Michael Jordan's apricot liqueur is warming. It's a sweet variation of apricot brandy.

Tom Hodgkinson, who once made a few bucks importing absinthe into England during its revival in the '90s, might have preferred drinking that. I look over and see that he's fine with Michael's apricots. Cool. I don't have to mix any drinks.

By now, I would have thought our invited company would have moved on, theme-wise. Yet, curiously, everyone is still chewing the fat about the Allies "settling" the Great War. Talking about that past conflict seems one way to avoid arguing about the current one in Iraq. Or is it?

"Making peace is difficult," Margaret MacMillan judges. "It's hard to hold together coalitions. It's easy I think to get caught up and beguiled by your own power. You sit in a big place like Paris or Washington and you say we can arrange this. I think you sometimes underestimate, powerful people do, just how difficult it is to organize the world."

"That'd be a good course title," I say, grandiosely imagining myself someday taking or someday even leading a seminar on Organizing The World. "Probably, I continue, "there'd be a lot of disputatiousness throughout the class." The only person who reacts positively to my comment is Barb, ever loyal. She gives me a smile -- no, a half-smile.

Not to my credit, most of my historical sense of the Middle East is informed by a few segments of the movie Lawrence of Arabia. With her command of modern history and of contemporary international relations, Margaret easily transcends my feel for the region. Soon she has us geopolitical innocents eating figuratively out of her hands.

For instance, she posits that the major powers, as true "19th century imperialists," treated "the non-European parts of the world in a cavalier and off-hand way, and I think we're still paying for that." That thought leads us to our discussing colonial wars, past and present, Asian and African.

Another of Margaret's examples has the Treaty setting the groundwork for a Jewish homeland and independent state and thereby giving rise to some of today's Mid-East hostilities. Paris's peace-makers "thought the Arabs would give up, they'd move away, they didn't count. And I don't think they thought the Jewish presence in Palestine would develop as quickly as it did."

(To no one in particular, I quote a rabbi friend of mine, the late and much-valued Sol Tanenzapf, about how impoverished Jews in Poland and Russia, along with not-so-impoverished Jews in England, Canada, and the US donated money so land could be bought in Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine. There, after following the legal forms for those purchases, Jews could settle, farm, and build houses. Sol said that people forget that Jewish settlers did not take land from anyone. Rather, they purchased it from legitimate owners, albeit in swamps and desert areas that nobody else wanted.

(Barb, who also liked Sol, gives me a hard look. She's surprised by my tangent to the conversation. Or maybe she's surprised that Sol and I had once had that particular exchange since at times I've been empathetic to Palestinians. My understanding is that those Arabs, through Ishmael, also can lay holy claim to lands now occupied by Israelis. God apparently was not into real estate.)

Iraq was another misjudgment of the Versailles gang. Barb cites a recent Op-ed,
here [subscription required], that almost seemed to regret 1) the collapse, after World War I, of the Ottoman Empire and 2) Versailles' subsequent invention of Iraq. The encompassing Ottomans were "Muslim but tolerant with an array of different cultures."

Apparently, on their own without the Ottomans' reconciling routines and without a cohesive national identity, the Shites, Sunni, and Kurds of the new Iraq ultimately proved inept at coalition-building. Enter dictators, resolving by force the contradictions of warring sects -- until Saddam's fall.

Margaret remarks that Versailles peace-makers thought Iraq was filled with folk who didn't know their own minds. "I'm not surprised that Iraq never really worked as a country because it was made up of all these disparate pieces and people who'd never had any shared history. I mean, yeah, not surprisingly, they didn't hang together terribly well."

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.”

Dissatisfactions with the reputability of search engines? Tim Berners-Lee frets over the rubbish on his medium too. He admits there’s no way to appraise the reliability of what’s online.

For ten years, though, he's thought one way to promote trust would be to “put what I call an ‘Oh, yeah?’ button on the browser…You should be able to click on ‘Oh, Yeah?’ and the browser program would tell the server computer to get some authentication – by comparing encrypted digital signatures, for example -- that the document was in fact generated by its claimed author....”

Lisa Kudrow speaks about her main medium, half-hour comedies on TV. Today it’s “in a weird place. You have 19 minutes on network television to do something more eye-catching and funnier than people humiliating themselves on Reality Shows, which is a tough act to follow…it feels like there is a lot of desperation.”

