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?...

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.

Having witnessed almost seven centuries now, Joan broods that the tragedies of History do indeed repeat themselves, as when cover-ups become the crime (e.g.,Watergate, Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky). Joan says it’s up for grabs, though, whether the successes of History repeat themselves.

She reminds us that years ago, it was a talk with Billy Graham that led U.S. President George W. Bush to quit drinking, to start making something of himself, and to begin living his Christian faith. Joan compares notes with Billy about the wastrel that she counseled, the young French Dauphin (later King Charles VII). Before Joan ‘got’ to him, the Dauphin had been apathetic, inherently lazy, easily influenced by self-serving advisers, and waging only perfunctory warfare against the incendiary English invaders. It seems that after talks with her and after being moved by the force of her bold crusade, Charles listened to diverse points of view, looked at information that contradicted his biases, took decisive actions, secured better advisers who challenged his thinking, and aptly wrapped-up the One Hundred Years’ War.

Joan’s money lines: “Will George W. Bush conclude his war as successfully as the Dauphin? My analogy may be imperfect, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, and I don’t mean to seem immodest, but has Condi Rice learned anything from my historical example?”

Time for Barb’s dessert (chocolate bourbon pecan cake). I look at my watch and am amazed at how late it is. We talk some about Leadership in today's sorry world. No one seems to like a definition I once heard, and which is tied in with gradually telling uncomfortable truths: Leadership is disappointing your people at the rate they can absorb.

Apparently, Joan has kept up with her countrymen and with another modern idea of Leadership, for as we start to leave our dining area, she lays on us a quote from the philosopher Camus: “Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. Walk beside me, and just be my friend.”

Instead of single-filing out of our dining area (the way we came in at 8:00), we follow Bob Geldof’s example. We link arms with Joan. Beside each other, we walk through French doors into the living room. Nobody turns right when the others turn left. Nobody goes through the doors first or last. We enjoy thus engaging our bodies and leading each other.

Each person returns to the exact chair they vacated before dinner. We're not free-wheeling in all things.

Our maneuver spurs Barb to describe what occurred one night in the early ‘60s after she saw a Fellini movie. The finale in 8½ has all the storyline’s characters, living and dead, linking arms and dancing down a street. That night at the movie theatre while credits rolled, Barb says she was part of a row of young folk who got up, linked arms, and similarly danced up the aisle and out onto the street. That was as memorable, she says, as the movie itself.

Glancing at Danica Patrick, Chris Peters has a recollection that he too grew up in the Midwest, and therefore qualifies as a twin spirit of Danica’s too. James Dean reminds us that Chris’s Ohio is not as close geographically to Illinois as his Indiana. What's more, in last Tuesday’s primary, the majority of voters in the Buckeye State did not align themselves with the senator from Danica's girlhood home. Danica says she treats all Midwesterners equal.

James laments that he did not have the close connection with a father as Danica and Chris evidently did. In his self-report, James was a storm cloud early on. As in his title role in Rebel Without A Cause, James might kick furniture in a rage. He says his younger self exhibited the same bravado, the same hopes and fears, as characters in his two later films. James says he didn’t wish to be called a “chicken.” He didn’t want to be outdone by others either.

James seems disappointed everyone at the table receives this information calmly, without commiseration. Ultimately Barb makes the familiar point that it’s natural for adolescents at some point to give their folks or, for that matter, to give any authority a hard time. “Teen-age-itis is an age where nothing fits. Usually they grow out of it.”

This sounds a lot like the mother in Rebel. James frowns.

“I recall," Barb says, "although I wish I didn’t, the green Mohawk haircut of one son, the parking tickets another son earned for the family car, and the repercussions of our daughter walking out of a high-school German class when her teacher said, ‘If anybody feels they are not learning anything here, they should leave.’ Still, those years could have been a TRILLION times worse. Actually, they probably were worse, but I have repressed those memories.”

Hearing that, I ache again that I didn't spend an hour a week alone with each kid. Just talkin' or playin'. For me at least in those early years, those times would have been infinitely more cherished than all the job things I was doing (or thinking that I had to be doing).

James is saying he’s still alienated, and that he can’t identify with adolescents who aren’t at least a tad demonic, obsessive, and misunderstood. He’s kept his grudge against his real-life father who shipped him out from L.A., when he was eight years old, to relatives back in Indiana. James says he was returned to his birthplace there on the same train as the body of his just-deceased mother.

