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.”

Elisabeth Lloyd has heard of a study in The Proceedings of The Royal Society demonstrating that the greater the artistic endeavor, the larger the sexual appetites. She’s uncertain about those researchers’ proposed link between artistic sexuality and schizophrenia. Indeed, an inborn chemical may contribute to artists’ individualities and their uniquely imagined views of the world. Before Elisabeth will go along with that conclusion, however, she says she will need more data. Data do win, apparently with her, the prudent scholar.

Rick brings in some background data, which I suspect the well-briefed Hu Jinao already knows. (For the dinner tonight, we had told our guests who else was invited.) Much as Lucian Freud typically paints people “how they happen to be,” Elisabeth studies how women happen to have orgasms. Today, with her “unorthodox and admirable” claim, Elisabeth is likely one of the most frank scholars on that intimate action that directly involves the whole human race.

That said about her reputation, Rick returns to her evidence. In turn, that ultimately becomes prologue for his attempt to pry out from Elisabeth the inside story on the life history of Elisabeth’s predecessor (by 50 years) at Indiana University: the famous and terribly important sex scholar Alfred Kinsey.

Frankly, I am relieved that Rick, Lucian, and Hu fail, completely fail, to motivate Elisabeth into passing on anything spicy about Mr. & Mrs. Kinsey and their randy colleagues in the ‘50s. It is really none of our business. Others’ private sex is not a public matter. And that kind of talk is a silly and dangerous distraction from important crises in our world...

By gosh and by golly, we talk of medieval, current, and future events. At midnight, we are still going strong.

It is late, millions of words have been said, and now I need to recap our guests' final themes. Much as Rick did in his last schematic post, I simply am going to list a couple of their points that grabbed me. It is all more complicated and nuanced than this, but we need to move on.

1) Billy Graham gives a reprise, warning against a pastor electioneering or becoming emotionally involved with politicians. Rather, clerics need to proclaim moral standards that can guide politicians’ consciences -- that vital role is their everyday salvation. For ethical issues, Billy looks to future pols consulting a mix of religious leaders, not just one.

2) Joan of Arc -- holding an awakened, quiet, and newly-diapered baby Francois -- rejects Rick's offhand premise that everybody in Joan's village knew each other’s business totally. Instead, Joan recalls Frenchmen on farms enduring long private hours of back-breaking work alone in the fields. No time for kibitzing. No I-Pods in those fields. Much time for salvation thru personal and quiet alignments with God.

3) Bob Geldof almost regards technology as part of salvation ("...It can help us do practically anything..."). He briefs us on how musicians have started to use the tip-jar on their websites to sell their recordings. He is excited that his fellow-musicians who use that means of distribution will be able to make a decent living at what they really love doing. Bob also is turned on to using today’s new tools to advance anti-poverty goals. He salutes www.google.org’s grants for start-ups to industries that can provide needed jobs to Africans in Africa.

Through all this and other chatter about our world and its salvation, we adults nurse our Irish whiskeys, 20-year-old malt. Mind you, it is the first alcohol that Joan has ever had.

Outside, as the party-goers head home, Billy looks at his watch and sings out that old Irish salutation, “Top of the morning to you!”

Whereupon Bob sings out the old Irish follow-up, “And the rest of the day to you!!!!!”

“Since we’re all together,” Chris Peters says as he balances a plate of double-tomato bruschettas, “I need to understand what our goals are tonight. You have to have a clear goal, whether you’re working with 100 people or 5. A goal forces you to decide what to do, what not to do. I know that Barb and Rick have already had several iterations of these Friday-night parties. Our hosts know precisely what we’re supposed to accomplish here. So what’s up, Rick?”

Danica Patrick says, “People who strive toward goals, and achieve them, often are not very interesting.”

Despite that lifeline from her, Rick looks abashed at Chris's slight salvo. I feel a little anxiety on his behalf.

“It’s better that you ask us now, Chris, rather than later,” Rick answers in his best hangdog impersonation. “I like it when folk come back at me. Thing is, we’re hoping that we’ll share the stories tonight that we tell ourselves about who we are and what we’re about.”

That itinerary draws a particuular blank on our guests' faces. “And if you’re tired of our own stories,” Rick adds in his cheerleader mode, “or if you sense that some other stories are needed, go right ahead. Tonight, tell your preferred version.”

I add that our common humanity can unite us, and a dinner party of course does not have to have winners and losers.

Rick quotes a paragraph from this blog’s Rationale (top center in this blog’s banner/masthead), specifically our intro about enjoying the interactions among tip-tops in their fields. He also works in a quote from William Carlos Williams that "We owe it to each other to respect each other's stories and to learn from them."

At that, the team leader of assorted high-powered Microsoft work-teams breathes heavily and sits back on the couch. Relaxing his high-tech, hard-core business drive, Chris notes, “O.K. O.K. -- just so we maximize our utility.”

Out of James Dean's mouth comes this: “Well then, there now. I like story-telling. You can learn from it." Pretending to spar like a boxer, James reaches far over and lightly punches Chris on a shoulder.

