It is my idea to invite James (in my head, we are on a first-name basis). From front pages, I still remember how he was speeding to a sports-car meet in 1955 when he crashed his custom Porsche 550 Spyder, fatally. This movie star, tough but sensitive, was only 24. That end to a spectacular career ‘stopped’ me, like later deaths of JFK, Elvis, and John Lennon.

At the time of James Dean’s accident, I was closing in on becoming a teen-ager. My siblings and I saw him as expressing our restlessness. He was the smoldering antithesis of the well-behaved modern kids that we were expected to be.

Rick, who did not join the Oscar Party at the Wellborne's house last week, says he does not learn much from "Hollywood types.” Rick is the one who wanted to meet Danica Patrick. In 2005, she brought him and 300,000 others to their feet as she almost took the biggest purse in auto-racing. Last month Rick saw her again, not first-hand but in a sophomoric and salacious ad that Fox-TV had banned from its 2008 Super Bowl show. On a website, Rick ferreted it out anyway. He expects to learn tonight much about "Indianapolis Speedway types." He has also endowed Danica's contest around the track with near-mythic proportions, emblematic of those two metaphors that Homer bequeathed to us in Iliad and Odyssey, life is a journey and life is a battle.

Ned Wellbourne is a bowling buff. One day this neighbor suggested we invite Chris Peters, co-owner of America’s Professional Bowlers Association (PBA). Chris is in his late 40s, an organizational guy, a ‘graduate’ of Microsoft. According to Ned, Chris “threw off the ‘golden handcuffs’ of his deferred stock options, retired early, and bought into -- and transformed -- the PBA.”

I had not heard of Chris Peters, but so what? Rick and I do not limit our parties to household names or, for that matter, to public intellectuals like a number of our past guests. If you are spectacularly rich, awesomely young, and gorgeously talented, we do not loathe you... at least not automatically...

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.

First in, James Dean. He comes in a leather jacket, blue jeans, and a cloud of smoke. He seems open and decent. He may not be a man's man like Clark Gable was in the movies of the '30s and '40s, a gruff chap I might have wanted to resemble (I say 'might have' because frankly I don't remember much of my early wants, except that I dwelt in externals). Nevertheless, Barb may be right: James is more than just a boy-toy. James is also interesting because he has a touch of the skepticism and 'Up Yours!' attitude of a contemporary who came to fame later, the early John McCain (as depicted in biographies with subtitles such as Man of the People and An American Odyssey).

With James, quickly we get beyond talk about the weather. The snow has stopped here, but it's still cold, and James says he doesn’t go out anymore unless he really wants to. He adds that he feels “cheerful” but not “optimistic” about being here. We’ll see if that is a distinction without a difference. Couldn't he be at least cautiously optimistic?

James says he’s seen some squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons, and other small animals rummaging around outside. “That’s a sign of a healthy neighborhood, but do your neighbors try to poison them?” James seems skeptical when Barb says “No.”

James insists that he always liked mixing it up with folk who are not actors or directors. “It’s especially nice to meet people who could be schmucks but who turn out to be mostly normal.” Oh oh, tonight Barb and I will have to be mostly normal.

James says he’s interested “in seeing how people live these days.” Barb takes him on a tour of the house, the whole house.

I hear them now, down in the basement. She’s handing him a large, green, and slightly used ashtray from the ‘50s. It’s made out of plastic, has astrological signs around its circumference, and is not “us.” It’s our most unforgettable wedding gift, stored on an old shelf for moments like these. James agrees it’s not quite right as an ashtray, but adds that everything about life is not quite right anyways.

I step out to the porch, descend a step, and watch Danica Patrick exiting her Mercedes Benz 30. A host gets to greet warmly.

I was going to type here that she looks into my eyes confidently. Everybody engages in private thoughts all the time, and right now my thoughts are that her eyes are a mix of self-belief and vulnerability.