This part of James’s autobiography brings clucks of rapport from the womenfolk. Chris Peters stares at the ceiling, either bored or irritated, or probably both. I refrain from asking Chris which came first, Irritation or Boredom? Or are those emotions even related?

Barb is the only tablemate who’s sympathetic that James never got to visit Paris. At least James doesn’t blame his Dad for not taking him there.

This party isn’t doing it for me, er, for us anymore. The only racing worth doing is getting out of here.

I would rather be upstairs asleep. Or navigating fierce whitewaters. Or even cutting the grass at our church’s cemetery (my least favorite role there). (My favorite role there is pushing the loaded-up food-cart down the center aisle, during the organ's offertory anthem after members of the congregation have put non-perishables into the food bank's cart.) (Barb insists on pushing the cart at the supermarket, so I serve mostly in a decidedly secondary capacity as a runner delivering dairy, cereal, and soap products to that cart.)

Once in a while now, Chris Peters still tries to get a word or two in edgewise. But then James Dean re-opens his trap and selfishly brings the spotlight right back to his repertoire of sappy vignettes.

If there’s a lesson here about the Race Of Life, it’s to Establish Structure & Ground Rules At The Outset. I guess other groups have this same problem with over-talkers denying chances to under-talkers.

A couple hours ago, back when we were talking about Wilbur Shaw rescuing the Indy, Danica Patrick casually had said that she listens less to what a man say and looks more at what he does. All right, Danica (I say to myself), what if talking too damn much is what the man does? Was he always so...so volatile?

Graceful defeat is our only course now. As in chess, sometimes winning moves just aren’t possible.

Praise be, to draw things to a welcome close, Chris snaps his fingers, gets up, reclaims his coat, turns around, and remarks that he enjoyed meeting Danica. Gentlemanly, he shakes James’s hand -- less convivially, to be sure, than when they first met. Chris says thanks to Barb and me, and skedaddles out.

He is no sooner out of our driveway than Danica looks at her watch, says “Wow, it’s late. Gotta run. Good night,” and bolts out, Phoenix-bound. She lightly taps her car’s horn in a goodbye gesture.

Eventually I grab back the green ashtray that all night James has had dibs on.

I empty it into the fireplace and tell James that we hope he had a good time. That’s not a lie.

“This has been a great chance for me to get inside my character,” James says. “Thanks for hearing me out,” we hear him shout as he drives out of sight.

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?

Perween Warsi likes my cooking. She goes back to the buffet for seconds.

Yesterday our neighbor was telling me that it takes guts to prepare food for a woman who owns a posh restaurant in London. And who has an international, experiment-minded team of chefs whose meal packages are distributed to hotels, delis, caterers, airlines, pubs, and major supermarkets. Her company tests 7,000 new food products a year, launching the 300 best. As I heard driving in with her earlier tonight about the fare in the England of 1986, Perween recoiled from store-bought samosas filled with ”mangy bits of potato and carrot.” It was bland, boring, inauthentic. “Somebody needed to take responsibility for bringing tasty and wholesome Indian food to people. So why not me?”

Tonight I try to be on a different playing field than Perween. No dal, curry, pakora, chapatti, khorma, or chicken tikka.

Jackie Robinson digs into the salad and probes Muhammad Yunus about "life before Nobel-ization." Muhammad recalls spending seven years in the US universities, first as a Fulbright student, then as an assistant prof. Meanwhile, half-way around the world, West Pakistan occupied East Pakistan’s capital, not far from Muhammad’s family home. The Pakistanis’ killings, rapes, and looting were absolutely ghastly. In the States, Muhammad organized other Bangladeshi expats for the Bangladesh Information Center.

All that I add to this conversation about that War of Liberation is what I retrieve from Salmon Rushdie’s clever novel Midnight’s Children. Our book-club read it. The narrator’s doings mirror India’s agonies, some of the grimmest parts centered on the civil war between Pakistan West and Pakistan East (Bangladesh). My South Asian companions tonight fill me in on selected details of that agony, including India’s intervention on the side of the rebels. As I observe in reply to Perween, it was a slog to read Rushdie’s 500-page satire and to abide his elitist stance. Rushdie’s novel has its funny parts and, as I emphasize, it stirs a desire to visit India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh...