This is my debut post. Scary.

Tonight we have taken pains to hide our TV, normally in that living room, out of sight in a downstairs back-closet. While our guests are often in the media, they also are activists, and so we fear aspersions will be cast, or will be thought, about people like Rick and I getting sucked into the media’s world of escape.

Tom Hodgkinson has brought some flowers. I put them in a vase near 'our' harpsichord.

Michael Jordan, the tall one with the shaved head, seems glad to have been invited.*

Outside our powder room, we've hung a glorious photo of our daughter and her family on a Florida beach. Margaret MacMillan doesn't have to comment kindly on it, but she does.

I congratulate her on her prestigious new posting at Oxford, while giving up her also-celebrated role as Provost at the University of Toronto’s Trinity College. “I was of two minds about it [the British job]. I hate moving. I thought, ‘Will I ever find a nice dry-cleaner?’ And then I told myself, ‘Don’t be so pathetic ’" [subscription required]. I certainly could identify with Margaret: Rick and I have our pitiful moments too.

I notice Margaret's red dress, efficiently dry-cleaned, is topped by a lovely pearl necklace.

Tom's firm British accent contrasts with Margaret's milder one. He has always resided in the UK and she did while doing her doctorate. Her mother was British-born and bred.

I hope they will get along...
________

* UPDATE: I do believe Michael was glad to be invited. He did not disengage, and when he left, he gave Rick a boisterous high five. He gave me a hearty kiss on the cheek.

Expecting a good deal of tonight’s conversation will focus on Margaret MacMillan's new book about Mao and Nixon’s diplomatic revolution in 1972, Barb and are ready to show off that we've read it.

Margaret says, yes, that bilateral meeting marked the end of one period and the opening of a new one. Glasses now off, she builds on that theme.

Barb also mentions, in passing, that one of her ex-suitors in Chicago, a Chinese man, was inspired by Chou-en-lai, a pivotal figure in 1972's normalizing of Chinese-US relations. That suitor now is back in Beijing, himself a hot shot in the Foreign Affairs Ministry. That thread of conversation goes nowhere. Just as well.

I ask Margaret to elaborate on her view of President Nixon. [Globe & Mail subscription required] "Such a complicated man…clever…in some ways a great statesman [but] he did some really stupid things." Tom Hodgkinson, pink of cheek, prompts Margaret to talk about some of Nixon's stupid things.

Our group of strangers continues breaking the ice with each other. Gingerly.

Suddenly, our downstairs powder room is getting compared to Chinese ones. Seems that Chinese authorities in 1972 were so keen to please western journalists accompanying the U.S. President that they lacquered the wooden toilet-seats at the Beijing hotel set aside for the press. That lacquer caused such painful red boils that afflicted journalists referred to their rear-ends as “baboon bottoms.”

Sorry, I don't see our downstairs bathroom as anyway comparable.

Barb tells everyone that Margaret's first book, Women of the Raj, also recounts funny tales.

Overall thus far, the undercurrent is awkward. The mood, unpromising. I'm not sure our guests will stay the course.

We head into the dining room.

Rick replays that last 'Screw' episode as more confrontational than it actually was. At present, Michael Jordan and Tom Hodgkinson are in our LR on our couch, the same couch, on different ends. They're laughing together at something. No problem.

Who really knows, though, if there's any hard feelings between them. Harking back to Michael’s days with the Chicago Bulls and Tom's distrust of big government, I attempt to introduce Margaret's Paris best-seller as a 'bridge' between our guests' interests.

Sometimes, as an eager or neurotic hostess, I feel this need to kick-start conversations. Who am I to behave like an orchestra conductor?

My ‘bridge'? First, I attempt to connect the give and take of basketball with the yin and yang of idlers' struggle to live free. Second, I hold that those situations have something in common with the hauling & pulling among World War I's victors at Margaret’s Versailles Conference. That's a feeble stretch, I know, I know.

Michael weighs in to question the stance of the peacemakers. He proposes that since they’d gone "through all of the disappointments that a relationship has to go through. It's almost like a marriage. You learn certain tendencies about each other [and] that you don't want to irritate each other, you only want to compliment each other."

No disagreement there.

Margaret doesn't find many compliments or complementaries at 1919's Versailles.
"The British and the French may have been enemies for a very long time and they may have been friends in 1919, but they didn't trust each other as far as they could see each other...The British just wanted to keep their empire. And the French want[ed] justice, a little revenge."

Michael isn't willing to let go, at least not just yet, of those leaders' misbehaviors. They transgressed his code, for "If you knock a person down on a hard foul, you pick that man up and say, 'Are you all right?'"