The desperate character that Lisa plays in “The Comeback” show endures much humiliation.

Barb asks if Lisa might ever fall back on her Biology degree. Barb is being playful -- but Lisa is excited about Biology's breakthrough news just last week, that embryonic stem cells have been created from human skin cells. Lisa does take the possibility of working in Biology half-seriously: “No, I don't think so. I think that ship has sailed. I would have to do a lot of school to catch up.”

Our reminiscences sail back to Jack Kilby. After a decade as an electrical engineer in Milwaukee, Jack looked for work in miniaturization. Texas Instruments proved an enthusiastic employer, wanting to avoid hand-soldering thousands of components for thousands of bits of wire. "I worked through the period when about 90 percent of the workforce took what we called ‘mass vacation.’ I was left with my thoughts and imagination…I thought it would be worthwhile to try and make everything from semi-conductors. This was contrary to most other major efforts at the time.”

Hey Jack, one should work well even when no one sees it, and one should take responsibility without being asked, but no vacation?

Jack talks about his experiments with various passive and active devices. He aimed “to lower the cost, simplify the assembly, and make things smaller and more reliable.” Jack recalls how he “realized that since all of the components could be made of a single material, they could also be made in situ inter-connected to form a complete circuit.”

Jack’s engineering jargon, and there’s more of it, short-circuits my understanding.

Settling again in our LR, Rick unfurls his old humiliating story about how he was 'motivated' into going online. How many times have I heard that story?

All the same, as I say while pouring liqueur, many people can date their involvement with the Net to a particular episode. I tell how my sister Mary Lou, for example, realized she 'had' to learn about the information highway one day in 1995. She was walking down a hall and happened to see two colleagues looking at a map. It was a hard copy, printed from online only a minute earlier, of the expected path for a Caribbean hurricane. "Do you think this will affect my trip to Mexico?", one colleague was worrying. Mary Lou says that moment was her trigger towards computer literacy.

After Rick declares that Tim invented e-mail, we hear that particular inventor really was Ray Tomlinson, a computer engineer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tomlinson had the idea in 1971 that it would be as easy to send messages on a computer network as it already was to send files. Apparently, 30 to 40 seconds later, Tomlinson came up with the @ sign to identify users’ and senders’ names.

E-mail’s provenance gives me a charge, since Rick and I -- together with our first-born son –- during 1971 lived only 3 miles away from that Cambridge. We rented a third-floor walk-up @ Newtonville. To tonight's guests, however, I do not brag about that 'bond.'

Ray Tomlinson should be a household name, don't you think? Do computer people have awards like Oscars and Nobels?

(Tonight is the chattiest Rick and I have ever been with masters of computerland. Once, though, we sat behind Bill Gates flying economy on Northwestern. We had seen an article indicating he flew economy class on that airline. We're fairly certain it was Microsoft Man -- we caught a frontal look too. We saw what we wanted to believe.

(Before take-off, a stewardess kept trying to prompt that red-haired, bespectacled guy to turn off his electronic device. He was as stubborn as a CEO, shutting his laptop only at the last minute.

(So Rick wrote a note asking the Man to give our first-born a job interview. A thousand air miles later, we crossed out the word ‘interview.’

(Pity, neither of us had the nerve to give him that note. When we landed, Rick handed him his coat from the overhead compartment, helping him on with it.)

Lisa Kudrow interrupts my above flashback. She says she takes pleasure in the Web’s universality. She is glad no one institution controls it with proprietary claims.

Further she praises Tim for the notion that any piece of information anywhere on the Web should have an identifier, a URL or Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that would allow users to capture hold of it?

Lisa remarks, upbeatly, that Tim Berners-Lee and Jack Kilby stand as exemplars of her proposition that it is “not just how smart you are –- but how creative you are with your smarts”.

I am about to say something about there being a whole lot of kinds of ‘smarts’ to be creative about, like hymn-singing smarts, enthusiasm smarts, happy smarts, basketball smarts like our guest last month Michael Jordan, etc. But I have already bent our subjects of tonight's conversations enough. I know that listening confers respect, and I am determined to listen...

