I so love hearing professionals shop-talk. Guys in technical fields seem so much at peace talking about their work, as compared to the angst you can get from men who aren't technical.

Wonder if I correctly caught what Tim Berners-Lee was saying about sending information through the air as flashes of light? Did I overhear something about computer pros needing to sell their ideas to marketing and business sides of their organizations?

It is not fair that I am out of the room and can not keep-up with the conversation. Back when I was in the kitchen stirring gravy and cutting cumin-infused lamb, I probably missed out on good talk of browsers, infrastructures, protocols, servers, applications, the works.

When I rejoin the group, Jack Kilby is being questioned. Were his breakthroughs greeted well? Or did he get the cruddy sort of ‘blah’ reaction, Lisa Kudrow explores, that a comedian gets when a joke bombs?

At first, Jack recalls, “there was tremendous criticism…[and several of us] provided the technical entertainment at professional meetings for the next five years as we described and debated the merits of various miniaturization systems…The turning point was two highly visible military programs in the ‘60s -- Apollo Moon and Minute-man Missile.” Both programs adopted the integrated-circuit technology.

Jack singles me out for a sympathetic glance, likely as a follow-up to our discussion an hour ago. I had been talking about modern men and women, when suddenly Rick had said that 'wives are silent partners.' He had quoted from J.M. Barrie's play What Every Woman Knows: behind every successful man is a woman who must do two things -- 1) never allow her man to realize that she is helping him big-time, and 2) always allow him to think that it is his own ingenuity and intelligence that are moving him ahead.

Of course it had been sweet of Rick indirectly supporting my call for male scientists to take on more domestic responsibilities. (I think that's what he had meant with that quote.) Basically, however, I had replied that Rick's 'power behind the throne' argument was anti-feminist. Today's narrative focuses on a two-career couple, rather than the fix-it woman who stands quietly in her husband's shadow. Rick had agreed with my point affably.

That had sunk in with Jack too. He says 'humankind' now like it includes womankind:
“Humankind eventually would have solved the (circuit) matter, but I had the fortunate experience of being the first person with the right idea and the right resources available at the right time in history.”

For his part in history, Tim credits government backing for allowing him to do much of his highest-tech engineering, combining HyperText and Internet for “the Web address which you find in shortened form painted on trucks and vegetables and all kinds of things now.” Tim waxes about W3C developing open technical specifications through a democratic process. Any member can suggest that --

"What's W3C?" bursts Rick. Over to Jack who says to be it stands for the World Wide Web Consortium that Tim oversees in Boston. W3C strives for inter-operability, and thus keep the Web from splintering into factions –- academic, commercial, free. "W3C works for me," Lisa Kudrow says.

She builds on that show of support to launch a far more ambitious question: “What would you say was the Web’s overall achievement?”

For Tim, that's easy. “It allows people to exist in an information space which doesn’t know geographic boundaries. My hope is that it’ll be very positive in bringing people together around the planet, because it’ll make communication between different countries more possible.”

Jack is on the same globe: “I believe the best is yet to come.”

Well now, who wouldn’t believe them?...

It will take some shifting to follow-through on Lisa Kudrow's exit question and the redesigns that she proposed along with Tim Berners-Lee and Jack Kilby. For starters, we will have to re-build a counter, knock-out a non-load bearing wall, and re-locate a china cabinet, five chairs, and three paintings.

Of course we will sink more into debt. We expect an income-tax return to cover most expenses.

We will carve out a new window, since the north light is best for painting pictures. Which is what I do in the dining room when guests are not at hand.

While we are at it, we will repair the kitchen floor and I will gain a new sink. At last!

For the art, ah, for the Art in picking those Pieces, one Piece at a time, thanks you three…

A polite knock at the door. It’s Celia Wellborne, come to share the good news that her husband has found his heavy-duty crane, which had been stolen a week ago from a fenced construction site. The machine is not damaged, but the police haven’t yet nabbed the culprits.

Celia peers in at us in the living room, and waves at Hu, who waves back. Moments after she goes, Hu leads a discussion on the politics of construction, Beijing style. We're told that nowadays over half of the building cranes in the world are in China.

