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.

Tim Berners-Lee says his “Aha” moment came to him while working after Oxford at CERN, a Swiss nuclear physics institute. ”I needed something to organize myself. I needed to be able to keep track of things and nothing out there – none of the computer programs that you could get, the spreadsheets and the databases, would really let you make this random association between absolutely anything and absolutely anything.”

Out of that need, and from CERN’s corporate wish to maintain coherent documentation among teams of visiting high-energy physicists, Tim began cobbling together a free, global database of information. He devised underlying protocols that ordinary folk could key into. Now, almost 20 years later, Tim's dismayed to see the Web corrupted by porn websites, spam, cyber-bullies, potentially dangerous chat rooms, and hackers who steal fortunes or top secrets.

Because I checked out a porno site, once it was -- with my Folklorist’s curiosity and academic interest in the Dionysian -- I let out a smirk. Does Barb notice?

Our visitors dart off. Rick and I return to clean up our dining/kitchen area. After we pick up the plate that Hu Jintao pretended to spin (an ancient Chinese art) and after we scrape away the crumbs on Elisabeth Lloyd's dessert plate, after that, we notice something sad: Lu Freud had eaten off a dish that is chipped. It's actually a plate with a dragon on it. Imported from China. What isn't these days?

Anyway, we goofed. Yep, we will do better next time.

All the same, I can not help having serious regrets: I was supposed to get that plate. Not a guest. Certainly not Lu...

Billy Graham, who once spoke to one million Asians by TV satellite link, wonders aloud how Joan might have gone over on TV. Very well, he suggests, even on non-religious channels.

Bob Geldof wonders aloud what his native land might be humming today if Joan been born Irish. He claims Ireland might be even happier and free of the English sooner. Bob also notes that about the same time that Joan was leading an uprising against the English in France, Irish renegades were uprising against the English in Ireland. Less successfully, though, in the Irish case.

Joan wonders aloud what sort of ride she would have had as a player today. Would she, for instance, have welcomed the United Kingdom into the European Union? How would she feel about the farm subsidies now supporting part of what was her parents’ 50 acres in Lorraine? Would she have supported Sarkozy's tough economic policies? Context is all, and so none of us ventures anything about a 21st century Joan.

Barb wonders aloud how this woman from the provinces in “repressive, repressive” times managed to overcome the dismissive attitudes of veteran generals. As head of French forces, how on earth did she work such miracles as to lift the siege at Orleans in only nine days?

I wonder aloud how the Hundred Years’ War would’ve ended had Joan not experienced those visions or voices, the ones who told her to recover her homeland from English domination.

James Dean gives out with another of his patented “Well then, there now” sentences. That’s his response to my reference to the disastrous speech at that Folk-Singing conference. I take James’ remark as a sign of Empathy & Social Skill. Barb and I answer somewhere between a smile and a nod.

An Oscar might have been on James's mantle had he lived to take home the Academy Award he was up for. With Perseverance, which incidentally is one of my top guidelines in Life As A Race, Barb says that James might have become “the Marlon Brando of his generation.” Chris Peters looks dubious.

There’s a lull in our introspections as we adjourn to the dining area. Danica circles the table and sits first. Food is passed around. Nobody says much about anything.

James mumbles to Danica Patrick something about Fate. Whatever it was, she blushes, but not a damsel-in-distress blush. Not that I know much about every woman's blushes.

Anna Amalia’s handshake strikes me as guarded, her look critical. I almost sense she might send me back to the kitchen. Surely, though, I misperceive. Maybe she is puzzled about why on earth we summoned her tonight.

Maybe I should have dressed more fancy? But tonight is not a costume drama.

We all sit, but not before Anna fluffs our chairs’ pillows and realigns our flower bouquets. She directs most of her attention to Rick.

I know that polite hosts are not supposed to jab their guests with questions before the meal, but I cannot resist. I ask her about the fire in 2004 of her library with major collections of handwritten musical scripts, German literature, and medieval manuscripts. Knowing that her library is regarded as a significant contribution to Western culture, I butter her up over East and West Germany each wanting it after World War II. (In the end, the holdings were split between the two.)

Oh my, I have it all wrong. The burnt library was not hers, but her aunt’s -- the contemporaneous and same-named Anna Amalia, who was a Princess of Prussia rather than tonight’s visitor, a Duchess of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel. Well, no one has ever called me infallible.

We are told that our guest’s architecturally famous library in Weimar, thank you very much, is still intact with some 850,000 volumes. Icily, Duchess Anna inquires about our library. Rick, trying to lighten the tone after the mix-up and looking for a laugh in this self-deprecatory and ironic era of ours, says our library consists mostly of our kids’ left-behind textbooks. Anna frowns at me.

Anna asks Rick that inevitable question, the one that provides context for conversations, “What do you do?” Rick appreciates that it is not dynamic for a person of his years to say he is retired, lest he come across as too detached from the blooming, buzzing world. So he replies that he is a “self-employed consultant.”

Anna does not press to learn what he consults about or whether his self-employment brings in money.

Anna does not ask what I do.

Her fragrance smells like Mrs. Robinson, the character that Ann Bancroft played in The Graduate.

So where are Kenny Chesney and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau?

We are about to drive Muhammad Yunus back to his home away from home. Rick is fitting the hotel’s bike into our trunk.

Climbing into the front seat, Perween Warsi is purring thanks for the forthcoming ride back to town. She is reminded of rides home she used to give her female workers after night shifts.

Rick's hand is on Jackie Robinson's shoulder, “So when’s the last time you posthumously had a role in somebody’s short story?” Jackie is chuckling.

Then he is gone. Once again, Jackie has stolen home.


_______________

Because next month's First Friday falls on the US Independence Day, we defer our next party to Friday, August 1.

In the meantime, accounts of past parties can be found at our Archives.

November, 2007 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, 2008 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;

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.

May with three music-makers: country singer Kenny Chesney, composer Anna Amalia, and classic baritone Dieter Fischer-Diskau.