We chaps haven't exactly thought of ourselves as creating ”composites,” but we all admit we're “in the composite business.” Tim Berners-Lee mentions (actually, re-mentions) the important theoretical work by Vannevar Bush, a predecessor of his at M.I.T. on storing information based on associations.

That's a killer first name, Van-ne-var. A kick to roll off the tongue. What if we'd named a son Vannevar? Would he have gone to M.I.T., and now roll around Technology all day?

Jack Kiley backs the idea of science as a composite, though his words are sort of boilerplate flat: “I’m grateful to the innovative thinkers who came before me, and I admire the innovators who have followed.”

Our guests’ easy consensus is that innovative thinking is a composite with something extra that turns out to be useful. Everyone goes along, sort of, with that definition, the better to get along with each other across the rest of the evening. We're not seminar-exact.

As our little supper party winds down, Lisa Kudrow vouches that everyone appreciates Barb’s work making our meal and post-prandial snack. "Her time in the kitchen has meant she’s had to miss some of tonight’s conviviality, yes? I get the impression Barb want to be more in the midst of dining-room things?"

Oh-Oh.

“Sure do,” my wife jumps at Lisa's lead, weary of having to ask us to speak louder when she's in the kitchen. Like her father the doctor, this Lisa woman is interested in curing long-term headaches.

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

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

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

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

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

Because cheese is traditionally absent from Chinese diets, we hosts are audacious enough to want to cosmopolitan-ize the President. Tonight, from an online recipe, I’ve prepared chicken and wild mushroom broth with cheddar cheese wontons. They go over fine.

When Barb speak of imported-from-China foods that she buys at our local market, Hu Jintao casually mentions that he’s cancelled his country’s agriculture tax. As I understand it, that step reduced the urban/rural economic divide and somewhat whittled away at China’s income disparities. Hu, who sure is comfortable with statistics, elaborates that just 1 percent of his population control 60 percent of the wealth. By contrast, in the U.S., 5 percent control 60 percent. Hu strikes me as one of those CEOs who believe it’s difficult to manage unless you measure.

Assuming ownership of a radish, Hu argues for recognition of his country’s progress. He assures us that China doesn’t just belch black smokestacks, the favored signs of progress of his predecessor (by 30 years) Mao Zedong. It’s propelling far into the Information Age. Relatively it’s becoming Innovation Country. “Relative to what?” Elisabeth probes -- but politely. She seems like a who-what-where kind of person.

Over quail, “the yield of the hunt” and Lucian Freud’s favorite Western food, Hu says that his young countrymen want to try out the thinking of Westerners like the economist Milton Friedman and the philosopher John Rawls. “Try out Rawls?” Elisabeth Lloyd fiddles with a fork and seems genuinely excited, “As in trying out a political order where liberty and equality are reconciled?” Hu replies with a statesman’s stiffness, “A qualified yes. Our Rawlsians are exploring a middle ground, without arguing for liberty against equality. Our interest is in moral duties and obligations that accord with people’s common idea of modern justice.”

Our company kicks that idea around for a while. Lucian, it evolves, wants "liberty first," prioritizing a society with as much individual opportunity as possible to exploit one's talents and endowments. As vigorously, Barb wants "equality first" in the "shared social space with fellow-citizens." Those differ, amicably enough, in their emphases and on the function of taxes. They do not 'triangulate' to a centrist position. That’s O.K. Somewhat opposing views have been heard and middle grounds not found. In this, I suspect we are unlike Hu's Middle Kingdom today, which after all is collapsing the boundaries between communism and capitalism.

As we adjourn to the living room, I maintain that folk behavior is interesting and horizon-broadening to know about. I refer to specific sexual adventures of the Kinsey Gang. My sources are the not always reliable books, movies, and biographies on that Gang, together with their pioneering research. Everyone, I figure, at the table is curious about what went on back in Bloomington but we’re circumspect. We present ourselves as un-shocked, we wear our most disinterested expressions.

That is, everyone except Lucian Freud. He still appears bemused.

Summarizing, Lucian eventually declares that “everything is autobiographical.” Elisabeth, shaking her long brown hair, again is not so sure. The most she’ll say now is that good science does arise out of personal drives of researchers.

Slightly off-topic, eventually Hu Jintao only offers that old feminist cry from the ‘60s and ‘70s that ‘the personal is also political.’ He doesn’t elaborate on that, in or out of his nation’s context. Perhaps at variance to the child-like obedience demanded by the murderous and absolutist Mao, Hu’s politics enable his countrymen and women to have -- if not liberty -- more personal space?

I assume, all very respectfully of course, that Hu is a devotee of the school of ‘Capitalism now, Democracy later... Maybe.” So when a chance arises, as tactfully as possible, I inquire if he has any idea how much ‘later’ may be. I figure he’ll say something about his path of gradualism and incrementalism. I expect that observation especially since five or ten minutes ago, he was telling us that he governs by consensus among rival leaders, and thus he’s certainly not in a position to solve speedily all governmental problems by himself. Other leaders have to come round.

Elisabeth is more direct: “President Hu, what are the chances that social democracy will be established within 10 years? And with a farmer's vote equal to a city-dweller's vote?” I'm confused by Elisabeth's question as I had thought citizens didn't ballot on state or local officials. What I hear from her is that now the rural voter registers as just one-quarter of the urban voter. I want clarification.

Hu doesn’t go there. What he repeats is that political reform will have to be cautious and studied. Hu says China is "pursuing a scientific outlook in development" through solutions that integrate not only economic concerns but environmental and social ones.

Hu's scientific quest to tie things together strikes Barb as akin to Lucian's artistic need to have models pose throughout an entire picture's creation. Eyes turn to her as she recalls what Lucian had said earlier about the model's presence affecting his painting of everything, e.g., the floorboard in the background, the lamp at the side, the sheet on the couch.

Eyes turn back to Hu with his point that China should “cherish socialism”which is hostile to great inequities and supportive of millions continuing to rise out of poverty annually. "Workers," Hu accentuates with what could be interpreted as either a smirk or a hope (sorry, I am not good at reading Chinese faces), "workers have recently gained job rights including the development of skills and talent via on-the-job training. Also lawyers now are taking on cases for workers' rights." And Hu has initiated programs and centers to make officials more accountable and government more open about meetings and functions.

“How’s it working out?” Elisabeth asks pleasantly, grateful (I think) to be talking about something other than her sex research. And as she ever-so-discretely pours Earl Gray Tea, Barb asks too: “Are there also provisions for elected works councils, collective bargaining, trade unions, and direct profit-sharing?”

For half a moment, Hu visibly blanches, cautiously and studiedly.

Suddenly, a pang of guilt hits me about my earlier pushiness tonight over energy, carbon credits, global warming. Maybe I shouldn’t be deferential to foreign authority, but after all this cordial man is our guest in our house. Methinks we should tread more lightly challenging him and his Party’s hierarchy. Our Chinese teapot and our questioning of his regime may ignite in Hu’s mind, even sparking him to reflect that his most brutal predecessor may have had the right idea after all, i.e., during the Cultural Revolution, Mao the Uber Authoritarian attempted to closed-down all his country's teahouses, the better to squelch dissidents.

Not to worry. No scowl emanates from our Presidential guest. Ah, relief. Tea-time with us, here in our often-democratic and very often-comfortable West, may veer toward the argumentative, but it hardly threatens his state, which now permits teahouses anyhow.

And…who would have thought? With marked chagrin in his voice, Hu says his father -- who had a small tea-trading business -- was denounced during the Cultural Revolution.

From his aura and the courtly way he carries himself, the Billy Graham I see is comfy with Power. Rick circles back to an earlier to & fro tonight and asks about Billy’s back-channel work as an ambassador for U.S. Presidents wanting to break the ice with certain foreign leaders (but not the African crooks we were talking about earlier). “You dress like an ambassador Billy,” winks Bob, as if that were the lowest state to which a person of character could sink.

We value that, different from certain leaders of his era, Billy’s avoided fiscal or sexual scandals -- and as Rick observes, Billy has apologized for insulting American Jews as found on a once-secret tape from President Richard Nixon’s White House. Billy, it seems, had put faith in Nixon’s character and his misadventures in Vietnam and Watergate. Once that faith was broken, “It was nearly unbearable to me,” Billy tells us. Bob suggests, “Nixon’s downfall was pretty unbearable for Nixon too.”

Rick further mentions how Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Nixon advanced their careers and policies by identifying with religious leaders. More often than not, those politicos sought out Billy, rather than the other way around. Rick quotes a biographer who attests that being in a newspaper photo with the solid, benign, family-respecting, and quite lionized Billy could bolster anyone’s approval rating in Middle America by 10 to 20 points. This correlation leads Bob to muse about getting a picture of himself alongside Billy to use as publicity somewhere and somehow for something.

Billy realizes that sometimes he has come across as these secular authorities’ unofficial chaplain, causing critics to accuse him of endorsing their policies. Naturally, Billy inquires how Bob cultivates his relations with governments’ big-wigs. Bob acknowledges that “I wouldn’t call [England’s] Tony Blair and Gordon Brown my friends, but I know them pretty well and this whole issue of Africa really does bother them. I think if they could do something while they had power, they would. Or to put it the other way, if they didn’t do anything, I think they’d regard it as almost a badge of shame.”

Bob tells about the time on television that he confronted one of Blair’s predecessors about the desperation of Africans. “People remember that as me telling [Margaret Thatcher] to go fuck herself, but that isn’t it. She said to me, ‘We’re very grateful for what you do.’ I engaged with her, very sotto voce and deferential, and she said, “Well, Mr. Geldof, it’s not as simple as that.’ I said, ‘No, Prime Minister, nothing is really as simple as dying, is it?’ And I looked at her and got the gimlet stare but I held it. So we went in for lunch, and she taps me on the shoulder and says, ‘Come and see me tonight.’ So we went to the flat and we had a scotch together.”…

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Chris Peters discovered the 100-year-old PBA was for sale, he recruited a couple of Microsoft pals to help buy and modernize the whole blooming league. Their years at Microsoft must have sensitized them to the payoff of owning the platform. $5M? For those chaps, chump change.

“We could have started our own bowling league, and not have paid off PBA’s debts, but we wanted to continue the organization’s tradition,” Chris states. “We wanted the right to call ourselves part of that history.” At the same time, "We could limp this thing along like a little toy; do a little improvement; or do it big. Because we're all Microsoft-type personalities, we went for the extra jumbo size” in improving, league-rebuilding, and institutional renewing.

James Dean asks what was the nature of that renewal? Barb says, “Good question.”

Danica Patrick intervenes, “I wager you trusted your instincts. I think that I trust my instincts a lot. I trust what I’ve learned and my ability. And I think that, you know, you have to have intuition as to what’s going to happen and how quick you’re catching your car, and how your car reacts within traffic, and a lot of traffic at that.”

James nods his pompadour, “You always have to trust the gods too.”

“Why yes,” Chris says, “that’s right. We definitely trusted our instincts -- our instincts led us to establish live webcasts, to revamp PBA’s website to capture about a million hits a day, and to set up an electronic bulletin board for excited bowlers and fans to enjoy the buzz. We threw out the old PBA rulebook, and invited a more emotional, in-your-face style of play.”

Chris mentions that the demographic that makes or breaks most pro sports -- 18 to 34 year-old males -- currently is up 80 percent for pro-bowling. Chris was seeking a Microsoft-type result that was SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-based).

Chris’s depiction is substantive, yet I notice Chris’s repeating Danica’s line about trusting one’s ‘instincts’ while ignoring James’s supplemental about heeding the gods’ too. I valued James’s add-on if only because it spurred Danica to introduce (a variation of) Aesop's proverb, "The gods trust those who trust themselves, yes?" Sure, a hard-nosed fact-checker would rule for the verb 'help' instead of 'trust, but no matter, Danica's point goes over well with all.

Chris has edged further away from James's second-hand smoke. Has he banned smoking in PBA?

It also strikes me that Chris and James figuratively have circled each other tonight, almost in a standoff, largely avoiding direct conversation. Now I amuse myself by mentally replaying Chris's omission of James's slight point about the gods. Agreed, it's trivial of me to do this, for Chris's omission doubtless was unconscious. Thing is, in my jejune late-teen days & nights when life was slow and, oh, so mellow, I’d try that same sort of linguistic bonding with girls -- you know, like others, I'd approach from the front, move in with head held high, lean forward with pelvis, introduce myself, raise eyebrows, and seek chemistry through body language as well as patter. Consciously too, I’d try steering the conversation so she'd talk about herself, just as I'd dismiss semantic contributions of chaps who were also trying to move in. That gamesmanship didn’t always work. Deep now in December, it somewhat hurts to remember that I was a ‘callow fellow’ well before that phrase was popularized in that “Try To Remember” song.

