Michael Jordan, who’s also known for putting-down team-mates who aren’t giving their best, tries to spur Tom Hodgkinson on towards more of “make the mental adjustments you have to go through” as a team player. He jests that Tom could help by assembling our left-overs into plastic containers for guests' take-aways.

Tom laughs. Assembling left-overs is “so not me,” he sighs, unwilling even to try out-doing anyone in cleaning up our dishes.

Reaching across to pat Tom on the back, Michael champions raw drive. He replies, "Competing is the biggest motivation in life.”

The gist of Tom’s calm rejoinder is that it's capitalism, big bad capitalism, that spurs us to compete. It forces us to always be under pressure and to grub for more. "I’m victimized by capitalism...anxiety and ego. I think everyone is.”

To which Michael replies, with a sharp look that endorses the opportunities of the free market, "Screw that."

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.”

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…

Members of Hu Jintao’s team await outside, each with a BlackBerry. In her rental car, Elisabeth Lloyd has a hotel to return to, having a busy day tomorrow downtown with luminaries. Lucian Freud is catching a red-eye flight back to his show at the MoMA in New York. Hu will drop him off at the terminal.

As Hu shakes our hands and climbs into his stretch limo, he says that sometime we all should visit the new Beijing. For one thing, its 3 million car drivers generally are much more patient than the lane-changing Western drivers he keeps seeing on our roads (and whose incautious behaviors made him late tonight). Chinese may well toot their Audis’ horns, he says, but theirs is a toot to inform, and certainly not to vent the sort of road rage he’s seen in the West.

“You behave yourself now,” I advise Lucian. He shrugs and murmurs a sub-linguistic sound, which I interpret as meaning that he will, his way.

Lucian kisses the hostess goodnight. A wisp of Barb's hair falls out of place.

I let in a genial Billy Graham and after several minutes, I open the door for a gracious Bob Geldof. Each heartily pumps my hand. Rocker Bob does not look scruffy, and Reverend Billy has his white hair in a mullet. They and Joan seem like good scouts.

I lead each into our LR and then it's back to our bedroom (on the first floor). I have been gathering and putting blankets on the floor there for Francois’s nap. I presume Rick is in the other room introducing all.

When I chug back to the party, Billy is an ace at T.L.C., rocking Joan of Arc’s baby and tweaking his cheek, almost as if he is presiding over a baptism. Billy even offers to change the diapers (not needed now).

With his handkerchief, Bob tries to wipe Francois’s nose, but that is a turn-off for this baby. Bob’s song and jig is marvelous -- wish I could have filmed it.

Billy and Bob are hitting it off, very much in sync, talking about a 94-year-old blind golfer in Florida who sunk a hole-in-one the other day. I thought those two might click. Joan and Billy also seem simpatico.

Frankly, I cannot tell whether Joan and Bob are getting along. When he referred to the message on her orange sweatshirt as “ballsy,” she looked as if she had just graded that comment with an F.

After the breast-feeding, Baby Francois yawns, rubs his eyes, and dozes off.

“Right you are,” Joan responds to me, “blankets on the floor would be perfect.” So I guide mother and baby to the ‘nest’ I have made. Once we are certain that Francois is still snoozing, we leave the door ajar, the better to hear yelps.

Joan and I pop into the kitchen. After I check the braised carrots on the stovetop and as I put the meat back in the oven on ‘Warm,’ Joan makes a sign of the Cross…

I have some inner rumblings about tonight's line-up. Unquestionably they are great accomplishers who've enriched our times, and I value their agreeing to dine with us. Still, doubts arise whether whether they'll prove fascinating to each other and encourage a breadth of everyone's outlook. Hell, it's too late to dis-invite.

I'm uncertain too whether strapping individualists like James Dean and Danica Patrick will square with earlier-generation Chris. We assure ourselves, however, that everyone will override differences and see each other as compatible. It’s risky but vibes at any dinner party are chancy.

When neighbor Ned, now a contractor but once a pin boy, said Chris Peters had “sprinted” into the fiscal stratosphere by working 16+ hour days as one of 37 vice-presidents of Bill Gates’s company, we teetered towards a theme -- and maybe a hidden communal interest: Life As A Race. Besides gleaning aspects of our guests’ trajectories, we might tap into larger lessons about priorities in this life.

