Evening, reader.

As our world-famous guests arrive –- and Tim Berners-Lee is first -- my sense is that they are kind, good-spirited, they have done things for people. That understanding precedes my trust.

When Jack Kilby died a few years ago, like others I regretted, "Now I will never have the chance to meet him." I had not reckoned on tonight's imaginary encounter with his background (in facts herein) and quotes (in italics).

Jack has two daughters and five granddaughters – ”You could say that the Kilbys specialized in girls,” he observes. He is easy taking a fatherly interest in Lisa and me. Curiously, he asks about Lisa Kudrow’s recurrent “Smelly Cat” song in her role as a mellow, vacuous folk-singer on Friends. He is especially keen about her creation of the Michelle wannabe inventor for High School Reunion.

Rick chimes in about the DVD we rented, Lisa’s satirical series The Comeback. We liked her complex, delusional character and how the media was shown constructing reality.

Lisa is pressured to speak of those two inventors at 3M Corporation who actually did invent Post-Its. She knows that Spence Silver created the adhesive in 1980 without knowing what use to make of it. Colleague Art Fry came up, Lisa reports, with the practical application -- after he kept losing scrap-paper bookmarks in his church choir’s hymnal.

The inventors in our living room imply they are solidly motivated by such practicalities. For as Jack Kilby says, “Hell, it’s incredibly satisfying to face some important problem and find a solution.”

These men are star-struck enough to wonder about Lisa's co-stars on the long-running Friends. For 10 minutes, she shares back-stage stuff, friendly and funny stuff, about the real Monica. Rachel, Ross, Chandler, and Joey. It is clear they were a cohesive ensemble.

We learn that Lisa's university major was Biology. She took it when living-matter departments were flourishing -- before Biology programs in universities became more abstract, molecular, and smaller in student populations. Lisa says she had planned to become a medical researcher like her father, a headache specialist.

But after graduating from Vassar, she gained an intro to a L.A. sketch comedy troupe, Groundlings. A friend of her brother’s opened that door. Much on-stage experimentation, and assorted acting jobs, followed. Questions ensue tonight, our guests asking Lisa how she responds to hecklers, how she uses objects to depict her characters, how Jack Benny's old 'slow burn' would go over today (okay).

Lisa's inspiration comes from “a few different people at a few different moments. A lot of it was myself, at different moments when I’m insincere or afraid or insecure about my sexuality. And then other people [supply elements] for other things: certain teachers, family members.” Lisa doesn’t think of her Phoebe character on Friends or certain other of her parts as particularly ditzy: “They make me laugh really hard. I never think they’re really that stupid. No one is ever just dumb. They’re usually dumb about something, and you just have to figure out what that something is.” For her characters, she loves “coming up with things.”

When I asked my ironic little question about Al Gore, I heard no groan. I know that the Silicon Valley values Gore's raw brainpower -- he's a consultant there -- but I wanted to learn if computerland begrudges his imprecise claim?

Our guests balked at characterizing Gore. I guess that first-time visitors at dinner parties shy away from discussing politicians. Just like first-time Presidential candidates shy away from "innovation agendas" to push new-economy jobs. (The exception so far is Obama, but the campaign is still on.)

It unfolds that Tim Berners-Lee’s office at M.I.T. is sparse, anything but world-wide or world-class in size. Still, think of the thrill of young undergrads there, passing by the office door with Tim’s name on it!

We learn that the popular image of Tim as the Web’s inventor is quite “separate from private life, because celebrity damages private life.” I recall that his website indicates that he is active in the Unitarian church. Tim confirms that affiliation, finding a parallel between the Web and Unitarians –- they are both decentralized entities with a higher purpose.

Lisa Kudrow says that she can relate to Sir Tim’s problem with celebrity-hood. Except for L.A., “People kiss you and touch you, and I’m not very touchy, actually.” Lisa appreciates that her sister, who looks a lot like Lisa, responds to audiences’ demands for Lisa’s autographs. That sister “doesn’t want to give them a phony autograph, but some people won’t take ‘No’ for an answer. So what are you going to do? She [the sister] signs more, I think, than I do, because she’s nicer.”

(Lisa’s tale sets me thinking. Maybe we could buy a book for autographs and ask our guests to sign in please. We would never sell those signatures -- but when we are old, those autographs would remind us of visitors who earned our respect.)

Jack Kilby has not been as concerned about maintaining his privacy as Lisa and Tim. Yet he has resisted the “standard corporate baloney” that would make him famous and catered-to. He has declined, for instance, having a high school named after him in his home town –- ”The whole thing would be a lot of trouble. I’m not worth the fuss.”

Everyone gets a chuckle out of his ‘fuss’ line.

As hostess, I want to bring out the good in guests and to justify tonight's mix. "Lisa has to count as an inventor too," I say. "Besides a special brand of incandescence, it takes imagination and ingenuity to be an effective actress.”

Lisa's giggle has a trace of her giggle on Friends.

“For TV and movies,” I continue, “Lisa has invented comic as well as serious characters that let you know their vulnerabilities.” Fact is, much as Jack has over 60 patents to his name, Lisa has created very well over 60 different roles…

Earlier tonight when Lisa had said she improvises by elaborating on quirks of people she knows, the remark had passed without comment. Now returning to that theme, Lisa acknowledges that she creates a “composite.” Inspiration arises from “a few different people at a few different moments. A lot of it was myself, at different moments when I’m insincere or afraid or insecure about my sexuality. And then other people [supply elements] for other things: certain teachers, family members.” [broken link]

btw, Lisa doesn’t think of her Phoebe character on Friends or certain other of her parts as particularly ditzy: “They make me laugh really hard. I never think they’re really that stupid. No one is ever just dumb. They’re usually dumb about something, and you just have to figure out what that something is.” [broken link] For her characters, she loves “coming up with things.”

Every year an estimated 400,000 Chinese die from air pollution, and I had wanted to button-hole President Hu Jintao about that. Hostesses are supposed to be polite, and so I agree to hold back. There will not be a peep out of me either about China’s sweatshop manufacturing or its slow reaction/cover-up for the SARS epidemic a couple years ago. As long as Hu does not pull geopolitical rank on me, I will offer unilaterally respectful talk.

Skeptically looking around our living room before he sits down in our grandest chair, Lucian Freud closely notices the looseness, tightnesses, angles, and changing directions of brush-strokes in our framed paintings.

We have a cockapoo named Presto, who sidles up to Lucian. Lucian remarks that dogs are one of his favorite subjects for close-up portraits.

I do not think he likes our landscapes, abstracts, and figures on canvasses far smaller than he now uses. It is fair to say they lack Lucian’s fabulous accuracy in anatomy, microscopic attentiveness to details, and original palette of color (earths, yellows, reds, and lead-whites). Worse, the people in our artworks’ group scenes all look alike, possibly resembling their self-regarding creators. (That, we learn, is one of Lucian’s perceptions about group portraits by other artists.)

It is an ancient conversation-starter, I realize, but on our coffee table we've placed a book featuring a lot of Lucian’s paintings as well as some of his extraordinary etchings from oversized copper plates. We are not compelled to like his work, but now as the four of us leaf through it, we do appreciate his cast of sometimes lumpy characters, mostly against the backdrops of his messy, paint-splattered studio. We note solo figures in and out of clothes. We also glimpse several of his rather honest self-portraits, including one that presents Lucian in the nude -- except for the old boots he wears so he will not spill pigment on his shoes.

Lucian chooses his subjects on impulse, he says. They are not professional models adept at holding poses, but friends -- or friends of friends, "people that interest me." Lucian says he demands of them congeniality, reliability, and punctuality. He requires that they pose in his studio even though he is painting a lamp or floorboard (he is very big on floorboards): the model’s presence, Lucian says, affects everything in his picture.

Over the course of as much as an astonishing 2,000 hours that each model spends in his company, an emotional connection evolves. Hmmm, that is more time that Rick and I spent courting a zillion years ago.

When Rick inquires, “When do you know when a painting is finished?” -- now that is a corny question -- Lucian says he gets preliminary inklings. Ultimately he finishes whenever he gets the impression that he is working on somebody else’s painting...

We hear how Lucian starts with his subjects’ eyes (sometimes teary or doe-eyed) and then appraises and reconsiders their intelligent faces. Next he paints and repaints their sagging lips, sweaty armpits, vivid paunches, pubic growths, stray wisps of facial hair, and weary (non-erotic) genitals.

His fluid depictions are not idealized. Lucian says, "I could never put anything in a picture that isn't exactly in front of me. That would be a pointless lie, a mere bit of artfulness." Not one for decorativeness or artistic flattery, Lucian recalls that when commissioned to paint Queen Elizabeth II, he famously showed her with a 5 o’clock shadow and a fright wig.

She was fully dressed, our Elisabeth (Lloyd) points out.

We don’t feel sorry for Her Highness, for it’s not as if the Queen is unpainted. We’re told she’s sat for 120 other portraits.

Just when Lucian was telling me that, yes, he does converse with his models (through tales, songs, poems, and anecdotes), President Hu arrives. So what if he's late -- at least he's here.

Looking out our door, I see his limousine is parked not in front of our place but in front of our neighbors, the Wellbornes. In response to Barb, Hu says that his staff members there will not need take-out from us –- they’ve brought their own food, drink, and self-improvement materials.

Tonight Hu has left his BlackBerry behind in the limo, which I interpret as a compliment to our company tonight.

Tonight I am boldly crossing my own cultural border, swooshing around in an embroidered Chinese gown. It is red silk. Hu Jintao, ever the diplomat, compliments me on it. I own up that I borrowed it from our next-door neighbor, Celia Wellborne. At a market in China, Celia had selected a material, taken it to the on-site tailor, picked through many style books for a pattern, been measured up, and returned a week later to a perfect fit.

At Rick’s bidding, Hu gives out with impressive numbers on improvements to the social net and about China’s progress in rural education. Rick whispers to me, “Things are going great.”