I pop open some of the champagne that Lucian Freud savors, and in response to my request, Elisabeth Lloyd gives the toast. We drink to "Reason.” God only knows why “Reason." Or was it "Good Reason" or "Good Reasoning"? Whatever. As a septuagenarian probably (as a healthy friend says of himself) "down to single digits," I prefer drinking to "Good Health." Elisabeth’s dedication, though, appears to please Hu. Lucian hoists his glass to Reason, but he doesn’t act like his heart is in it. He allows that once he was known around London as an utterly UNreasonable gambler.

We’ve haven’t had a second sip from our glasses before Lucian introduces, as counterpoint, a ray of Buddhist philosophy: people find enlightenment by getting their minds out of the way. That said, we all re-drink, with varying degrees of heartiness, to "Feeling, and To The Mind Not Getting In The Way.” Elisabeth is supportive, remarking that “intuitions are vitally important as fruitful guides [among other things] to Research.”

At times a quite private man about himself tonight, Lucian eventually orates (as artists can be so good at doing) about art and artistic behaviors. At one point, perhaps goaded by Elisabeth’s research, he quotes Pablo Picasso that sex and art are the same thing.

Hu Jintao, who certainly has done his background research for tonight, gets personal: he shares with us that the British typically constrain their jealousy when they see Lucian in the tabloid press hobnobbing with gorgeous female companions. The public accepts the series of beauties as Lucian’s due, as rewards for his high art. Lucian gives a bemused response to this aspect of his busy life being known outside London.

In China, Hu says, personal displays of artistic and intellectual genius or ability can be seen as a form of human plumage, designed to entice sexual partners. Fair enough. In the West too.

Think about it, though. Think how fashion is a kind of language, sending out messages. Yet the suit Hu’s wearing tonight is neither artistic nor intellectual-looking. Sort of churchy. I privately guess Hu is not much into enticing sexual partners.

(Evidently, he’s more into worrying -- as he had said earlier -- about reforming an exchange rate regime that’s been boosting inflation and creating an asset bubble at home. You know, I think he likes worrying about these things too.)

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.

Finished with the meal, everyone had kicked back and lingered at the table, toying with their silverware and coffee saucers. Just a few hours ago, the table had been so clean. Now it is strewn with debris -- two wine corks, linen napkins with spots of mung dal soup, dabs of baby spinach, chocolate smears I had made when I had cut the cake, radishes that had been on salad plates (no one seems to like my peeled-back radishes), a cheese rind from appetizers in the LR (how did those get in here?), and miscellaneous other signs of our happily breaking bread together.

In the LR now, we stretch, self-scratch, return from using the facilities, peek in at the still-slumbering Francois, and appreciate the pink amaryllis plant blooming wild and crazy on the table (it seems to have grown an inch while we were away). Its destiny, Joan of Arc reminds us, is to fall by the wayside -- but meantime, it shines.

Billy Graham has that twinkle in his denim-blue eyes as he regrets the room’s other plants are not getting the respectful attention of the amaryllis. Acting out the old wives’ tale that plants grow better if you talk to them, Bob Geldof feels free enough to be hokey, very hokey, now: he bends, closely faces an ignored poinsettia, and jests, “Can we talk?”

We humans sit back and talk of cabbages and kings, of raspberries and dukes. In due course, Rick tears a stripe off John of Lancaster, the first Duke of Bedford, "the guy with anger issues" who was responsible for burning our Joan of Arc in Rouen. Rick expected, I think, our guests to join in and slag the guy.

That is not happening. Joan may not be 100 percent happy about John, but she has forgiven him and others who trespassed against her.

Rick asks Joan about her early teen years on her family's farm. She tells about the hard work there. Because he knows that many early teen-age girls nag their dads to buy them a horse, Rick then floats a bizarre notion -- that failing to coax her dad into such a gift, Joan at least partiallly was drawn to the military life where leaders could ride white horses. Rick's inquiry is not dignified with a response.

Last in, Chris Peters. He’s un-starched and pleasant, high-energy and independent. For instance, he knocks twice and blasts right in. He won’t let me “go to the trouble” of hanging up his coat. Look for him to push conversations forward.