Danica’s brunette, evocatively dressed, and (I’d guess) 100 pounds. Her relatively low body weight must help in auto-racing. Maybe it’s the lighting, but I’m floored at how gorgeous she is.

Danica reminds me of another young and spunky brunette, also a mind-booster, who works at a local donut & coffee shop. She beams as she gives us our coffees, and chaps like me tip her directly. That is, we used to tip directly. That practice ticked-off other servers and they successfully insisted all tips go into a bowl by the cash register. Now tips are fewer.

Danica and I do not converse about her spouse. He’s at home tonight. Frankly, I don’t exactly remember what we do converse about. For all I know, we might have even considered whether the U.S. downturn (as mirrored in today's announcement of job losses) would affect other nations' economies. Less or perhaps equally pretentiously, we might have chatted about Bret Favre's retirement from the Packers. I don't remember. Whatever, our talk was a neat couple of moments for this septuagenarian. She appeals to younger ages too -- she won Nickelodeon Kids' Choice awards as favorite female athlete in a poll that drew nearly 87 million votes.

During our tour, James Dean is impressed that our great room/open kitchen has replaced our formal dining room.* James is unaware that such restyled spaces are common these days. Nor does he truly grasp the role that feminism has played in this domestic reconfiguration. James looks uncertain as I bring him up-to-date on this aspect of modern North American women.

Boiled down, my thesis is that the sisterhood no longer wants to be servants in their own homes. We have had it with carting foods back and forth from our kitchens to separate dining rooms. It is not fair for us to absent ourselves from other diners, whether family members or guests. Kitchen parties are ‘in.’

“I like the way you let it all hang out,” says James, waving at the dirty dishes, pots, and measuring cups, looming on our countertop and horribly visible from the dining table.

By our fridge, James asks if he can have some milk “to coat my stomach if we’re going to do some serious drinking.” He chugalugs straight out of our big carton of 1 percent skim, wiping his mouth with his shirtsleeve. The only other person I have seen drink straight from a pitcher is one of Rick’s colleagues. He was on a panel at a conference and he did not dribble like James does now.

Thank goodness our second floor approaches tidiness. The bed is made. No underwear is on the floor. He does not notice the cobwebs in the corners.

In Rick’s den, James bends over to study the five people huddled together in our family portrait, one son with braces showing. That photograph sits upright on the floor because we have no place to hang it. James says he likes it down there, “all lonely.” The picture dates back in the 1970s. James says he does not have such an artifact of his family. That comment hits me as a little self-pitying, but then James puts his aloneness in context: “I was a child of the '50s, in shows that treated the family as a tragic crossroad. That was just the Zeitgeist." He stubs out his cigarette in the ashtray he's been carrying.

I realize that actors seldom resemble the roles they play, yet I had anticipated more histrionics, more soulfulness from him. My impression is that James is not as vain or showy as Rick thought he would be. Also on the positive side, he inquires about our family and is a good listener.

James, I am learning, can be something of a joker. Like when he sees that I see the bottom of a T-shirt sticking out of one of Rick’s bureau drawers: “Don’t worry,” James deadpans, tugging out the bottom of the T-shirt he is wearing, “messiness is part of the human condition.” He peeks into our medicine cabinet and gives a vocal lift to “Ah-hah,” as if he expects to find shelves of Viagra. He congratulates us on having toilet tissues that can be pulled down from the top -- "You'd be surprised how many families have to reach around under the roll."

If this playful young man can keep his wistfulness in check, he should put a little salt into our evening -- or so I tell myself as we move back toward the LR....

* BACKDATE: For more on our kitchen/dining room makeover, see the final posts
here.

Last in, Chris Peters. He’s un-starched and pleasant, high-energy and independent. For instance, he knocks twice and blasts right in. He won’t let me “go to the trouble” of hanging up his coat. Look for him to push conversations forward.