We Westerners roam beyond those topics that Rick had ‘planted’ for us, learning for instance about his wife and two children, his stint as a provincial governor, his having to compromise between competing personalities and factions within his Party. He does not mention restive minorities or his brutal suppression in 1987 of protests against China in Tibet.

With the pride of the hydraulic engineer that he was some 35 years ago, Hu does mention however the building along the Yangtze River of the mammoth 3 Gorges Dam, for flood control and hydroelectric power. Almost as one, we four Westerners come together as quizzical over that project’s wretched impact on the environment. Rick, who earlier tonight had asked us to steer clear of environmental topics, is the first to be caught up in the critical moment: I will have to ask him later what on earth got into him -- given his anxieties about being a good host, he is now a mystery, asking about valuable archaeological and folk-cultural sites that the Dam will submerge. For the rest of us too, it is as if a proverbial dam has burst open, as if Rick's 'ban' on environmental criticism is withdrawn. Elisabeth Lloyd follows through, noting how she has read that the mega-dam’s reduction of River silt will cause erosion and sinking of coastal areas. Lucian has heard of damage to biodiversity. I watch TV news and so I can wonder too about the dangerous landslides into the stinky Yangtze.

To which the President says, evenly, that authorities are working to minimize those costs and achieving cleaner technology. Only after a nation is well-off, however, can it afford to clean the environment. To his credit, Mr. Hu does not deny the Dam has forced the relocation of 1.3 million persons. Unfortunately, they are 3 Gorges’s short-term losers -- yet they have to be considered alongside the project’s many, many short- and long-term winners. (Hu is thought to be agile at table tennis, and he is up to returning the conversational ball too.)

My sense is that Hu understands his country's environmental mess. Still the bridge-builder, he does not dwell on pollution sources in our homeland -- vehicles, pulp mills, phosphorous as well as chlorine, and sewers that flush sewage, chemicals, and fertilizers into rivers during heavy rainstorms. Nor does he emphasize that China’s delivery of goods by transport is often cleaner than, say, North America’s. Also understated is that in effect North America, with its consumption of foreign goods, has outsourced much of its pollution to China. I suspect that Hu may be saving our face -- and his economy which needs the rest of the world as a market.

Rick deviates once more from his 'hands-off' approach to pollution. Now he has the chops to ask: "I hope I'm not overstepping, President Hu, but what if your government adheres to its present course? Within 25 years, China will emit twice the carbon dioxide of all the OECD countries, yes?" What could have triggered this from my mild-mannered husband?

Hu, the federal chieftan, deflects that question, characterizing the too-lax provincial governments as messing things up by poor implementation of his central government's environmental prescriptions. He's striving for better governance too.

I would say we’re pretty good foils for Hu to play off of.

Smoothly changing the subject, he refers approvingly to Newly Displaced Population, a 2004 canvas by the realist painter Liu Xiaodong. “Look,” he suggests, “Chinese authorities did not censor that critical painting. That openness is emblematic of China’s growing tolerance.” Pressed by Elisabeth Lloyd, however, Hu does admit that representations of the Tiananmen Square episode still are off-limits.

Flash forward to Lucian gamely asking about contemporary art in China. He does not bring up a topic he had remarked upon before Hu showed up, when we were talking art and anticipating Hu's arrival. Lucian complained then about those art factory villages where scores of Chinese artisans replicate original works from the West which they sell by the square meter. Rather than that concern, Lucian dwells now on the explosion of museums, galleries, and auction houses. That Shanghai and Beijing are very much “hot stops on the highly competitive international art circuit” comes as news to Barb and me, but not to the well-read Lucian.

He asks about the tension between younger Chinese artists who flaunt their personal styles in the face of their nation's official emphasis on the harmonious collective. Lucian wins no direct response from Hu to that, except I detect an eyebrow uptick, as if the President is reflecting that some Chinese these days go in different directions.

Lucian knows, moreover, about Beijing’s newish “798” district, a cultural quarter that clusters 300 artists’ studios, commercial galleries, bookshops, and restaurants. Lucian also is in the know about the top marks that Western critics and buyers give currently to important contemporary Chinese paintings, especially those not in the old social-realist mode. Happily, art professionals no longer have occasion to carp, “That’s pretty good for a Chinese painting.”

Few important Chinese paintings are purchased these days by mainland Chinese, the buyers principally being Europeans. According to Lucian, those buyers, and others, prop up the star system of international art. Hu asks, “But Lucian, is that a good thing?” That leads to our discussing whether that system is declining as the art market increasingly offers choice. I know middle-class people, for instance, who buy locally and thus value personal connectivity to artists whose work they hang in their homes. Lucian, though, tonight projects that the big-bucks crowd will continue buying globally…

Like countless women before, Elisabeth Lloyd and Barb appear to find this Lucian Freud bloke fascinating. Damn, they hang on his words. Hu Jintao notices too. Why is it that chaps in the arts fascinate women? Is it the excitement and challenge of their roguish, unpredictable personalities? Do wild chaps bring out the rebels lurking in women?

Thirty or more years ago, I remember Barb wearing a certain smile when she once observed from a distance (in a second balcony) that Zubin Metha, the conductor, was ‘Sexy.’ I think she’s smiling like that at Lucian now, from up-close.