Vis a vis his bowling interests, I remark that in the 1950s, a typical weekend in my hometown could include going to a bowling alley -- with a pretty girl of course (I glance over at Danica Patrick and would glance appreciatively at Barb too, except she’s giving that tour). Back in Springfield, we’d play 10 or 20 frames, stumble across foul lines, down cherry cokes or beers, and get to know each other better. Maybe we’d have a pizza too. Pizzas were just catching on then.

Chris says that when he was twentysomething, he’d spend days and nights cranking code, crunching numbers, and helping fight off Microsoft’s competitors. Food came from vending machines and god-awful take-out; days passed without his using a fork and knife. However, working with numbers was fun for him then, and the mathematics of bowling is fun for him today: “Scoring is fairly easy, but it’s highly quantitative as a sport.”

I warn Chris that our neighbor may drop in to bend his ear. Ned Wellborne’s a fan of Chris’s and how he “turned around” his bowling league. Chris replies that he’d like to meet him.

As for Danica, she does not bowl, so immediately there’s no connective tissue with Chris on that score. Every day, however, she roller-blades, lifts weights, runs 3 to 5 miles, and completes 90-minute yoga sessions in a hot room with a circuit of 26 poses repeated twice. Observing his awe at hearing this regimen, I sense that Chris -- like me -- does few of those daily exercises.

James Dean shuffles in from his tour of the house with Barb. Introductions are made all around. Chris and Danica are not startled by James’s out-of-placeness. Chris says to James, “I’ve seen you before.”

James doesn’t seem on equal footing with the others. It could be that his inspection of the house has privileged him, or penalized him, in Danica’s and Chris’s eyes.

For the first half of everyone’s glass of sherry, I resurrect our motif for tonight, proposing a toast to “Life As A Rush.” (I had meant to say “Race,” so I re-toast.) Chris Peters offers the toast for the second half of everyone’s glass: “To Leisure. As they say, it’s not a good life without it.” Ummm, the sherry’s second half tastes better than the first.

Chris says that while working-up Word and Excel at Microsoft, he had no time for basketball, folk-singing, theatre, or indeed for any Leisure at all. Once retired from Microsoft, however, he returned to bowling as an amateur. Then he saw that after 36 years of Saturday afternoons on ABC-TV’’s TV’’s Wide World of Sports, the game’s popularity was dwindling. The PBA league was nearing bankruptcy. Approaching his 40th birthday, he was overtaken by “a very Woody Allen-esque fear of mortality.” So rather than sitting around downing lattes, apparently like a number of Microsoft’s well-heeled alums do, Chris says he found a life-extending part of “what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.”

That is different from Rick’s approach to his 70th birthday, retirement time. Unfortunately, he had neither an epiphany nor a retirement ‘mentor,’ nor did he replace his social network at work with another one. For the first couple of years, Rick researched our family history, played with his lathe in the basement, and did some fly-fishing. He wanted to help a federal group inventory public statuary in the county, but that fell through. He looked into learning about navigation and renting a sailboat for six months in the Caribbean, but he relinquished that possibility too.

Out of the corner of my eyes, I notice James Dean is buttering-up Danica Patrick’s piece of bread. Danica accepts it, puts it on her side plate, but does not partake. Pity, because it is a delicious and expensive butter from a small local creamery.

Feeling the need to hold up my share of our conversation, I find a time to interject, “Our next-door neighbor grew up with bowling too and still plays with friends who are keglers. They enjoy it almost as much as watching the televised Olympics.”

“Yes, I’m looking forward to meeting him,” Chris says, and I realize that Rick beat me to the punch, mentioning Ned while I showed James the house.

Now Chris is turning to Danica, they are talking about lanes and earned polls, and whether she is stronger on the ovals or the straight courses. Then on his turf, he is saying that it is difficult to bowl precisely on professional ones. That allows me to weigh how a professional lane differs from an amateur one. As well, I turn over in my mind whether Chris's bowlers actually call themselves ‘keglers’…

Back here in the living room, he’s doing it again. James Dean not only is sucking-up to Danica Patrick, which I can understand, but he is monopolizing the evening’s conversation, which I don’t understand. In the interests of equity, it’s time to call the meeting to order.

I turn to Chris Peters to mimic James’s earlier pretense of tapping (like a prize-fighter) Chris on a shoulder. “Whatcha think?”