Later, when Dietrich learns that Kenny moves about on stages for audiences of 20,000 or more, Dietrich wants to know what happens to the singer’s facial expressions at the front of such gigantic crowds. Can one “put much faith then in the personal presence of the individual singer?” Kenny asserts that -- at least musically with regard to audiences -- size does not matter much: his shows rock with production elements such as high, wide, split-screen views of the whole singer. Pop artists like him have to work in hip visual, audio, and even kinesthetic realms.

“It’s a spectacle then?” Anna Amalia wonders.

Speaking for his own genre and for holding to the highest levels of integrity, Dietrich seems critical (by my reading) of The Three (operatic) Tenors. Thus Dietrich opines, “I think that there’s a large measure of trickery when a tenor sings the most demanding aria literature for evening at half-voice directly into a microphone and handles it easily because amplifiers are carrying his voice. What would this poor [tenor] gentleman do if he had to stand before an orchestra and sing there in the old, normal fashion?”…

A week ago, after we nailed down a visit, Muhammad Yunus phoned back to ask if he could be helpful in facilitating tonight’s party. “Much obliged,” we’d said, “we’re taking care of it.” He asked for the name of the nearest hotel.

Now, he drives up in a haste on a foot-pedal bike from that hotel, leans that two-wheeler against our porch, and sweeps us away with his vitality. I suspect his force is internal, not because of any milk he drinks standing up. Muhammad bemoans his tardiness and wishes that Mapquest had a guide for bike routes. Its online (car) directions misled him.

Jackie Robinson is impressed the hotel rents bicycles. Muhammad explains that it tries to be eco-friendly for travelers. “I get to see more communities that way.” Muhammad’s not eco-preachy in making that point.

En route he was taken by the fair number of our locale's hardware stores. He passed a plumbing supply store that was holding a seminar on solar heating.

Perween Warsi says, "Coming here tonight, I saw a fair number of construction bins in driveways. I figure your neighbors are buying renovation goodies at those stores and fixing up their houses."

Jackie had noticed a home where half of a pile of logs was split and stacked for firewood.

I venture that after our hard winter, this year’s spring is exceptionally brilliant. This is the best time of the year to see our neighborhood in its green gladrags. Cool weather plus abundant rain have yielded rich colors. I allow as how our young neighbors think our foliage isn't all that special. Because Barb and I are the geezers on the street, these neighbors joke that our verdict stems from our advanced age, weak eyesight perhaps.

"After the rain, good weather/In the wink of an eye/The universe throws off/its muddy cloths." That's Perween. Reciting a poem Ho Chi Minh wrote while in prison.

We demand more. "...All the birds sing at once/Men and animals rise up reborn/What could be more natural?/After sorrow comes happiness."

A young neighbor from up the street ambles by with his 4 or 5-year-old daughter. They both wave.

Perween turns to Mohammad. “The whole world was very happy in 2006 to hear you’d won the Nobel Peace Prize. I even gloated.”

A quick intake of breath and Muhammad shares the moment when he and his fellow-citizens first heard. He was at home, in lungi (sp?), which I assume is informal clothing for Bangladeshi men. To acknowledge the thousands who had rushed to congratulate him, he came out of his house so fast that it was difficult to change clothes.

Jackie sees me drawing a blank. “‘Lungi’ means ‘loincloth,’” he says.

On prodding, Muhammad says he shared the Prize with the Grammen (village) Bank that he founded. It loans an applicant just a little money, about $200 US. In the under-developed world, that’s been enough to lift most applicants out of poverty.

Perween lauds her fellow-South Asian for giving his share of the $1.4 million for other anti-poverty measures including an eye bank, a health scheme, and a system for drinking water in rural Bangladesh. She’s especially delighted that he’s harnessed market forces in a start-up that’s developing low-cost, high-nutrition food. That initiative supplements his Bank’s selling of penny packets of different seeds. Grameen is the country’s largest supplier of seeds.

Barb fishes for more personal data: “Did your parents live to see your marvelous successes?” Most did.