Lucian picks up on sensory data fast, and if at this instant he were to ‘do’ his host, he’d paint me a jealous green.

Most likely in Lucian’s case, the attraction is his glorious output. Yes, that must be it.

Definitely the allure is not his input, all those supremely long stretches introspecting his subjects, standing at his easel day after day, with his models laying on a couch, perhaps even his Grandfather’s couch. Lucian takes time out for the artist & model meals that he cooks. With drive and focus like that, who could hang out in cafes with family or friends (isn’t that what visual artists do?)

We learn, however, that one way that Lucian does connect with his daughters is to paint them many times, perhaps in bathrobes. The pictures are benign and paternal, and in his clinical and visceral style.

(We're really into it. I’m sitting on our couch, taking in the flow, the opposite of being bored as hell. I’m flexing my disgustingly huge ego, jubilant that Barb and I somehow managed to attract and hold this set of luminaries. Their high ideals seem more important to them than their robust egos. Besides using terms like ‘charismatic’ or ‘energetic,’ it’s hard to describe people you appreciate. So I’ll just say they fill the room.

(Additionally, I’m relishing the affable banter between Billy Graham and Bob Geldof. They’re just foolin', not riding each other hard. When one of them seems to put on airs, the other zings a friendly insult, and that’s enough to sand-down the other’s rough edges. It’s not so much what they say as how they say it, how they play well with others.

(Before I retired a decade ago, all the time I’d give and receive the same sort of ribbing with work buddies. We’d keep each other real.)

Billy acknowledges that he has had faults and missed opportunities. Some of the many thousands of conversions to Christ that followed his sermons may have been short-lived. Billy regrets that he did not always bring the Gospel to the White House -- Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter could be “prickly.” Billy’s concerned too that some clergy scorned his moderate and inclusive teachings, i.e., fundamentalists have found him insufficiently conservative for a southern Baptist. Billy laments a 'with us or against us' disposition that is out there.

As the talk gets around to the meaning(s) of God, Joan of Arc pitches in. At one point, a maxim she offers sounds like something provocative from the outdoor marquee of a church: “Lying in bed and saying ‘Oh God’ is not the same as going to Church.”

Bob likes that, and in turn Joan likes that he likes that remark. Billy laughs and says something indecipherable.

Bob re-frames the discussion to the Church in the past and organized religion’s misuse of God in medieval wars. He is stumped about why good people do bad things in the name of religion. He seems open to the possibility that divinity could exist without religion.

Joan glowers at Bob as he holds that “The world doesn’t need any more Christians…” She relaxes, however, as Bob finishes his thought, “any more than the world needs more Buddhists or Muslims." Bob glances at Billy, as if to reference him for introducing the notion earlier, "What the world now is more compassionates."

You can't argue with that, and I think we've hit a dead zone in conversation.

Barb is visual-minded and eventually inquires into a prayer-wheel she’d heard about, one that Billy distributed at one of his New York crusades. Billy describes how you could turn a dial to questions on the outside of that wheel -- for instance, “Have you had personal sorrow?’ and ‘Do you hate someone?’ A window on the wheel then would cite the Gospel text that provided an answer. At best, Joan and I are only indifferent to the wheel. In a friendly way, though, Bob reaches over to tap Billy on the back, “Dude, that’s cool, technologically and aesthetically.” Billy thinks of the wheel as “a handy and simple self-help guide.”

Later, Barb’s interest in watercolor painting comes forward when we dive into art and religion. She’s familiar enough with religious subjects (like Bellini’s angels, Durer’s virgins, and Raphael’s Madonnas) -- only she hasn’t put them into her own artwork, at least not consciously. Joan, evidently now on one of her favorite turfs, tells us about faithful relationships that Giotto, Michelangelo, Leonardo, et al. had with God. She regrets that the era of great religious paintings ended with Venice’s Tiepolo.

Joan is on Picasso’s case for declaiming that “God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things.” For Joan, it’s blasphemy that Picasso equates himself with God, even if the painter is only teasing.

Concepts in play now include "heal,” "care," “charity,” "salvation," “redemption,” “spiritual,” “eternal wisdom,” and "God's love." Joan at one point throws in “firmament” as in “God’s firmament,” a word I associate with hymns. Can’t remember which one, though. Surely it must be in more than one hymn.

Then we take up the recent wave of books by tenacious anti-religionists such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. Visibly Billy is the most stirred. With eloquence, he disavows those writers’ ideas of an impersonally originated universe. He mentions Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne’s use of a probability formula known as Bayes' Theorem to place the odds of Christ’s resurrection at 97 percent. Still, Billy does not insist upon "sufficient evidence" of divinity that this Oxford chap (Swinburne) provides or that Hitchens et al. demand. And later by invoking assorted lessons from religion, Billy demolishes their argument that a broad education in religious faith is 'child abuse.'

True eloquence may make fun of eloquence (folk saying), but nobody here tonight outrightly mocks Billy’s stand.

Barb does remark that skepticism and religiosity can co-exist within an individual.

Joan says that an emotional need for faith cannot be denied.