Chris maintains that his generation has not been as rebellious as James’s. “Many of us were fortunate enough to be turned on by computers. I got to hang out with “smart people with great development talent and a deep understanding of what it takes to create high-quality, easy-to-use Web software.”

I was about to say something about the different smarts in the bowling world, when Barb prompts: “Life at Microsoft must have been stimulating." I reckon she wants more input from Chris too. “Was it always a battle to the finish in chasing tomorrow’s technology?”

“Yes. it was an intense battle for software supremacy. Like I said once to a workgroup, ‘It’s extremely important to move responsibility very low in the organization. Your goal is not to be working on a project where you can’t sleep at night. Your goal isn’t to have it so that the project leaders can’t sleep at night. Your goal is so that nobody sleeps at night. And when nobody sleeps at night, you have pushed responsibility to the proper level.’”

“Sounds more like the zenith of overlapping instead of running a tight ship," Danica says.

“Exactly. We had broad duties and shared responsibilities up the ying-yang. We were young, and so was the field. I grew older, the place grew bigger –- about 30,000 when I resigned. The place had become more bureaucratic with many fiefdoms, and after 18 years it was time for me to make the break.”

James to Chris: “Your break was a creative impulse!”

Over to Chris, “I suppose. I suppose you could say that creative impulses do feed into sexy computer products for the digital age.”

The sexy ones in the room, plus me, disavow the notion that computer products, however alluring, can be remotely sexy.

I cannot get over what a relief it is to see that our Anna Amalia and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau are compatible. For example, they share peak regard for their national hero Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, paramount star of her Court of Muses, the Court of artists whose careers Anna advanced during her glittering regency. A composer of songs and harpsichord sonatas in the Italian mode, in 1776 Anna put some of Goethe’s words to music.

And then one day in Stockholm almost two hundred years later -- that was in 1970 -- Dietrich happened to record that very same song, Johann Goethe’s and Duchess Anna Amalia’s song. Talk about artistic affinities.

Dietrich brings Anna up-to-date on civic plans to revive her Weimar as the place where Europeans discuss the meaning of today’s Europe. Now they’re bantering in German, almost like Hepburn and Tracy. Sure, Kenny Chesney, Rick, and I are not talking the same language, yet we do not feel left out -- Anna and Dietrich converse so enthusiastically that they are fun to watch (for a while).

One point that Dietrich translates for us is Anna’s observation, perhaps from her Court days, that “A little flirting gets you through the day sometimes.” After our rocky start tonight, I am glad to see Anna gradually becoming more relaxed, at least with the men here.

Since he is energetic and persuasive, Kenny eventually interrupts and coaxes Anna over to our harpsichord. With her accompaniment, we soon hear Dietrich singing in English about love and the constraints of different social classes ( “…In the country and the city/One is plagued by futility/For the little that one has/One must struggle with one’s neighbors/All around God’s earth/ Is hunger, toil, and envy/Enough to drive one out…”).

As the Germans warble about woe, my mind digresses to the joy of Kenny’s sold-out shows. I know about those shows from a friendly young teller at our bank. There is euphoria: everybody has a good time, bringing friends.

One morning after one of Kenny's local concerts, this very open woman informed me that Kenny's music is about the playful person she wants to be.

(My banker also claimed she would be disappointed if Kenny were gay. “Some of the good ones,” she told me, “are gay or already married."

(I remember replying to her, as she was cashing my check, that I would not be disappointed. Kenny's orientation is his business. When she brought up Biblical injunctions -- there was no line-up of people pressing behind me -- I said I had a hard time buying the anti-gay, non-inclusive stuff in segments of the Old Old Old Testament. She seemed to agree.)

(Excuse the theological digression. Back to tonight's party.)

More than daydreamy me, our cockapoo Presto is focused on Dietrich and Anna's impromptu recital. He howls.

Kenny's demeanor signals approval of their classical European music. I wager that he sees their singspiels fusing together into satisfying dramatic wholes. “Encore,” he says. He claps his hands broadly, probably like he does after guest songstresses complete their turns at his sold-out concerts.

With a pinch of loss, Kenny is admitting now that he does not know much about opera. One thing Kenny says he does know is that "audiences get more comfortable seats at Dietrich's recitals than at my country concerts."