Vis a vis his bowling interests, I remark that in the 1950s, a typical weekend in my hometown could include going to a bowling alley -- with a pretty girl of course (I glance over at Danica Patrick and would glance appreciatively at Barb too, except she’s giving that tour). Back in Springfield, we’d play 10 or 20 frames, stumble across foul lines, down cherry cokes or beers, and get to know each other better. Maybe we’d have a pizza too. Pizzas were just catching on then.

Chris says that when he was twentysomething, he’d spend days and nights cranking code, crunching numbers, and helping fight off Microsoft’s competitors. Food came from vending machines and god-awful take-out; days passed without his using a fork and knife. However, working with numbers was fun for him then, and the mathematics of bowling is fun for him today: “Scoring is fairly easy, but it’s highly quantitative as a sport.”

I warn Chris that our neighbor may drop in to bend his ear. Ned Wellborne’s a fan of Chris’s and how he “turned around” his bowling league. Chris replies that he’d like to meet him.

As for Danica, she does not bowl, so immediately there’s no connective tissue with Chris on that score. Every day, however, she roller-blades, lifts weights, runs 3 to 5 miles, and completes 90-minute yoga sessions in a hot room with a circuit of 26 poses repeated twice. Observing his awe at hearing this regimen, I sense that Chris -- like me -- does few of those daily exercises.

James Dean shuffles in from his tour of the house with Barb. Introductions are made all around. Chris and Danica are not startled by James’s out-of-placeness. Chris says to James, “I’ve seen you before.”

James doesn’t seem on equal footing with the others. It could be that his inspection of the house has privileged him, or penalized him, in Danica’s and Chris’s eyes.

As we join the others, Rick is saying he has had several dreams lately about the U.S. election. As November approaches, he expects to have more. Once Chris Peters asks, Rick confesses that "I had favored John and Elizabeth Edwards, like other low-income white males." What brought me around, I supplement, was the Edwardses' strong call to fix U.S. health care for the less well-off.

Several friendly minutes later after a guest supports John McCain, James Dean flashes a smile and points to the plaid shirt Rick is wearing and asks, “I know it’s rude to go after what people wear at a party…” (Dramatic pause.) “but Rick, isn’t that the same plaid shirt you were wearing 35 years ago?” It is.

I mention that “all lonely,” un-walled and un-hung picture on the floor upstairs. “Well, I like old things,” Rick says. “The shirt’s seen better days, but it's comfortable. I only wear it two or three times a year.” (Not so dramatic pause) “It doesn’t smell bad, does it?”

James inhales and shakes his head no, saying “Everybody's entitled to a piece of clothing that's like a security blanket...Rick, you’re fun to rib.” I remind myself that Rick takes ribbing better now than he did 40 years ago when he was a driven Folklorist.

Chris says he has been to parties where, in addition to very old and very casual clothes, people dance on tabletops wearing lampshades on their heads. That is not my image of society in Seattle, Washington.

Rick gets up to fetch everyone's drinks. Party-wise, I think we are almost in second gear.

Danica Patrick is so young, so thin, so chic. I love her dress’s satin ruffles and its movements, even its soft noises. I tell her she looks nice. She moves close and confides, “I can look like this anytime I’m willing to put in the time it takes to get ready.” I know whereof she speaks: it can take us women an hour or, whereas guys can get ready in less than five minutes. They have it so easy.

Although casual, Chris conveys energy, as if life is a mathematical equation that measures how much one can accomplish each day. I have confidence in Chris’s sense of confidence...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rick tells the Chairman of the U.S. Professional Bowling Association that “A friend of mine met his future wife at a bowling alley -- actually, at a beauty pageant in a bowling alley.”

Which friend? which future wife? I muse. I so muse because, well because you know what ‘they’ say about couples who have been together as long as Rick and I have: that we already have said everything to each other. But here my hubby is announcing something I never knew about. Nice.