Actually, nobody’s raced to get here tonight. Already James, Chris, and Danica are 25 minutes late, and counting.

About James Dean's ‘wound’ quote from India: I quickly count and conclude that my body does have nine openings to the world. Nine! Never knew that before.

Even so, tonight James has logorrhea and that makes for a tense feel.

His stories are well-told and coherent -- unquestionably he’s dined out on them before -- but they don’t capture my interest. Often James has a key part in those tales, the hero of his own internal movie. Also he can be just a minor character or observer. Whichever, if he has an overarching theme -- and I’m not sure he does -- it's that adverse circumstances can promote human development, immersion in the dark can propel people toward the light, blah, blah, blah. One or two long stories along those lines might be riveting to hear… but ten?

Periodically, Chris Peters asserts his can-do perspective. For instance, hH urges concentrating on the 100 good things that happen every day rather than the several bad things. He argues too that more than ever before, people today experience less pain -- but James talks right over him. So Chris ultimately looks disengaged from this environment. Who wouldn’t be when James is saying in effect, “Look at me, I’m expressing myself. Be grateful for my renderings of life as bittersweet.”

We need a gong or ‘hook’ to cut him off. Neighbor Ned would be a welcome distraction about now. Now that we need him, Ned doesn’t show. I could phone him. It must be one of his alley's All-You-Can-Bowl nights.

Could Danica Patrick shush James up? Perhaps, because he sure dotes on her enough. I'm not saying his behavior is her fault, but perhaps his performance tonight is boosted by his having to compete with Chris for Danica’s attention.

Unfortunately, however, Danica has become super-silent. Perhaps she knows better than to interrupt. Possibly too, she’s never before seen anyone close-up who has proclaimed himself maladjusted: “I wouldn’t like me if I had to be around me.” To round off another story, James boasts, “A neurotic person has the necessity to express himself and my neuroticism manifest itself in the dramatic.” In his brain structure, James must have a larger than average amygdale that’s whacking him out.

No one is tearing James to shreds over his behavior. We are holding our criticism in reserve. We’re too damn tolerant. I should smile, smoothly cut in, and say it’s time to hear from Danica.

Except that at brief intervals, Barb -- especially great-hearted Barb, the great Yes of my life -- laughs. She has kind and encouraging words for James, like they could heal and repair wounds. Maybe they can.

Strange, verbosity is not especially characteristic of the awkward, reticent, sulky, and surly James Dean that I recall from movies. I hazard that he was unhinged by my invitation, at the outset of tonight, to have the guests tell stories about themselves. Naturally James has all these pent-up words and feelings to express, and he has not been able to grow up beyond his 24 years, but who gives a flying frog?

Once, when James goes on ‘Pause,’ Barb asks Danica, “What was your happiest birthday party?” By way of an exaggerated example, Barb shares that one her ‘happiest’ was when she turned 12 or 13. Her parents gave her, among other things, a James Dean T-shirt. “The one, James, with a print of your handsome, brooding face.”

Guess who now seizes the initiative to prattle about co-workers’ tragicomic birthday parties in Hollywood and New York.

If we directly aired that James has hijacked our conversation, a resolution might ensue -- but not when your most famous guest is fast-talking and emoting brilliantly non-stop.

On our table in the adjacent dining room, Barb (who's been a new level of kitchen-busy) has just put the whipped cream on the cold creme of asparagus & mushroom soup. Those ingredients are in season (read: cheap). Seven hours ago, I cut and stirred them with chicken broth, butter, flour, pepper, and juice from half a lemon, storing my brew in the fridge until a little while ago.

Our three guests, however, don’t seem to want to budge from our music circle. So Barb brings in the living room a tray for each of us to eat off of. We haven’t used those trays for years, so she has to dust them after we haul them up from the basement.

Before anyone can take a sip, by way of a prayerful Grace, Anna Amalia gives us a pitch from the harpsichord and leads us in a half-dozen or so musical ‘Hallelujahs,’ guiding her right hand up and down to induce the high and low notes and sacred air that she wants.