Paraphrasing a Reader's Digest version of Keynes that I bumped into once, I add that the Allies were more interested in victory than peace. Heavy reparations exacted on Germany kept that country poor for a decade and led to the tragedies of World War II. Margaret flatly disagrees: "Hitler did not set out to dominate Europe because of the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler wanted to dominate Europe because he thought the Germans were a master race and he wanted them to dominate Europe."

By that light, Hitler was using the Allies' demands for reparations as a propaganda ploy, a means to mobilize Germans against their alleged 'victimization' (that 'V' word again).

That interpretation of Versailles varies widely from Mr. Hoffman's. He was The Man, our beloved history teacher in high school, although when I see this surviving gentleman at reunions, I'm too inhibited by the past to call him 'Bob,' as some of my classmates do. Anyway, judging by the prolonged silence now, tonight others' understandings of Versailles are under review too.

But, tell me, how much prolonged silence do you really want at a dinner party? Don't you think that the tone could be more natural with a skirmish or two? Not emotionally exhausting skirmishes, but ones about ideas?...

Back at our dining table, once we transport dishes to the kitchen, our guests seem to relish devising reductions of Barb’s problem. Barb welcomes all ideas: “Like I’ve been telling Rick, the layout is awful.”

Sadly, no one is an adherent to the proposition, beloved in my Folklore circles, that every time a kitchen/dining room is emptied of people, the appliances, sinks, tables, and chairs vaporize, reappearing when people return.

I’m relieved that Barb doesn’t bring up our other 'aspirational goals' for our kitchen. Fixing the floor with several trip points. Changing the sink that has to be cleaned with Clorox. De-sagging our sagging cabinets.

"The world can only be changed one Piece at a time." Tim Berners-Lee then rises above the corniness of that observation: “The art, ah the Art, is picking the Piece.”

As they scope the kitchen, our guests are surprised that ingredients of tonight's hyper-cuisine had been put into plastic bags and vacuum-packed, then cooked in low temperatures for very long periods. So they assume we’ll need additional room for our Cryovac’s new technology for cooking.

We admit the cooking-under-vacuum mechanism is on loan, just for tonight. Barb explains that the smell of her home-baked dinner rolls was intended to compensate for the lack of cooking pungencies in the air and for the blandnesses emanating from odorless Cryovaced goodies.

Remembering that invention these days is often a team effort, our guests use their paper napkins to take turns sketching better layouts.

After some jousting, a solution emerges.

It’s getting late, I worry about renovation costs but, what the hell, i lack the energy to disagreeeeee.

tipsy-smitsy from bottle of apricot liqueurrr from party last month. I agree-he-he-he to everything.

_________
* UPDATE - About those paper napkins, which our neighbor Celia Wellborne says are a no-no for company. Unfortunately I hadn't gotten around to machine-washing -- and Barb hadn't gotten around to ironing -- our cloth napkins from last month's party. A breakdown in our household's division of labor, that.

An anxious-looking Joan of Arc says, “Excuse me,” interrupting one of Bob Geldof’s breezy asides to Billy Graham. You can tell something big is coming.

Knowing of her revulsion toward forces of occupation, I rise and refill everybody's drinks, anticipating that Joan is about to say the West is long overdue in compensating Africa for supporting colonialists, white racists, corrupt tyrants, and exploitative corporations. Cognizant of her sympathies for the oppressed, I also wouldn’t be surprised if Joan were to quiz Bob on whether Live Aid inadvertently helped fund an allegedly brutal resettlement program in Ethiopia in the late ‘80s, one that somehow may have killed up to 100,000 folk. Or perhaps she’ll lament that too few Africans sang at his Live Aid and Live 8 Concerts.

But no, when I sit back down again, she speaks no criticism of the substance of the chap whom she’s been half-snorting at. Rather, it’s a stylistic point that Joan raises her hand to make. Imagine! Style!

Bob’s routine profanity, she says, meeting Bob’s eye, is “counter-productive” (is that a 15th-century word?). It’s an unnecessary roughness that’s out-of-bounds, a gesture of bully masculinity that implies that only men have the guts to launch big-time crusades. Oaths don’t necessarily spark folk to do their zealous best. Her cussing, she admonishes, would have been a wretched example for her Army back in 1429. Joan adds that as a substitute for a foul-mouth word or phrase, she occasionally did utter a mild, “By my martin!”

By my what? A martin is a sparrow that migrates near the feast day of St. Martin of Tours -- but a martin’s relevance to oaths? Beats me. I know that Edward Albee has a running joke in his play Tiny Alice about cardinals (birds) and cardinals (church honchos); so if Joan is attempting a similar pun about birds and the church honchos who sent her up the river, sorry, I don't get it. To speak is to risk being misunderstood.