In response to the question about whether God is dead, Bob points out that there's no conclusive way to disprove the existence of God. But then he gets in a quasi-jibe, good-naturedly of course. When Billy remarks “I'm for morality, but morality goes beyond sex to human freedom and social justice,” Bob allows that “Beyond Sex” would make a great title for something.” Just as calmly, Billy bespeaks, “Maybe even better than ‘Boomtown Rats’?”

Appreciating our giggles and grins, Joan says that “laughter is god-given. It reduces blood pressure, it lowers stress hormones, it increases muscle flexon, and it raises the immune function by boosting levels of infection-fighting T-cells and disease-fighting proteins which produce disease-destroying antibodies.” Each of us takes a deep breath and laughs again, which prompts Joan to characterize us as “triggering the release of endorphins, the body's natural painkillers. See? We’re each producing general senses of well-being.”

I register silent surprise as I hadn't realized Joan was into smiley or scientific stuff. Is her occasional laughter a mask for her deep pain?

With regard to laughter’s benefits, vocal agreement comes especially from Billy who says he used to begin sermons with funny stories.

The five of us then have a number of back-and-forths on the bombastics of Hitchens and the other anti-religionists, the charged’ tone of that atheistic vanguard, and the counter-itch that pulls folk toward God.

Ultimately pressed to declare myself on matters of the soul -- and this on an empty stomach -- the best I can quickly summon is this: “As a Christian, I prefer the anti-religionists’ chaps’ frontal attacks…I value their directness ahead of agnostics’ flapdoodle. It seems to me that agnostics merely pretend open-mindedness to uncertainty about God while underneath generally they’re concealing an arrogant disdain for believers.” That’s my little speech.

(Actually, I didn’t say that -- it’s what I wished I’d said. What I’ve just typed is a highly edited version of my stumbling-around. As a result, I've not paid attention to or noticed the last five minutes of talk. You see, I‘m not always a reliable narrator.)

Then, out of the blue, I hear and smell a fart. No one claims authorship.

‘Tis a good time to move on to the next room for dinner at 8. Barb goes to the kitchen for last-minute preps and to move dishes to the table. Everyone looks starved.

Joan says we have "touched on" a lot of things. I tell myself that her touched-on description means our approach has been too scatter-shot for her taste: we haven't even begun to 'cover' our holy topic.

When I get a signal from Barb, I say, “Church on the move,” and everyone digs that slang for “It’s time for our group to leave this location.”

Billy is first through our French doors and into the dining area. I wonder if he's always first through doors.

Easing back into the conversation, I remark that I was at her “breakout” race at the Indianapolis Speedway in 2005. “Oh really,” Danica Patrick responds, like I’m as much of an operator & leering pig as James Dean seems to be tonight, like maybe I'm also impolitic enough to ask her the What-Big-Race-Have-You-Won-Lately question. I say that yes, I really was there in Indiana, re-inhabiting the world I’d known as an excited kid, 65 years ago.

Instead, at a moderate speed, Dad drove our family’s stick-shift car to Indianapolis. I recollect fights en route with my brother. I recall merriment too from Burma Shave messages. These days, I miss the six narrow markers along the road like “Cattle Crossing/Means Go Slow/That old Bull/Is Some/Cow’s Beau/Burma Shave”?

For our gang tonight, I attest to the Indy Speedway’s motor roars and the smell of screeching rubber. I can picture big crowds around the track, and I remember the alarm on Dad’s face about a ripping crash we heard and rising smoke we saw.

A week or so later at the movies back home, I saw a black-and-white newsreel of that same event -- narrated by Ed Herlihy. That’s the first time I’d been part of something newsworthy. Ah, one never forgets the good memories.

James, a native of Indiana, circles his hands over his head and imitates the buzz of souped-up engines ramming round and round a track. For him too, the Indy was life-and-death exciting. “It suited my morbid personality. Almost as much fun as shucking corn.” I rib him (back) with a nag about the morbidity of his smoking, and he laughs.

At one point, Danica turns historical on us. It seems that for ‘my’ year, 1940, the winner was the identical chap who’d won the year before, Wilbur Shaw. Later, during World War II, the Indy fell into disrepair and folk expected it’d be turned into a housing development for returning veterans. When Shaw revisited the scene of his triumph, he was shocked at its run-down state.

Danica: “Wilbur took on the task of finding a buyer for the property. It was owned by Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I ace fighter pilot. Wilbur looked around for someone who knew what the Indy was all about. A local businessman was game and in 1945, the track began building towards new greatness.” Decades passed before women were even allowed in the garage, the pits, or even the press box. And, as we hear, not until 1977 did a woman, aerospace engineer Janet Guthrie, qualify for the Indy.

Chris Peters asks Dancia for the name again of the energizer in her story of the Indy's rebirth. “I’m fascinated by institutional renewal,” he justifies. Danica repeats, ‘Wilbur Shaw.’” The puckered Wi of “Wilbur” elongates her lips perfectly. Noting the attention Chris and I give to those lips, James emits a tormented look.