Barb distributes the protein shake that lean Kenny Chesney had requested in advance. She's disappointed that Kenny won’t try out the goodies she’s later places on everyone else's trays -- chicken schnitzel, hot potato salad, baked sauerkraut with apples, and the cabbage casserole that Anna brought.

Anna tells how she was happy in providing artists with a true home and a spiritual family. At large feasts, she'd sit in a chair watching happy faces of guests savoring her labor of love. (Does our Duchess exaggerate or lie? Doubtless she had cooks who did the actual preparation? I've never met a Duchess before, so I'll give her the benefit of the doubt.)

Anna confesses that once when the food wasn’t as tasty as she would have liked, she had to endure dangerous sniping, even hostility, from her guests.

Kenny assures her that since guests kept returning, she should take that as a vote of support. Kenny wins a smile from her and with a grin, promptly forgoes his radical diet. We're all happy to see him digging into the food.

Hand slicing the air vertically, Anna claims that similar to Kenny, she’s conscious of her extra weight, and so for 35 years she fought for the rights of over-weight people. (How precisely did she fight for them? I wonder, but am reluctant to ask.) With a shudder, Anna says she could never go on a protein-drink regimen. She says her personality changes when she’s overweight. With a margin of error plus or minus 3 to 5 pounds, I do not see Anna as chunky. A person can think others notice their problems, but often they don’t.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau mentions how episodes of TV’s Sopranos generally feature a meal -- just folks like us co-mingling and enjoying each other. “However, if something looks idyllic or familial,” Kenny warns, “it can be glum.”

Munch, munch, the rest of us chew.

There’s pain in the best of families, but no one steps up to extend the conversation with particulars of their families' glums. Just as well -- after a hard week, who needs party-dampeners?

“How many blacks have you invited to supper here, Rick?” We are not jolted by Jackie Robinson’s equal-opportunity challenge. As the son of a sportswriter, Rick knew Jackie used to chide journalists in the ‘60s with ”How many blacks on your sports staff? I thought so.”

Rick has no rhetorical acrobatics to spin. Blacks have been under-represented at our table.

“Jackie,” my hubby mumbles, finishing a chew, “give me a break. I was there with you on the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.”

Actually Rick did not see Jackie there in August ‘63, but we know the guy was there, a friendly face in the friendly crowd.

“That morning," Rick resumes," I remember Nancy Dickerson on the morning news."

Perween Warsi and Muhammad Yunus do not seem to recognize the name, and so I put in a good word for her: "Nancy broke a glass ceiling as CBS-TV's first Washington reporter. She was a Washington Insider."

"Anyway," Rick takes back the floor, "Nancy discouraged viewers from walking anywhere near the route from Washington Monument to Lincoln Memorial. Trouble was expected. A quarter million people and I went anyhow. We passed thickets of FBI agents snapping our pictures.

“I hung out there for five or six hours, listening to singers like Mihalia Jackson, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan. Speakers like Walter Reuther, Ralph Abernathy, and Charleton Heston, who I mis-remembered for years as Burt Lancaster. Plus James Farmer, John Lewis, and other chaps pushing for meaningful civil rights legislation.” Just to pronounce these names brings gravitas to tonight’s party.

“I’d forgotten to wear a hat, and after five hours standing mostly in the sun, around 3:15, I went back to where I was staying. On the evening’s news, I learned about the final speech, the ‘I have a Dream’ one. Greatest speech of my lifetime. Hearing Martin Luther King unfiltered would have been worth a sunburn.”

Jackie is okay with my ramble. He adds that he supported King’s non-violent strategy for achieving equity, just as he respected the mobilizing talents of the ‘60s other charismatic leader of American Negroes, Malcolm X. “When I disagreed with Malcolm’s strategy of hating whites and wresting freedom by any means necessary, black militants labeled me an ‘Uncle Tom.’” Well, I saw through their tactic -- it was a case of 'If you can't play the hockey puck, play the man. If you can't win on the merits of your argument, discredit the person you're arguing with.'..."