgeoning & Bullying The Competition, and so forth.

I suspect Barb also expected more prescriptions out of our three experts on life in the fast lane. We hear nothing akin to virtues emblazoned at the YMCA pool where we swim -- Caring, Honesty, Respect, & Responsibility. Overlooked too are those sacred themes of struggle that the Olympic movement borrowed from a school in Paris -- Swifter, Higher, & Stronger. Just last week at the funeral of Sharon (a good friend of Barb's), her eulogist summed-up Helen's guidelines as Live, Love, & Laugh; those sound values haven't been hinted at either. Equally forgotten are maxims our kids used to recite at meetings of Boy & Girl Scouts, like Be Prepared and Be A Friend. And how's about those values of Native North Americans, like Trust, Honesty, Humility, Wisdom, and Bravery? Perhaps those qualities -- beside the old standbys of Hope, Stamina, Selflessness, Solvency, and Good Table Manners -- are assumed to be seminal.

Perhaps this whole quest for priorities in ‘Life As A Race’ is misbegotten. Probably every page in a dictionary sets forth decent priorities.

Danica says something about learning to navigate the “whiz” of the traffic and finishing second in England’s Formula Ford Festival. “That’s my most memorable achievement" Later, talk-show host David Letterman became one of her memorable sponsors. Now she's part of the strong team organized by Michael Andretti, son of the great racer Mario Andretti and a former racer himself.

James Dean voices doubt that he could have “fit in” at Microsoft for an extended time -- even if he had been Bill Gates’s hire number 105 (that’s what Chris Peters was). James says he’s been thinking about how to phrase a concern of his. Chris gestures a ‘Go for it,’ and so James unfurls: “Do you mean to tell me that you Microserfs could be expressive? Could open up about emotions? Or do you mean to tell me that you had to keep a happy face and bottle up your feelings?”

“Could you run that by again?”

“No problem. What I'm getting at is this: How did you guys cope with nightmare bosses screeching at you in your interdependent roles? And how about godawful sadness and personality conflict on the job? What happened to those who couldn’t leverage their strengths or couldn’t live within the rules? Importantly, were there ways they could put their agonies to work for the greater good?”

I’m baffled, but Chris is at the ready: “There were bads and goods. The stupid guys were screeched at, sure. There were hassles, and some decisions brought heartbreak to workers on discontinued projects,” Hire 105 reflects, absorbing James’s hit and conceding a point.

“Nothing’s simple anymore," Chris continues. "When I was hired, it was another small software company. We could see our projects through to launch. We were practical but not mechanistic, if that’s what you’re getting at. We so-called Microserfs could decide when to take a few steps back in the short run in order to make greater strides in the long run. We were gung-ho. We tried to think big. We wanted to rise above the status quo. We had exceptional individuals, creative, free-thinking, diverse, proactive, not afraid of change -- and in need of a challenge.”

To this day, Chris is a Microsoft loyalist and overly gung-ho PR man for his ex-company: “As far as I know, the corporation’s still like that… James, am I speaking to your question?”

Before James has a chance to reply, Chris scratches his bald spot and remembers the question that led to this Microsoft endorsement, James's thing about agonies: “When people’s values aren’t congruent with the organization, when they aren’t internally motivated, when they disagree with a decision, well, they just leave, sometimes to join other workgroups in the organization.…”

“Your storyline is a good one," James says slowly, as if he has to sort out Chris's rhetoric from the real. "They felt exhilaration as well as rejection -- I get that. They did the best with what they had...”

“Absolutely. Our people had Discipline. They used their Knowledge and Skill Sets. When all’s said and done, James, note well: some sadness and anxiety are normal. However, an antidote to inevitable disappointment is Hard Work.”

“Yeah,” James blows a smoke ring, something which I haven't seen anyone do in decades, “and here’s a little thing that I have to note well: an antidote to Hard and Miserable Work is Imagination. And sometimes, Chris ole sport, you have to hit bottom before you have it. Hitting bottom can be a prelude to creativity.”

Barb agrees, and Chris doesn’t disagree. Me? I muzzle a yawn. Danica says, “So James, how did you handle your on-the-job agonies?”

“Away from the studio, I tried to get rid of the clutter by playing bongo drums, but that helped only a little. You can’t escape sadness. It’s part of what a full life throws at you.”

Danica Patrick volunteers, “Funny, James, you should say that. Naturally, insecurities and anxieties creep into a racer’s life too. I don’t play drums or ping-pong like they do at Microsoft, but now that I think of it, I do deal with my job’s downside. At home I find untapped possibilities in designing sports clothes. That means my family and I work on fashion, color, fabric, style, applied math, pricing, sizing, marketing, shipping, webmastering even.”

On our table in the adjacent dining room, Barb (who's been a new level of kitchen-busy) has just put the whipped cream on the cold creme of asparagus & mushroom soup. Those ingredients are in season (read: cheap). Seven hours ago, I cut and stirred them with chicken broth, butter, flour, pepper, and juice from half a lemon, storing my brew in the fridge until a little while ago.