Our guests are cordial enough to let me resume my reverie. In 2005, I had obeyed a mystic ‘call’ to revisit the Speedway. Mistily, I was recalling pleasures with my late father.

Of course, ’05 is when Danica had -- for a woman -- the best-ever start and the best-ever finish. Her showing, applauded nationally, was seen as a win for women in general. At least Barb saw it that way then.

“I made a hell of a point for anybody, are you kidding me?” Danica says, correctly, competitively.

Danica gives me an affirming glance. She’s treating me kindly, almost as if I’m a member of her own cool generation.

James, standing by the mantle where he’s put the ashtray, seems more hot than cool. Even when he isn’t saying anything, the chap is one buzzing center of nerves. He rolls his shoulders, tugs at his jacket, or pushes his hands deep into his jeans’ pockets. His facial gestures seem to invite sympathy over some private suffering. Confusion, Gusto, Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), Need To Urinate -- he may be expressing all or none of these conditions.

If others in the room also are considering how an actor builds his characters, they're wondering if he has to suffer to show suffering. And they're curious if he has to be happy to show happiness. Perhaps an actor ‘wings’ those moments or draws upon life experiences stored from ‘down’ and ‘up’ times. I’m in the dark whether you can separate life from theater.

Boy oh boy, do we learn a great deal about bowling. More individuals may be bowling alone now, and numbers of amateur bowlers may be declining, but pro-bowling currently has more people watching than the National Hockey League. (Rick inserts that hockey also has changed incredibly in the last 30 years.) “I love bowling. I wanted to save bowling…The only way to do that was to make it profitable,” says Chris.

Whereupon I set forth a little background from Ned next door: once he told me that ever since the disgraced Richard Nixon installed a bowling alley in the White House, the game had become déclassé. I mention Ned’s complaint that renaming alleys “lanes” and gutters “channels” did not cut it as upgrading. Chris agrees, and also ventures an opinion on President Nixon.

Danica Patrick doesn't want to talk politics. Government, she says, was the only course in high school she almost didn't pass. So she asks Chris Peters about other changes that he has introduced to pro-bowling leagues. She seems to have a sharp mind for business and finance.

Chris tells us about giving stock options to employees and players (a motivator he had learned at Microsoft), about raising prize money and hiring rock bands to pump up audiences, about re-interesting the ABC Network in televising finals, and generally about trying to heighten the league’s pizzazz. Audiences are on top of the action, thanks to new down-the-lane seats. Chris enthuses that nowadays players can express more of their personalities, shaking their fists in the air and even trash-talking their opponents. To increase head-to-head competition and create rivalries, the new PBA capped the number of players, added a trick-shot segment, and opened matches to women.

James Dean says that maybe his off-job passion should have been for bowling balls, not for racing cars. “Oh well, History’s History,” he reflects, “and nothing I can do about that now.” James's “now” is urgent, as if to prompt us fellow-diners to use our now-ness by going out and changing History tomorrow.

Danica notes that life and death go together...

James says 1955 turned out to be a miserable year for sports-cars. Months before his own accident, 82 people were killed at Le Mans. A car left the circuit and plowed into spectators. Danica adds that it was a Mercedes. Worst catastrophe in racing, ever.

About the meal to help along the discourse? If we are what we eat, we have heft and complexity, for we open with Rick’s pasta e fabioli, i.e., beans and macaroni in a basil-flecked broth that has heft and complexity from good Italian cheese. During my main course, the way James attacks his rack of lamb with garlic cream sauce, I am afraid he will break my precious china, handed-down from Grandmother Florence.

We have baby arugula with tomato vinaigrette -- freshly made mind you, not re-heated from last month’s dinner party. We also have sides of grilled langoustines and homemade ravioli with lobster and pumpkin. This is not a buffet…probably I am serving too many different items.

James pulls out a chair for Danica, insists on sitting beside her, passes her everything (sometimes twice), and delights in her every reflection about this (e. g., “Life is what you make of it”) and that (e.g., actors Adam Sander and Van Deisel are her favorites). James represents himself as a twin spirit” of Danica’s, since he grew up in the Midwest too, in the state bordering Illinois (where Danica was raised). The two of them, he boasts, escaped to the more glamorous and fabled West Coast. For this party, James plainly seeks a burst of intimacy or, more likely, a ‘Let’s Be Friends’ alliance.

I interpret that James is committed tonight to a role. He is enacting the Early Romantic. It is like a ticket to a performance by a juvenile hunk. He chatters mawkishly. He quotes Keats on truth, beauty, and the fatal illness that led that very young poet so reluctantly to relinquish his fiancé Fanny Brawne. Not so subtly, James throws off signals of exhilaration and near-obsession about Danica. Tonight's novel experience of dinner-partying with this vibrant woman seems to have amped-up his brain’s reward system with norepinephrine and dopamine.

O.K., James is a Method actor and all that. Nevertheless, my hunch is that he is sincere in the emotional butterflies he is conveying.

I suspect Rick and Chris are oblivious to James’s reaching-out…

Usually but not always, I can ‘read’ most of Rick’s reactions. His mien is telling me that he regards James Dean’s stories and psychologizings as “sappy.”