I discern a young-man’s perkiness in Chris Peters. He gets the autobiographical give-and-take rolling by asking if Danica Patrick could tell us how she became interested in her daredevil sport. “Auto-racing,” Chris beams, “takes far more courage than rolling a fairly heavy ball across a greased floor.”

Danica seems to intuit that Chris genuinely wants to learn about this, and is not just being social. She replies, “My father used to race snowmobiles, midges, motorcycles…He met my mom at a snowmobile race on a blind date. We’re very much a racing family…”

Chris says fathers have been supportive of top bowlers too. For example, Kelly Kulick -- a woman who made bowling history in Chris’s PBA league not long ago -- was encouraged by her dad, for whom she works in an auto-body shop.

Danica endorses Chris’s allusion to Kelly Kulick with a smile, and returns to her narrative: “It’s just racing. It sounds so goober, but I just don’t think about it.” Hmmm. From our kids, I know that ‘goober’ means ‘goofball,’ but that may not be Danica's connotation.

James Dean is eye-balling Danica. She refuses the lighted cigarette and ashtray he offers to share. He looks like his feelings are hurt.

Rick is not immune to Danica’s charms either. He is paying more attention to her than to our other guests, even more than he paid last month to Joan of Arc.

Danica, it develops, is an endorser for all sorts of commercial products, including PEAK Antifreeze. Rick professes an interest in winning PEAK’s upcoming sweepstakes. He wants to be 1 of the 15 fans to whom Danica will give driving tips during the Pole-Qualifying Weekend this coming May. Thereafter, each of the 15 will drive a single-seater around the Speedway. To qualify, evidently all you have to do is send in proof that you have bought PEAK antifreeze.

Not long ago, Rick saw a horrific car crash. Since then, he has become a very cautious driver, almost pokey. I can scarcely envisage him tooling a single-seater around the Indy…

I am handing this blog biz over to Rick for now -- one or two things to do in the kitchen...

James Dean’s eyes are aglow, he’s got a cheesy smile, he’s leaning over toward Danica Patrick’s armchair, and he’s clearly trying to wow. Let the record show that she doesn’t flirt or bat her eyes back.

When she alludes to her teen-age years, however, Danica does look at James, cursorily. She says that, like James, she chose to leave home as an adolescent. (Offhand, I’m amazed that she knows that much about James. After all, he was a goner before she was even born.)

Danica’s need was for seat time with open-wheel racing in England…“Definitely England is the most competitive area. Everybody that’s great from every country comes to its concentrated 'formulas.' From the airport leaving to go over there, I remember my mom and dad and sister, and they were starting to get choked up. My dad said, ‘I couldn’t imagine you not going and not having this opportunity.’”

Behind Danica all the way and aware she'd be going at speeds in excess of 200 m.p.h., they wished her “luck and safety.”

“Luck and Safety, we all need that,” James chirps. “Don’t forget you need Clear Goals,” Barb adds, “especially after several iterations.” Now if I had rewound Chris Peters’s earlier statement about iterations like that, my words would have smacked of sarcasm. In Barb’s manner, however, that sally sounds mellow, as if she and Chris were goal-keepers for the same team.

Joshing ensues between the champion of Luck’s Vagaries (mainly James) and Get-Up-And-Go (mainly Danica, who says that “Man, people need to take personal responsibility for their situations”).

So far, those touchstones are the closest anyone tonight has come to explicitly sorting out prescriptions for our "Life As A Race" theme. Nobody so far has mentioned the necessities for Perception and Ambition -- qualities that I associate with each guest.

There’s no recitation either of qualities honored in bowling, like Playing Fair, Being Ready When It’s Your Turn, & Confining Your Bowling To Your Own Lane. Chris also hasn’t alluded to the imperatives for ‘making it’ as a Microsoft manager, like Keeping Technical & Business Considerations In Mind Simultaneously, Embracing & Acquiring & Sometimes Bludgeoning & Bullying The Competition, and so forth.