Our three guests, however, don’t seem to want to budge from our music circle. So Barb brings in the living room a tray for each of us to eat off of. We haven’t used those trays for years, so she has to dust them after we haul them up from the basement.

Before anyone can take a sip, by way of a prayerful Grace, Anna Amalia gives us a pitch from the harpsichord and leads us in a half-dozen or so musical ‘Hallelujahs,’ guiding her right hand up and down to induce the high and low notes and sacred air that she wants.

Barb distributes the protein shake that lean Kenny Chesney had requested in advance. She's disappointed that Kenny won’t try out the goodies she’s later places on everyone else's trays -- chicken schnitzel, hot potato salad, baked sauerkraut with apples, and the cabbage casserole that Anna brought.

Anna tells how she was happy in providing artists with a true home and a spiritual family. At large feasts, she'd sit in a chair watching happy faces of guests savoring her labor of love. (Does our Duchess exaggerate or lie? Doubtless she had cooks who did the actual preparation? I've never met a Duchess before, so I'll give her the benefit of the doubt.)

Anna confesses that once when the food wasn’t as tasty as she would have liked, she had to endure dangerous sniping, even hostility, from her guests.

Kenny assures her that since guests kept returning, she should take that as a vote of support. Kenny wins a smile from her and with a grin, promptly forgoes his radical diet. We're all happy to see him digging into the food.

Hand slicing the air vertically, Anna claims that similar to Kenny, she’s conscious of her extra weight, and so for 35 years she fought for the rights of over-weight people. (How precisely did she fight for them? I wonder, but am reluctant to ask.) With a shudder, Anna says she could never go on a protein-drink regimen. She says her personality changes when she’s overweight. With a margin of error plus or minus 3 to 5 pounds, I do not see Anna as chunky. A person can think others notice their problems, but often they don’t.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau mentions how episodes of TV’s Sopranos generally feature a meal -- just folks like us co-mingling and enjoying each other. “However, if something looks idyllic or familial,” Kenny warns, “it can be glum.”

Munch, munch, the rest of us chew.

There’s pain in the best of families, but no one steps up to extend the conversation with particulars of their families' glums. Just as well -- after a hard week, who needs party-dampeners?

(Reminiscence: I'm 11 or 12 or 13 years old and an energetic neighbor lady volunteers to teach a half-dozen of us kids how to do the foxtrot. Fortunately that maneuver was to see me through the years, including two weddings.

(Oh, have I ever mentioned that Barb and I had one wedding in a big city-hall with urban chums and some family? The next day, at a rural church we had our second wedding with country chums and other family.

(Hey -- long before those weddings, in Mrs. Brown's class we also negotiated the box step, the waltz, and best of all the Delphoi Dip. The last was racy then but real tame by today’s norms. Not at all like anybody’s sexy tractor.

(I'd do the Dip then & there with Henrietta K. I was smitten by, or had a case of proximity infatuation for, Henrietta...although I doubt she ever knew it.)

Anyway, re: tonight's narrative: a couple minutes ago, out of the blue I revived the Delphoi with Anna Amalia. She went along with it -- and, get this, she wasn't heavy to Dip with. I will say, however, that for most of the time Duchess Anna was hard to lead around the dance floor. She had her own ideas about where and how to go.

Now that we’re seated again, out come those wonky stories that Anna telling about her policies as Regent. Is life, story? Or what?

Kenny has this neat way of raising & lowering the pot ten or so inches as he quickly pours the coffee that Barb's made. Cool -- he doesn't spill a drop outside our cups.

A couple hours ago, when Rick got up to go to the bathroom, our troupers were leaving the building. That was 5:30ish.

Now that we're downstairs again, Rick and I survey the scene. We're tickled that Anna Amalia, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and Kenny Chesney had found a scrap of paper to write us an affable thank-you note. "We're exhausted but we've reached the state of elation that musicians live for," the note declares. With a flourish, they had signed their names and let themselves out.

Of course everything is in place. Nothing has been stolen. Not that we were worried.

Anna has forgotten her casserole dish. It is fine Hohenzollern china that she certainly will want back. We take that as a good sign, deluding ourselves that she is giving herself a pretext to pay us another visit.

Feel-Good Alert: as far as we know, and certainly as we are keen to think, all our visitors had a swell time, and our neighbors were not bothered after midnight by the beautiful noise.

It was all quite wondrous, exactly as life can be.



_________________________
For company on Friday, June 6, we are trying to interest three interesting entrepreneurs. See you then?

In the meantime, for accounts of past parties, click our Archives. We did live blogging for the following:

November with basketball's Michael Jordan, history's Margaret MacMillan, and idlers' Tom Hodgkinson;

December with www's Tim Berners-Lee, transistors' Jack Kilby, and TV's Lisa Kudrow;

January with China's President Hu Jintao, painting's Lucian Freud, and biology's Elizabeth Lloyd;

February with Joan of Arc, Rev. Billy Graham, and Live Aid & Live 8's Bob Geldof; and

March with Hollywood's James Dean, racing's Danica Patrick, and bowling & Microsoft's Chris Peters.