Loosen up, Rick. I for one am gripped by James’s emotional truth and his wrestling with troubles. I have seen that depth in James’s cinema blockbusters. (I thought he was not as effective, though, in his last movie, Giant.)

“My father and I never reconciled,” James says, re-focusing on Danica Patrick, which is odd since she clearly celebrates her father. James names several people in the film industry who claim he simply played a truculent version of himself, mustering his resentment at his dad into his acting.

Out of East of Eden, which Danica replies that she has not seen, James treats us to vignettes of a son muttering and resisting a father who is more preoccupied with freezing lettuce than with helping his perplexed offspring. Out of Rebel Without A Cause, which Danica firmly says she also has not seen, James describes his character as estranged from a henpecked father. That father moped around the house in an apron, never standing up for himself. Again playing primarily to Danica, James says he had to explode on screen over that father’s weakness. “I threw him on the ground and started to strangle the whimp out of him.”

Danica looks away and munches on her dessert (banana cake -- I had used up all sorts of frozen bananas for it, with icing as a bonus). Then Danica stops, “People I know get along with their Dads well. So I could never fathom why Picasso said something along the lines of ‘In art, one must kill one's father.’ Yes, I know Picasso meant that metaphorically: the artist must reject or cannibalize the works of his or her predecessors, but James do you characterize your --”

“Not just artists,” Chris Peters says, citing Great sociologist Max Weber, Great philosopher Voltaire, and Great psychoanalyst Freud. He knows some programmers and bowlers who also are estranged from their fathers.

James: “All righty, everyone knows that Freud claimed all men suffer from a psychological disorder that impels them not only to want to kill their father but to sleep with their mother.” James is right, yep, we all know that, but I would like to ask Chris, Rick, and their moms whether it really works that way.

“All right, James," jousts the other woman at the dinner, "I’m afraid I haven’t had the chance yet to see your film, stage, and TV productions, or else I might know your answer. Freud's in bad repute now, so I have to ask, Did you intentionally pattern your characters on Freud? Even in the '50s, that would have meant replacing reality with an overly academic image, yes?”

“Every role is different,” James begins, tickled to be invited to respond to a question from Lady Danica, “and I did not read Freud. But during my one year in Hollywood, I was developing a niche as a confronter -- not a murderer -- of father figures. I faced the danger of getting type-cast, I was even looking into comic and singing parts. They were things I wanted to do that I hadn’t even verbalized...”

Leaning towards Dietrich, Anna Amalia lowers her voice, “My husband was very gentle.”

Anna Amalia asks if Rick and I are married, and when I specify that we are and that we had two sons and a daughter, she asks if we married once our kinder were old enough to be part of the ceremony.

Earlier, I had noticed that Kenny Chesney twigged to the mention of annulment. Now he says that after a four-month courtship in 2005, he had wed the Hollywood star, Renee Zellweger. “I remember coming back from the wedding and we landed in Little Rock, Arkansas. I had a show. We didn't have a honeymoon, you know? Welcome to Little Rock, Baby! Happy Honeymoon!”

Another four months later, Baby filed for an annulment, citing fraud as the reason. The couple believed that was the broadest of the available legal reasons that could be filed in her home state of California.

It must be difficult for dual celebrities to make a go of it. And then there is that gentleman's code, 'Never badmouth a lady.'

According to Kenny: “The only fraud that was committed was me thinking that I knew what it was like...that I really understood what it was like to be married and I really didn't."

(Allow me this aside: My Rick here is one of those billions of men who love being loved and loving, even in a long-term marriage. But my girlfriends -- we call ourselves “The Golden Girls” -- tell me about bachelors who are busy entrepreneurs, state judges, teachers, et al.) who are commitment-phobes. These guys also have shows coming up, always. They are happy boozing, working, staying up late, traveling, doing jock things, dating Babies-of-the-moment. The complicated relationship and lifestyle of marriage and fatherhood simply is not on those guys’ ‘To-Do’ lists. Like, Kenny has to spend months on tour with the 100 full-time employees of Kenny Chesney Inc. Hence I can understand why he has taken –- at least for now -- an Incomplete in Long-Term Marriage.)

Dietrich jumps in with a reflection on his own experience, much of it as a widower and father of three: ”I was rarely at home, often inaccessible. And when I was at home, I had to work [study scores, familiarize himself with composers as persons and with the times in which their work was created, develop an interpretation that is original]. I was subservient to this work. I was its slave…One tries again and again to scale back, to make adjustments, to fulfill one’s obligations…But in the final analysis, I don’t think it can really be done. You have to make the sacrifice, and unfortunately others are a part of this sacrifice as well. It is a bitter lesson, which everyone in my position will experience. I think the same thing has happened to everyone who has seriously devoted himself to Music...”

How should I react to Dietrich's lesson? Well, people (other than my sister who had to endure hours of my practicing) used to tell me that I could elicit mellow tones out of my clarinet. But now -- as happens most days -- I am glad that I did not seriously devote my whole life to music. I do not verbalize that opinion in front of our guests, though...

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."