We all applaud Kenny's set, none moreso than Dietrich, who catches Kenny’s indolent message, his good ear, his reservoir of strength, his physical pleasure in singing his kind of music. ”The most important thing for a performing artist…[is] to build up a community of love for the music with the audience, to create one fellow-feeling among so many people who have come from so many different places and feelings.”

When Barb asserts that Kenny has that gift, Dietrich notes that “Anyone who’s not moved himself cannot move others with what he is doing.” Dietrich continues, “Your songs are not theoretical.”

“Kenny, you knows how to open the heart,” Anna says, sounding like Paula Abdul, the judge on American Idol,“You don’t do a theoretical job of just making a theoretical fellow-feeling.”

Dietrich adds that these days it is exceptional for newcomers to get traction, as Kenny has been able to do, in the music industry. At best, most hit singles last about a week, and only a couple of stingy corporations control much of the all-important choosing, marketing, and distributing. Thus only a few artists can achieve Kenny's widespread success.

Buoyed by our reactions, Kenny sings again, this time about frat parties and bare feet on the beach. He's into juvenile kisses, broken hearts, and lives that transition from school to adult responsibility. These are moments that everyone here tonight knows about from late in their teens. Undeniably, sadness or bitter-sweetness does mark Kenny’s texts, but not as much as in Anna/Goethe and in Schubert/Mueller.

In his ballads about chilling-out as well as his upbeat rockers, Kenny yearns for The Perfect Moment in Life and Music, yet Perfection is destined to be lost like sea foam.” All in all, Kenny takes the long view that one has to persevere. His idea, or one of his ideas, is that life’s unexpected tragedies often yield reasons for living.

At that, Presto, our critic in white, wags his tail with vigor. I don’t mean this post to come across like a film where a remark from an actor is followed by a cutesy, quizzical close-up of a dog. Just sayin’ that Presto is having a good time. His ears too are being tuned-up. (Now I’m sounding like a judge on American Idol.)

Somewhere along the way, I frame an artistic injustice I’ve long felt -- it's a topic I've had up my sleeve to wind-up tonight's interactions. My notion is that talented musicians can bring audiences jubilantly to their feet whereas other artists such as sculptors, carvers, or potters never get that sort of bountiful applause. "Not fair," I maintain.

Anna: "I don't think that's a fair understanding. Each art has its own magic."

Dietrich wants to stay with music's transcendence. He quotes a neuroscientist on the source of music’s magic: all of us are able to apprehend music, and indeed we can be manipulated by it into an intense visceral experience. "Okay," I repeat, with more of a whine, "yet given the huge amount of work behind other artworks, music’s bewitchment isn't fair."

Kenny Chesney chuckles that various art forms are so different, "different, but not deficit," echoing Jeremiah Wright earlier this week when that minister over-generalized his Chicago church as representing all black churches. "Look," Kenny re-chuckles and resumes our conversation's thread, "Audiences don’t usually watch master painters working on their canvasses."

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau concurs, and goes on to unveil the fact that he’s been painting for almost 50 years. Painting “directs itself to completely different sense organs, and I think that musical ideas can only be reproduced metaphorically with lines and colors. It’s true that I sometimes try to represent subjects that I have sung, but that is not the important thing. The important thing is to be creative myself: that I can really shape something myself and don’t have to put myself as interpreter in the position of subservience to a thing, as I have been accustomed [as a singer] to do. From the first stroke, a dialog arises with the thing that I am bringing to the canvas. This dialogue can be very exciting, but also very painful. It isn’t a holiday pastime but rather a genuine discussion.”

In what is evolving into a round-robin, Barb argues that artists do draw upon music for inspiration. In various Cubist geometries, Picasso painted a mandolin, violin, and crudely shaped clarinets. Anna asks Barb, "How do you happen to have that arcane bit of specific knowledge at your fingertips?" I don't know exactly what prompts this query -- perhaps Anna thinks that I set up this conversation so that Barb could show-off, but no.

It turns out that Barb's clarinet teacher hung prints at his studio of those early Picassos, something I haven't known about. Barb adds that the great Pablo possibly was influenced by his "growing up surrounded by innovative Catalan tunes. And he married a dancer with the Ballets Russes. You know too, he regularly swapped ideas with his composer-buddy Stravinsky."