I suspect Barb also expected more prescriptions out of our three experts on life in the fast lane. We hear nothing akin to virtues emblazoned at the YMCA pool where we swim -- Caring, Honesty, Respect, & Responsibility. Overlooked too are those sacred themes of struggle that the Olympic movement borrowed from a school in Paris -- Swifter, Higher, & Stronger. Just last week at the funeral of Sharon (a good friend of Barb's), her eulogist summed-up Helen's guidelines as Live, Love, & Laugh; those sound values haven't been hinted at either. Equally forgotten are maxims our kids used to recite at meetings of Boy & Girl Scouts, like Be Prepared and Be A Friend. And how's about those values of Native North Americans, like Trust, Honesty, Humility, Wisdom, and Bravery? Perhaps those qualities -- beside the old standbys of Hope, Stamina, Selflessness, Solvency, and Good Table Manners -- are assumed to be seminal.

Perhaps this whole quest for priorities in ‘Life As A Race’ is misbegotten. Probably every page in a dictionary sets forth decent priorities.

Danica says something about learning to navigate the “whiz” of the traffic and finishing second in England’s Formula Ford Festival. “That’s my most memorable achievement" Later, talk-show host David Letterman became one of her memorable sponsors. Now she's part of the strong team organized by Michael Andretti, son of the great racer Mario Andretti and a former racer himself.

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.

Chris Peters and Danica Patrick especially enjoy my second round of appetizers, zucchini with lemon-dill cream. Only 51 calories per serving.

Our guests seem so agreeable with each other that I hesitate to break the spell and serve the dinner they came for.

“I was not very athletic as a kid…,” Chris idly vouches at one point while eating another 51, “but I always loved bowling with my father…And I was always impressed by his bowling trophies.” He still plays on occasion with his dad and brother.

Optimally, conversation breeds conversation. Still standing by the logical site of any trophies that we might have garnered, James Dean ribs again: “I notice you don’t have trophies here [on the mantle], Rick. Are you guys being modest?”

In mock defense, Rick now alludes to an obscure trophy of sorts, the bookend with his name on it upstairs. Fifteen or twenty years ago, Rick was given that one bookend for speaking about Folklore at a Folk-singing conference. When conference organizers had invited him, they had mistaken his field of study as traditional music. Rick cringes at how badly his talk went over.

(That speech, sadly, was the first and last time one of our sons went to see Rick in his professional capacity. Even now, father and son live with that un-proud moment. That misfire, that mishire was not Rick’s fault.)

(For the record, what we do have on the mantle is a vase that this same son gave us from one of his overseas travels. I suppose it is a kind of trophy. It reverts to him when the crematorium bites our dust.)

As I dwell further on James’s playful taunt, I declare that our family does have a ‘status symbol,’ if not an out-and-out trophy. I cite the basketball hoop attached to our garage. True, our boys no longer reside here and they do not use it when they visit. I never realized that hoop was a status symbol until Emily Wellborne, our neighbor, told me so…

James Dean gives out with another of his patented “Well then, there now” sentences. That’s his response to my reference to the disastrous speech at that Folk-Singing conference. I take James’ remark as a sign of Empathy & Social Skill. Barb and I answer somewhere between a smile and a nod.

An Oscar might have been on James's mantle had he lived to take home the Academy Award he was up for. With Perseverance, which incidentally is one of my top guidelines in Life As A Race, Barb says that James might have become “the Marlon Brando of his generation.” Chris Peters looks dubious.

There’s a lull in our introspections as we adjourn to the dining area. Danica circles the table and sits first. Food is passed around. Nobody says much about anything.

James mumbles to Danica Patrick something about Fate. Whatever it was, she blushes, but not a damsel-in-distress blush. Not that I know much about every woman's blushes.

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.

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…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...”

Back here in the living room, he’s doing it again. James Dean not only is sucking-up to Danica Patrick, which I can understand, but he is monopolizing the evening’s conversation, which I don’t understand. In the interests of equity, it’s time to call the meeting to order.