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…”

Over his beer stein, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau holds that, when he has performed songs by different authors, for each piece he has to become an altogether different singer: The song’s interpreter should completely disappear. You shouldn’t be able to detect him.”

For an opposite tack, Kenny Chesney reflects that in the past, he has been fairly consistent in his good-time persona. Further, he is attuned to what designers call consolidated aesthetic totality. “That’s where what you wear sounds like what you sing, where your haircut and teashirt looks like it belongs with the instrument you play, or where your flip-flops fit the chair you’re sitting in.”

Alluding to his own musician son, Dietrich says that it is pompous to give advice to the young or the young middle-aged artist, except maybe ‘Never compromise.” Nonetheless, he, Dietrich, cannot help feeling that within him, Kenny has the stuff to work well not only as a songwriter (something Dietrich is not) but as a fine performer in other genres too.

Dietrich is more cautious, indirect, and considerate in tone than I am here, given my constraints of time and blogspace. For instance, he invokes Science to comment on changes in heartbeat that come with aging and that accordingly affect a singer’s tempo. Dietrich is Mr. Tactful, cloaking his message “in words that will not cause emotional distress.” As boiled-down by me, Dietrich’s counsel is that Kenny could build upon his natural curiosity, broadening-out from his country-rock niche.

It is plain that curiosity is a high virtue for Dietrich: “For many years, I literally learned a new piece every day.”

Kenny, he with the traveled smile, resonates to the forementioned heartbeat-tempo link. Altogether he is nonchalant and not offended by Dietrich’s suggestion that to be his best self, he might diversify his repertoire. The cowboy agrees that one becomes stagnant unless one continues to grow. "In my quiet moments of self-evaluation back home, I'll give some thought to broaden-outing...and to broadening-out."

"We all need to check our alignment with our soul's purpose," Anna says, presumably by way of encouragement. In my experience, however, the soul's purpose is rarely singular...

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.

A couple hours ago, when Rick got up to go to the bathroom, our troupers were leaving the building. That was 5:30ish.

Now that we're downstairs again, Rick and I survey the scene. We're tickled that Anna Amalia, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and Kenny Chesney had found a scrap of paper to write us an affable thank-you note. "We're exhausted but we've reached the state of elation that musicians live for," the note declares. With a flourish, they had signed their names and let themselves out.

Of course everything is in place. Nothing has been stolen. Not that we were worried.

Anna has forgotten her casserole dish. It is fine Hohenzollern china that she certainly will want back. We take that as a good sign, deluding ourselves that she is giving herself a pretext to pay us another visit.

Feel-Good Alert: as far as we know, and certainly as we are keen to think, all our visitors had a swell time, and our neighbors were not bothered after midnight by the beautiful noise.

It was all quite wondrous, exactly as life can be.



_________________________
For company on Friday, June 6, we are trying to interest three interesting entrepreneurs. See you then?

In the meantime, for accounts of past parties, click our Archives. We did live blogging for the following:

November 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 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; and

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.

Over desert (fresh strawberries with port wine sabayon, a recipe from Barb’s Aunt Elsy), I proclaim, “I’ve called us all together to say how great we all are.”

Back at committee meetings that I used to have to attend years ago, that was a ‘laugh line’ I’d deploy. I’d make that crack that after some of us colleagues had over-waited for our convener to appear. From tonight’s colleagues, though, silence.

I get serious: “Barb and I are pleased to spend time with you tonight. Everybody has potential, yet you three exemplify folk who’ve profoundly taken advantage of yours. I’m not asking you to boast, but I'd appreciate if each of you could give us how you pulled it off. How you actualized yourselves.”

“This sounds like something out of a bad short story,” Jackie Robinson says.

From the others, nothing. Is that Strike 1?

I hadn't said anything about a story. I was simply inviting some 'handles' from guests who have 'made it.' To my brand-new chum, I muster, “A bad story? Jackie, how so?”

“Simple. You and Barb have brought together three very different people, from assorted cultures. Food’s good, we have our moments, and nobody’s stepping on anybody’s toes. For a good short story, though, Rick, what you need is a fight, a contest, a car chase, or something adversarial. That’s not going to happen here. We're too polite. Besides, you’re asking us to toot our own horns, which grounded people don’t need to do. Don’t like to do.”

Sometimes you don’t fight. You try harder. I reply, “You know how a parent always worries about his kids and grandkids, wants them to have the best guidance. Right along with Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son and grandson, giving counsel is a thing that elders feel they ought to do. Up to now, a lot of what I’ve told my family are tired old bromides, like ‘Aim high.’ ‘Save money.’ ‘Find a work/life balance.’ 'Overcome your flaws.' 'Discover your inner self.' 'Serve others.' ‘Dress conservatively so folk will be fooled into thinking your progressive ideas are conservative too.’”

Muhammad's interest had been egging me on in this litany, but he cocks a critical eyebrow at my last prescription.

"Anyway, chaps, I'm not asking for anything as ambitious or arty as a narrative about yourself. No big deal like that. I'm just soliciting a couple quick truths on how you composed your lives. How your careers are happy expression of yourselves... Is that too vague?"

Again, blank faces. Game practically over?