Other greats, our grandkids, were visiting us on April's First Friday, so no celebrity came knocking.

“The tastes and flavors of your Little India are sensational, Perween Warsi tells me, getting into the car a little after the appointed time. “And your pushcart vendors -- their roasted corn is as good as anything you’ll find anywhere.”

It is not long before we two householders are discussing rising costs in the food chain. Perween precisely ticks off the causes, as if she'd been a delegate to this week's UN Food Summit in Rome. She particularly blames the rise on agricultural taxes and over-regulation of farms and organic growers.

Perween says she won her first big-store contract, to supply chilled and frozen dishes, through blind tasting. And through her persistence. Her company’s brand is confident: “Sensationally Better Eating.”

She tells me, moreover, that cooking is her hobby. She finds it therapeutic.

I know that Brits think of Perween as helping to create a new breed of Asian female entrepreneur. Sure enough, as we tool along the highway, I get that Perween sees herself as self-reliant. A true believer in economic freedom and open competition. She has the steel and drive to thrive in hercut-throat industry.

I brief Perween on tonight's other guests. Already she is in the know about Muhammad Yunis of Bangladesh -- Perween is from the nearby Indian state of Bihar. She and I hash out how Muhammad earned a doctorate at Vanderbilt, returned to Bangladesh to teach university economics, compiled a list of the 42 most impoverished women in the village beside his campus, and paid off their debts (which were crippling those villagers). The total payout to the money-lenders, from Muhammad’s own pocket, was $27. All that Muhammad asked of these often-illiterate peasants was to work hard and to repay when they could.

All in all, Perween seems thrilled at the prospect of soon meeting this great man. Along with partner organizations in Bangladesh and beyond, “He has helped make 4.7 million destitute families self-supporting,” Perween boasts. “His is not just a blown-up story that south Asians tell each other.”

When I identify our other guest, Perween Warsi appears, well, shocked: “A baseball player?!” She knows nothing about Jackie Robinson being historically the most significant player in baseball, ever. “He was the first African-American allowed to play in the major leagues. Baseball’s integration gave impetus to racial inclusion by other organizations.”

Some more background and Perween is no longer creeped out. She offers something of a long view about Jackie breaking the color barrier: “You can’t hold good people back forever.”

In-between my pointing out special buildings that we’re driving past, I give an account of Jackie’s early and later years with the Dodgers. Early on, as a rookie, he turned the other cheek to taunts from resentful teammates, opposing dugouts, and so-called ‘fans’ who sent him death threats. Later, as a well-established MVP, Jackie talked back to guys who hollered for him to carry their bags and polish their shoes. The forbearing Jackie is the guy many venerate. My husband is amused that less attention has been given to combative Jackie, the provoked one. The guy who could slide into second with his spikes high.

When we pull into our driveway, Jackie and Rick are there to open the car doors for us. No sign of Muhammad Yunus. Jackie gets a kick out of welcoming me to my own place.

Perween clutches Jackie’s hand and in a low voice, wishes she had been around to see his “controlled recklessness. Barb’s been telling me about your style of running bases. I heard that you’d drive competitors craaaazy. I love that.”

In a surprisingly high-pitched voice (which I had not expected), Jackie banters, “You got kind words, huh?”...

As Rick pours another red wine for Jackie Robinson, I wade in: “Our kids ignore advice. They are plugged into their own worlds. Nonetheless every now and then –- I admit, it is rare these days -- but they almost seek tips from people like us who have life-journeyed further. On many complexities, they are better informed that Rick and I are, but they also seem to almost want something pithy to ponder. Perspective. We do not want to put you on the spot for a long Perspective, a short one to chew on is fine. Our daughter-in-law likes “Food is Love.” Our son Michael likes 'The mark of truly smart persons is to know where they're stupid.'"

Perween Warsi, who evidently has been mulling, says, “Poor Lord Chesterfield. You know, his son didn’t follow through on his father’s many suggestions.”

That I did not know. "There is another thing you should know," I come clean. People our age like to sum-up, pontificate, pass on wisdom to the young. It is not too early for even you to come aboard the advice train."

It is a wistful grimace Perween wears, saying "Life isn't easy, so why should advice be easy?"

Agreement of sorts comes from Jackie: "Advice doesn't always help. Some element makes it pertinent for some and not for others."

“As I learned from my Mother,” Muhammad Yunus shifts in his chair, “with stories, you enter artificial worlds. Those worlds include accurate slices of reality.”

He has not given up on his theme. I thought we had shelved the story-telling notion. It is late in the evening, but Muhammad is glooming onto whole stories. Rick and I were looking for distilled wisdom, just that. Sound-bites, not paragraphs.

Why at this moment does it suddenly occur to Rick that he/we totally forgot to serve his potato/salmon soup? He was riffing about Sardar when the time was apt. Seeing the empty bowls still stacked on our buffet table, Rick offers to fetch the soup from the stovetop...