I turn to Chris Peters to mimic James’s earlier pretense of tapping (like a prize-fighter) Chris on a shoulder. “Whatcha think?”

Chris maintains that his generation has not been as rebellious as James’s. “Many of us were fortunate enough to be turned on by computers. I got to hang out with “smart people with great development talent and a deep understanding of what it takes to create high-quality, easy-to-use Web software.”

I was about to say something about the different smarts in the bowling world, when Barb prompts: “Life at Microsoft must have been stimulating." I reckon she wants more input from Chris too. “Was it always a battle to the finish in chasing tomorrow’s technology?”

“Yes. it was an intense battle for software supremacy. Like I said once to a workgroup, ‘It’s extremely important to move responsibility very low in the organization. Your goal is not to be working on a project where you can’t sleep at night. Your goal isn’t to have it so that the project leaders can’t sleep at night. Your goal is so that nobody sleeps at night. And when nobody sleeps at night, you have pushed responsibility to the proper level.’”

“Sounds more like the zenith of overlapping instead of running a tight ship," Danica says.

“Exactly. We had broad duties and shared responsibilities up the ying-yang. We were young, and so was the field. I grew older, the place grew bigger –- about 30,000 when I resigned. The place had become more bureaucratic with many fiefdoms, and after 18 years it was time for me to make the break.”

James to Chris: “Your break was a creative impulse!”

Over to Chris, “I suppose. I suppose you could say that creative impulses do feed into sexy computer products for the digital age.”

The sexy ones in the room, plus me, disavow the notion that computer products, however alluring, can be remotely sexy.

James Dean voices doubt that he could have “fit in” at Microsoft for an extended time -- even if he had been Bill Gates’s hire number 105 (that’s what Chris Peters was). James says he’s been thinking about how to phrase a concern of his. Chris gestures a ‘Go for it,’ and so James unfurls: “Do you mean to tell me that you Microserfs could be expressive? Could open up about emotions? Or do you mean to tell me that you had to keep a happy face and bottle up your feelings?”

“Could you run that by again?”

“No problem. What I'm getting at is this: How did you guys cope with nightmare bosses screeching at you in your interdependent roles? And how about godawful sadness and personality conflict on the job? What happened to those who couldn’t leverage their strengths or couldn’t live within the rules? Importantly, were there ways they could put their agonies to work for the greater good?”

I’m baffled, but Chris is at the ready: “There were bads and goods. The stupid guys were screeched at, sure. There were hassles, and some decisions brought heartbreak to workers on discontinued projects,” Hire 105 reflects, absorbing James’s hit and conceding a point.

“Nothing’s simple anymore," Chris continues. "When I was hired, it was another small software company. We could see our projects through to launch. We were practical but not mechanistic, if that’s what you’re getting at. We so-called Microserfs could decide when to take a few steps back in the short run in order to make greater strides in the long run. We were gung-ho. We tried to think big. We wanted to rise above the status quo. We had exceptional individuals, creative, free-thinking, diverse, proactive, not afraid of change -- and in need of a challenge.”

To this day, Chris is a Microsoft loyalist and overly gung-ho PR man for his ex-company: “As far as I know, the corporation’s still like that… James, am I speaking to your question?”

Before James has a chance to reply, Chris scratches his bald spot and remembers the question that led to this Microsoft endorsement, James's thing about agonies: “When people’s values aren’t congruent with the organization, when they aren’t internally motivated, when they disagree with a decision, well, they just leave, sometimes to join other workgroups in the organization.…”

“Your storyline is a good one," James says slowly, as if he has to sort out Chris's rhetoric from the real. "They felt exhilaration as well as rejection -- I get that. They did the best with what they had...”

“Absolutely. Our people had Discipline. They used their Knowledge and Skill Sets. When all’s said and done, James, note well: some sadness and anxiety are normal. However, an antidote to inevitable disappointment is Hard Work.”