Bob and Billy are shooting a gimlet-stare at Joan, repeating the date of 1429, and being slow in starting, only starting, to comprehend just who in blazes our Joan is. Nervously Bob starts to reach for…well, I don’t know what. For his cell-phone? To call 911, a loony bin, a taxi? We’re not ensconced in Star Trek here, so Bob can’t beam up or down to anywhere else.

He looks over to Billy for guidance.

Barb is giving me her pinched ‘I told you so’ look.

This is a potential turning point for tonight. In the next moments, someone may say or do something that will be demoralizing.

It is my idea to invite James (in my head, we are on a first-name basis). From front pages, I still remember how he was speeding to a sports-car meet in 1955 when he crashed his custom Porsche 550 Spyder, fatally. This movie star, tough but sensitive, was only 24. That end to a spectacular career ‘stopped’ me, like later deaths of JFK, Elvis, and John Lennon.

At the time of James Dean’s accident, I was closing in on becoming a teen-ager. My siblings and I saw him as expressing our restlessness. He was the smoldering antithesis of the well-behaved modern kids that we were expected to be.

Rick, who did not join the Oscar Party at the Wellborne's house last week, says he does not learn much from "Hollywood types.” Rick is the one who wanted to meet Danica Patrick. In 2005, she brought him and 300,000 others to their feet as she almost took the biggest purse in auto-racing. Last month Rick saw her again, not first-hand but in a sophomoric and salacious ad that Fox-TV had banned from its 2008 Super Bowl show. On a website, Rick ferreted it out anyway. He expects to learn tonight much about "Indianapolis Speedway types." He has also endowed Danica's contest around the track with near-mythic proportions, emblematic of those two metaphors that Homer bequeathed to us in Iliad and Odyssey, life is a journey and life is a battle.

Ned Wellbourne is a bowling buff. One day this neighbor suggested we invite Chris Peters, co-owner of America’s Professional Bowlers Association (PBA). Chris is in his late 40s, an organizational guy, a ‘graduate’ of Microsoft. According to Ned, Chris “threw off the ‘golden handcuffs’ of his deferred stock options, retired early, and bought into -- and transformed -- the PBA.”

I had not heard of Chris Peters, but so what? Rick and I do not limit our parties to household names or, for that matter, to public intellectuals like a number of our past guests. If you are spectacularly rich, awesomely young, and gorgeously talented, we do not loathe you... at least not automatically...

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.

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.”

Following an explanation that the organ-grinder in their next song is the Messenger of Death, our two Germans get a charge out of harmonizing for Schubert’s Winterreise. Anna Amalia’s voice is pleasant, though a little reedy. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s is astounding. The guy has the experience and love to do equal justice to words and music.

While respecting Dietrich’s rich projections of failed love and bitter loneliness, Kenny Chesney raises questions about the despair of those words by the poet Wilhelm Muller. Thus, from Kenny, “Does all this resignationism suit the inner Dietrich?”

“The alienation does suit Schubert,” Dietrich replies. “He knew he had syphilis and madness and death would come of it.” But “My [own] disposition is completely different from that…I’m very cheerful, and I think that’s a certain prerequisite to being an artist: a good measure of cheerfulness and humor.” Kenny then strums a cheerful riff, as if to say that he too is anti-miserabilism.

“I figure as long as I’m here, you might let me play a song,” Kenny cheers, hat still on, guitar in hand, and with some courage given the act that he is following and also given our group's advanced demographic. Rick and I had pondered about the reception that U.S. southern-born Kenny would receive from our two European romantics. After all, Anna and especially Dietrich have benefited from rigorous musical training, whereas Kenny has not been so advantaged. Generally he is a lot more carefree in his choices, regularly singing for instance about “going to class just to pass the time [and having] a keg in the closet, pizza on the floor left over from the night before.”

Just to be clear, this moment is -- if not like a gunfight at the O.K. Corral -- almost like a musical equivalent of a poetry slam contest. In a sense, by proposing Kenny as a fellow-guest, Dietrich has set in motion a clash or an accommodation between wildly different approaches to music. Will our two tradition-minded Germans regard Kenny’s 21st century emotions and techniques as less majestic, emotional, and cathartic than what they're accustomed to? In the wake of exposure to Kenny's firepower, will those elders remember and respect all the creative courage that it takes, in any era, to evolve into a musical artist? That is the question. Of course, that is not as pithy as the most famous question in drama, but 'tis apt for this tough crowd.