To those specificities, Anna smiles, "Well, Barb, my 'arcane' is obviously not your 'arcane.'

Dietrich: "Then there's the Art Students League of New York. Sponsored a series of music and art performances. First, jazz musicians played a tuba, clarinet, sax, trombone, and shaku-hatchi piano. Several abstract artists then responded in their visual medium. After observing the artists' paintings and drawings, the musicians offered a co-interpretation of what they saw. They had the last word, or note."

Barb folds in the news that when she taught elementary school, she'd play tapes of Prokofiev's Peter & The Wolf and Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals, which her students would interpret in paintings. It's getting to be a cliche in my blog posts, but once more I discover something fine about my life companion.

Anyway, I’m still dubious, and say as much, 1) about putting music on the highest pedestal and 2) about interactions between various arts. Anna's much earlier point about the magical perspectives of all the arts may have gotten short shrift in our talk, and that may have prompted her to quiz Barb about Picasso's musical instruments. Now she gleefully grasps one of my concerns. A close friend of hers, Anna recalls, even wrote an important work on The Artist Hesitating Between the Arts of Music and Painting. After much debate, that musically gifted friend bypassed the life of a singer, committing herself solely and successfully to painting.

Which leads to Barb saying that music only changes the world for some people. Others here agree, citing such turn-ons as snorkeling (Kenny), politicking (Anna), crossword-puzzling (Barb, but she doesn't do them in ink), walking 45 minutes a day (Dietrich), and so forthing. Harking back to reunions of our extended family, I add "playing touch football with my kids and their cousins." Hah! When I was a lot more limber, that's something I wish I'd done more of.

No way do I intend to reduce good-looking women to objects of sexual desire, but let me state that such women are a happy part of culture, as is the freedom to look at their goodness. When eyeballing such women for the first time, some chaps immediately check out their teeth or their legs or their breasts or their bums (if that isn't too 1940s a term). I focus on their faces. Just so you know, I go for quick eye contact, not possession. And when I'm around town with Barb, usually I restrain myself -- out of love for my wife, I forego out-and-out staring at every beautiful face.

So let me just say that Perween’s face has presence -- worldliness, supple smile, energy level, air of intelligence and interestingness, comfort in her skin, intensity in eyes. She looks great in a sari. South Asian women dress more colorfully than North American women. I ought to get Barb a sari.

Barb brings out the appetizers, crab Rangoon and oysters Rockefeller. Amid pauses, interrupted sentences, glances towards, and glances away, the conversation veers to national sports in Perween Warsi’s native land. When Perween remarks that India won a slew of Olympic Golds in international field hockey, Jackie Robinson slaps his palms together. His older brother Matthew had won a silver-medal at Berlin’s Olympics in ‘36, finishing 0.4 seconds behind Jesse Owens.

Jackie says his brother told him about the Olympic awesomeness there of Major Dhyan Chand, a.k.a. “The Wizard.” In the 1930s’ Games, Chand easily was the world’s most awesome center-forward in field hockey. Renowned for his brilliant stick-work and goal-scoring. Officials at the Amsterdam and Tokyo Olympics were suspicious: they confiscated and disassembled The Wizzard's stick, checking for magnets and special glue. Fruitlessly.

Jackie’s says that he’d heard that at the Berlin Olympics, Hitler was pissed that his “racially superior” home team was thrashed 8-1 by the team from India. Chand scored 6 of the goals. According to Perween, “Hitler relented. He offered Chand a Field Marshall’s rank in the Nazi army if he’d settle in Germany. “And Chand refused,” Jackie nods.

Perween announces that cooking was one of Chand’s favorite hobbies. For family and friends, the field-hockey legend would prepare fish, mutton, and halwa dripping with ghee (spelling?). “Chand had this habit of drinking milk while standing up. He thought that sent vitamins straight to his body system.”

Unlike Chand, cooking is not my thing. Now, however, when I come back to the group having popped two bottles of red wine into the fridge for the next 10 to 20 minutes, I inject a brag: the soup we’ll be having tonight is one I made. Tonight it’s potato soup with smoked salmon relish. I’d read that Bangladeshi, like our still-absent guest Muhammad Yunus, are partial to fish.