“Yeah,” James blows a smoke ring, something which I haven't seen anyone do in decades, “and here’s a little thing that I have to note well: an antidote to Hard and Miserable Work is Imagination. And sometimes, Chris ole sport, you have to hit bottom before you have it. Hitting bottom can be a prelude to creativity.”

Barb agrees, and Chris doesn’t disagree. Me? I muzzle a yawn. Danica says, “So James, how did you handle your on-the-job agonies?”

“Away from the studio, I tried to get rid of the clutter by playing bongo drums, but that helped only a little. You can’t escape sadness. It’s part of what a full life throws at you.”

Danica Patrick volunteers, “Funny, James, you should say that. Naturally, insecurities and anxieties creep into a racer’s life too. I don’t play drums or ping-pong like they do at Microsoft, but now that I think of it, I do deal with my job’s downside. At home I find untapped possibilities in designing sports clothes. That means my family and I work on fashion, color, fabric, style, applied math, pricing, sizing, marketing, shipping, webmastering even.”

I had not known that the average weight of a North American woman was 155 pounds. As the men talk about a virtualization server that Microsoft introduced the other day and a class-action lawsuit against the company's Vista upgrade, Danica Patrick and I have a side confab about women’s clothes.

After a while, most the discussion going on around me is about things that unfold in the U.S of A. For one thing, no one is informed enough to speak up for the European Union’s $1.3 billion fine last week of Microsoft. I would have liked to hear Chris defend his former company’s abuse of its market dominance. For our next party, we should again invite people who are different from us but we need foreign Greats so our interactions can be global.

Only James Dean is drinking now from our second bottle of sherry. The others do not appear to like the dry sherry we chose.

One sample from the discussion: James tells about his daytimes as a 20-year-old student at the Actors’ Studio. He was invited to a Broadway producer’s house for a party. On the assumption that he was valued for his personality, James took off that night from his busboy job. When he got there, though, the producer’s wife showed him the kitchen and expected him to load platters and wash dishes. James didn’t even have a chance to mingle with the guests offering nibbles and revealing that star-power of his. The producer never auditioned him for a stage role. That was, James says dryly, a wound, but then he adds that wounds are part of everyday living. {Sorry, I could not resist emphasizing his point as boldly as James did.} “In fact, The Bhagavad Gita defines the human body as a wound with nine openings.”

I try figuring out whether I agree with this or not. Rick looks disbelieving, even of the kitchen part of James’s story.

I may be over-analyzing this, but on balance, I figure that James is giving us cautionary tales. He is urging us to be open, really open, to the triumphs and the tears, the sweet and the sour around us. I could be wrong, but I take James’s argument as this: we always have to be open to the un-wonderful, just as we should never take the wonderful for granted. Not for a second.

It is poignant to watch James infatuate over Danica. As it happens, she gives James no encouragement, none at all. In fact, she dissolves in guffaws at his blowing her a kiss. Chris Peters gets a chuckle out of that too.

You got to love his authenticity. On the surface, he seems ebullient about life’s beauties and possibilities. Below the surface, he manifests such sadness that those beauties and possibilities can be so short-lived, so incomplete, so fragmented. When we toured the house earlier tonight, I saw the side of him that could make for an awfully sorrowful dinner companion. I hoped he would show his playful side. Yet, as he says in another of his stories, “sorrows don't sing.” A mood of steady sunshine would be inauthentic for James tonight.

James is a dear. Yep, he talks too much, but please find it in your heart to forgive him. Your heart has to go out to this young man who was just hitting his stride when...

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, reader, that is a wrap. Grandchildren are going to be visiting us early in April and hence we hope to re-connect with you on the First Friday night in May.

Hang on -- a rumpled James Dean has wheeled around and now is back in our front doorway. “I just wanted to say,” he slaps Rick on the back and then bear-hugs me, “I’m so sorry the good times are over.”