Kenny adheres to a classic structure. He starts with an instrumental statement of his melody, embellishes it, adds his voice singing alongside his guitar’s melody, develops that some, and closes by returning his voice to the guitar’s melody. I do not know if that is his technique at his shows, but tonight that is his mode. He presents his tongue-in-cheek She Thinks My Tractor Is Sexy: (“…She likes the way it’s pullin’ while we’re tillin’ up the land/She even kind of crazy ‘bout my farmer’s tan…” Next he kicks into Being Drunk’s A Lot Like Loving You,“…Well I felt the hangover of loving all night/I’ve sat at the bar all alone in a fight/I’ve bottled up feelings and poured ‘em out too…”

It's great that Jackie Robinson and I can be on this nostalgia kick until Perween Warsi and Barb arrive. Barb’s driving Perween here from our metropolis’s Little India. By his choice, Muhammad Yunus is arriving on his own hook.

I’m clueless about the Negro League. Jackie Robinson explains that bunting and base-stealing were emphasized. The game differed from the “less daring” Major League whose players all wanted to be Babe Ruth -- they put a premium on home runs and big innings.

Sitting here on the porch, we re-live Game One of the 1955 World Series. Jackie shows how he famously avoided the tag/lunge of the Cardinals’ catcher and stole home. He was the front end of a triple steal. On the front page of a newspaper in Bombay, where I was backpacking at the time, I saw the picture of Jackie’s big hook slide. Lots of dust at home plate.

Jackie stole home a record 19 times in the national league –- 19, just imagine. He also counts as a runner, hitter, and fielder. I pester for details on other peak moments, i.e., “How about that final day of the season in ‘51 season? The game had gone into extra innings. The Phillies had loaded the bases with one out. Remember?”

At the bottom of the 12th, Jackie had made a defensive play that saved the season. He dove for a soft liner to his right and injured his elbow. He converted the catch into a double play. Then in the 14th, Jackie hit the Dodgers’ game-winning home run.

We both guffaw over that and other glories of Jackie’s career. This proves not only that we revel in those times but that we’re relaxed and comfortable with each other. In effect, we say to each other, “Trust me, I’m a chum.” Of course, this may be a false bond, as when fans’ sentiments are directed from the grandstands in a positive way toward “their” team (until the team goofs up).

We touch upon the underbelly of sports, the hate pitched at Jackie because of the color of his skin. Jackie refers to the day when racial slurs flew around and Pee Wee Reese, the Dodgers’ captain, walked over to place his hand on the black man’s shoulder. Pee Wee kind of sensed the sort of hopeless, dead feeling in me and came over and stood beside me for a while. He didn’t say a word, but he looked over at the chaps who were yelling at me through him and just stared. He was standing by me.” Then: no more insults. “I will never forget it.”

Our conversation rekindles feelings I had as a ten-year-old, when I’d hop over a barb-wire fence to watch a local team. (Got caught and thrown out once.) Now, I might scream at the TV when a team is on a winning or losing streak, but I’m not as passionate about watching. It’s not like it was back when -- when I was crashing a minor-league game, when Jackie was scoring all the way from first on a sacrifice fly.

All three guests seem at home answering questions about their other selves. Muhammad has a daughter who is a Bangladeshi-Russian soprano, working in New York. Perween is a doctor’s wife in an arranged marriage. Jackie’s son, Jackie Jr. was wounded in Vietnam, got hooked on drugs there, beat back the addiction, and died young in a car crash.

Our guests gesticulate a lot. About the only time this threesome slows their hands is when hoisting glasses of iced tea. In time, Jackie says he is not a snob about drinking or eating. He will devour anything people put in front of him.

As if we were a focus group for her company, Perween prompts us to swap notions of foods that are seriously under-rated. Some of our visitors’ nominees are almonds, guava juice, and red kidney beans. Then they go back and forth on their guilty food pleasures, including guacamole, cheese, chips, cookies, and chicken tikka.

They must really be hungry. Worse, none of their preferences are on tonight’s menu.

I ask everyone to follow me into the dining area, and they do. I put finishing touches on a grain salad that is a medley of organic quinoa, barley and wild rice tossed with toasted pine nuts. I had already prepared its topping, a briny relish of olives, capers, and peppers.

Now I pan-sear the whitefish to be served over pearl couscous and garlicky Swiss chard. I want to counter the bland taste that fish can have. Celia next door says that one should eat the bottom of the seafood chain. For the sake of our health and the oceans’ health, I hope whitefish is better than predators like tuna and seabass.

I try to pour good will into every pot. But as a cook, am I trying too hard?

Rick says to the group that marrying me is the best thing he ever did. I have no idea of why he says that to them now...