That discussion reels in data about everyone’s childhoods. The grandson of a slave and a sharecropper’s son, Jackie was the most disadvantaged. Grew up with four siblings and a single Mother who worked 12-hour days as a domestic. Jackie did odd jobs, joined a gang, and (as he admits) stole food from grocery stores.

When she was living in Bihar state, Perween was part of a cohesive, well-off family with an amply stocked kitchen. She doesn’t say if she was high-caste.

From his tiny ornaments shop, Muhammad’s Father struggled to send nine children to higher education. Mohammad’s memory of his Mother, before her mental illness, was of her reciting stories and poems. He doesn't remember any by Ho Chi Minh.

Barb opens the dining room’s windows to spring. Muhammad Yunus pulls out a chair for Perween Warsi to sit in. She appears to enjoy his gallantry, disagreeing with Hillary supporters who, at the end of one of their candidate debates, turned on Obama. Allegedly he was sexist in pulling back her chair.

We are not done yet with the campaign. Jackie Robinson alludes to comments Hillary received for a debate blouse that showed a little cleavage. Barb points out that the comments came from male pundits who were thinking sex. Jackie recalls Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the Grand Canyon. When his translator asked the Soviet boss what that Canyon made him think of, Nikita replied, “It makes me think of sex. Everything makes me think of sex.” Muhammad laughs at that more than Perween.

Somewhere, somehow along the way -- okay, I eventually bring it up -- we value Sardar Patel, the Iron Man of India. When Jackie was debuting with the Dodgers and when the British were preparing to relinquish control over the subcontinent, Patel was the statesman charged with forging a united India.

I bend our guests’ ears about Sardar. He’s a hero of mine. Hero? I just mean he was important. At my age, it’s easier to pick the easy words rather than the right ones.

In 1947, some 565 princely states had the option of merging with Pakistan, or becoming independent, or joining up with India. More to Jackie than anyone else, I say, “By combining persuasion, bribes, threat, and force, Sardar convinced the maharajas and maharani that their independence would be imprudent, especially in the face of opposition from their subects. Sardar’s as central to India's founding as Ghandi and Nehru. Wish I could have been his aide or something.”

“I’ve understand your fascination,” Muhammad Yunus declares. “That was before my time, but I know about Sardar. He organized relief for refugees. He was an early proponent of free enterprise in Asia. And I agree, Rick. For India, Sardar avoided fragmentation and a weak central government.”

Perween cites a downside to strong central government, the autocratic Prime Ministership of Nehru’s daughter, Indira Ghandi. “Bihar was a center of resistance to Indira, to her authoritarianism, and to her gross interventions in a free society.”

In a drawer. god knows where, Barb and I have a long, narrow wall-hanging that’s from Bihar. We could have/should have hung it up for tonight.

As Barb takes something out of the oven, she reveals that I was so impressed by Sardar’s diplomacy that I even wanted to name our first-born son after him. I’d imagined our lad someday explaining with pride the doings of his predecessor. Our Mike was born decades ago, back when Barb was more traditional, and she resisted the exotic South Asian name. Now, however, after hearing guest endorsements of the Iron Man’s successes, Barb emits a hint of regret she’d said no. “Almost, kinda sorta sorry” are her words.

Jackie: “You brought me back from the dead. So invite your Sardar to next month’s dinner.”

Fork in hand for salad, Perween advises us to instead invite Dr. Rajendra Prasad, an independence activist, chair of the Constitution’s drafting group, 1st President of India. And like herself, a Bihari.

Muhammad Yunus has been quizzing Jackie Robinson over whether baseball is truly the superior sport that philosopher John Rawls proclaimed. "There's the beautiful symmetry of the diamond that footall and tennis lack." And Jackie Robinson has been quizzing Muhammad Yunus on extending credit to those who have nothing.

“Banks gave me an extremely negative response,” says the banker to the poor. Money men had mindsets that the risks of not being repaid were too high. However, I thought that making micro-credit loans could be a viable business model,” Muhammad is pleased to explain. “Once I offered myself as the guarantor, banks did loan me some cash…

"Ultimately I negotiated with the government to become a full-fledged bank, eligible for loans from government and other banks…Leftists thought we were exploiting the poor. Conservative clergy told women that if they borrowed money from us, they’d be denied burial.”