Surely these exchanges have defused most uncertainties about tonight. It is in Chris’s laugh that I find encouragement. His is not a mean laugh. As long as everyone’s polite, the party will not unravel. And God help us if it does...

Live from our front porch.

If all goes according to plan, tonight I will make a new friend. I’ve rigged it so he could arrive first. That is, weeks ago when phoning Jackie Robinson, I set the gathering time as 20 minutes ahead of the others. I might have coaxed him to stay for a one-to-one after Perween Warsi and Muhammad Yunus had left, but I didn’t want to risk offending the uncoaxed South Asians.

I've respected the chap for 61 years. Don't give me stuff about propagating the recent stereotype of the black male as ball player.

He's here. I boom out, “How’s your game?” -- meaning “I hope you’ll tell me that you are fine.” Jackie is either being oblique or his head right now is somewhere else. He says his best game was basketball. But during his twenties, with more opportunities beckoning in the “Pitch Black” (Negro) Baseball League, “baseball was the draw.”

It’s a warm evening, Jackie’s outdoorsy, and so before we sit in the shade of the porch, I pick up one of my sons’ bats. It happens to be laying around.

“I’m a little rusty. Check out my swing, could you?”

There's nothing worse than a complacent performer, and Jackie’s a performer who assumes a degree of responsibility to his audience, even an audience of one. He demonstrates how to take a wider stance. How to grasp the bat with the knob nearer the shoulder, higher and more erect. How to level the bat to the top of my imaginary strike zone. I do some moves, take some swings.

Everyone sits forward as Muhammad Yunus posits, “I would recommend that your kids distance themselves from what they learned in formal education.”

At the risk of sounding rude, I react, “You cannot possibly believe that.”

But he does. “This grows out of my experience shortly after I returned home to the famine of 1974. We tried to ignore it. But then skeleton-like people began showing up in the capital, Dhaka. Soon the trickle became a flood. Hungry people everywhere. Often they sat so still that one could not be sure whether they were alive or dead…Nothing in the economic theories I taught reflected the life around me. How could I go on telling my students make-believe stories in the name of Economics? I needed to run away from these theories and from my textbooks and discover the real-life economics of a poor person’s experience.”

Our Laureate couples his story with a piece of hard-earned advice. His warning: "It’s very difficult when you have learned something a certain way. Not only your mind absorbs it; your eyes also are trained to see in a certain way because eyes are only as good as you’ve been trained to see…”

More wine, more reflection from Perween Warsi: “Our experiences differ, Muhammad. From my family’s kitchen in Bihar, I already had a vision of what South Asian food should be like.”

“I had no vision,” Muhammad reveals. “All I felt, if you would like to call it a kind of drive, was can I make myself useful to another person, a person who was in terrible difficulty…I didn’t have a plan…I had only immediate things today, only today, not tomorrow…Wherever I went to school, [academics] taught me [macro considerations] about…billions of dollars in national plans and [over-arching and long-range] investment plans and so on…That is what I [had] learned in school…trying to acquire a kind of a bird’s eye view. You drive hard and see everything…

“Then I realized in my work…that when you fly high, you really don’t see things very clearly. You make it up because it’s such a blurred reality. You make up stories and piece them together and then you lose touch of the reality because you fly too high…You tend to survey everything and decide on a particular point, then you swoop down and pick it up. In a worm’s eye view, you don’t have that advantage of looking at everything. You just see whatever is close to you. Then I began to see that the worm’s eye view was logical, it was reasonable, and it was important -- that small problems must be solved because people’s lives depended on all these tiny things. I was not trying to solve everything.”

Jackie Robinson, now sipping coffee (not Chock Full): “Sounds like you were ashamed of sticking so long with your bird’s eye view.”

Muhammad puts a napkin down and looks around the room.
“Very much true. I was very frustrated that my background didn’t help me. All those days that I spent very hard to learn things. Some things could be useful, but if it was not useful it became a handicap. I couldn't see clearly because my mind was leading me toward a different kind of vision of what reality is...”

What Muhammad Yunus says about ignoring micro realities rings true for Folklore and me.

The perspective in my academic discipline gradually shifted across the last 40 years, towards understanding individual identity via close ethnographic data. I failed to ride the expanding concepts of ‘tradition’ and ‘folk.’ I stuck to texts and archives. I clung to macro generalizations as well as comparisons about groups. I should have attempted some reconciliation between my bird’s eye and others’ worm’s eye. What I did probably wasn’t useless, but it wasn’t pioneering either.

I excuse myself and head for the toilet. Not to cry or slash wrists, but to answer a call of nature.

As I shut the door and before I proactively turn on the fan, Jackie Robinson is talking about Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit that Ball?, a song once high on Billboard R & B chart. After singing only a phrase of it, Jackie stops and says "I don't have much musicianship to begin with." Perween Warsi shouts, “Stay with it, Jackie, stay with it.”