Perween Warsi says she understands something about the difficulty of prying loose funds for business. In the ‘90s, she had to fight to regain control of her business after a buy-out had fallen into receivership. Her anxieties weren’t over. In 2003, her cash flow tumbled from the loss of an account with Safeway Groceries. She had to lay-off 400 loyal workers.

That vignette is the basis for the economics professor and the company owner putting their heads together now. I largely tune out, but I do hear something about supply creating its own demand. And scrappy words like “investment,” “expansion”, “re-hires,” “putting debt behind S & A,” and “returns to profitability.” Perween utters that last phrase triumphantly.

Prior to Muhammad Yunus wheeling into our yard, Rick and I blogged only some of the interaction between Perween Warsi and Jackie Robinson. Friendly as age peers, our early arrivals had spent time bs'ing about this and that. On the basis of their rapport, you might guess they would be the dominant dyad within our guest triad.

Not so. All night, latecomer Muhammad has been right in there in, chattery with both. Dinner parties can include those whom nobody want to speak with, but not here, not tonight. No imbalance mars our guests’ speaking order or talking time. No peer conflicts arise over preceding moves of the others. No guest spends time looking at titles on our bookshelf to mask feelings of being left-out of the flow.

Then later, at one point, there's Jackie Robinson saying to Muhammad Yunus, "How many Nobels do you Third World economists have?”

“Some.”

“I thought so. The reformer of property rights?”

“Yeah. Hernado de Soto. I don’t think he’s been to Oslo, but he’s earned plenty of other Prizes.”

“Made a difference in Peru?”

“Oh yes. Cut governmental red tape and gave titles to something like 1.2 million families. He operates out of an Institute there.”

“From my son the coffee grower, I know de Soto designed a similar program. For poverty-reduction in Tanzania.”

“Yes. Elsewhere too.”

“Surely the protection of assets is an obvious need for the dynamic of capitalism,” interjects Perween Warsi.

“Righto. For trust, what’s needed is a formal property system.”

“Such as?” Again from Jackie. These exchanges are starting to resemble a ping-pong match.

“Where individual ownership and transactions are recorded clearly. Deeds can be used for collateral. More loans [can be] made available for new developments.”

“Frankly, I'm not sure that de Soto does it for me.”

Property rights as a wedge issue tonight? Surely not.

“Yes, he's had a hard sell, Jackie. Leftists claim his approach benefits well-to-do squatters at the expense of poorer ones. Conservatives claim some individuals don’t want to change their tradition of communal ownership. Critics fume that he claims a firming-up of property rights will eradicate poverty. That’s throwing too sharp an elbow at him. Hernando argues that other reforms are essential too.”

“Maybe he over-sells his idea?” Perween asks. Is she also suggesting Muhammad is overselling his major idea?

Muhammad’s face contorts to override her reservation. “Over-sell? Not at all. His idea certainly is not a brand. Oh, Hernando may have an occasionally jaunty self-regard, I don’t know. But my view is that he demonstrates the confidence to share his innovative ideas as actionable…” Now, Muhammad conciliates, “Rather like you did, Perween, with your company.”

Jackie attacks us with statistics -- like there are 1.2 billion people now in abject poverty. Like 50,000 people die everyday from poverty-related causes. I have difficulty wrapping my mind around those numbers. With her eyes, Barb communicates to me her equal inability to make sense of those stats too.

Preoccupied as we already are, Jackie wants us to get cracking to reduce those numbers soon. “If you're going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you're wasting your life.”

We five do not want to wimp out. After a while, we even agree -- and this is astounding -- to meet again for actionable ideas, next week, here. Far out!

Yet like Muhammad says, as anti-poverty guys, “Each of us is improveable.”

__________

Muhammad + Jackie + Perween. That's a combination that looked good ‘on paper.’ True, I had doubts this past week whether they would translate into an ensemble. Now, as they get ready to leave -- they are thanking us and we are thanking them -- the optimist in me believes that, more often than not, they coalesced.

If the world has under-achieved in reducing global poverty, advocacies of folk like Hernando and Muhammad point to plausible ways. Perween and Jackie are idealists for humanity too, but they also strike me as pragmatic folk. The type who could help people help themselves.