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Hosts
Our “credentials” for doing this blog? Scant -- other than what we’ve learned as guests and as hosts at dinner parties.
More of an interest than a cred, we are attentive to views of people who are great at what they do. Do we attach ourselves to famous people because we live unfamously? Probably. To grow, we’ve choosen to hang out with those beyond our separate fragment of society.
We blog because we like partying -- and anticipating the surprise minglings and social inclusions of parties. We party because we like conversations different from our usual gambits. We converse with guests because we want to use our dining room and clean our house at least once a month. It can be fun and edifying, our crash course on learning about folks who’ve made much greater marks in the world than us.
Frankly, Barb doesn’t dig cooking as much she did when our kids were still around. Nowadays, happy to report, when we’re having guests over, her culinary gumption gets going again.
She’s not always successful in keeping our menus simple. From meals we’ve enjoyed at restaurants, as a culinary detective Barb deduces ingredients that emphasize strong flavors for our strong guests. We try out and critique her new dishes a week or so before our party, making corrections as necessary, like adding blackberries to the Blueberry Crisp and dressing the parmesan regiano with fresh lime, generally adding a little bit of this to a little bit of that. Though anything but a chef, Rick feels the need to help, and so he sort of half-makes the soup. And we try to serve food that’s nutritionally, ethically, and environmentally correct.
Barb, star of the family’s constellation, brings to the table experience as mother of three grown kids, teacher, clarinetist, painter of landscapes and nudes (sometimes Rick models for her, all of which are unsold), dancer, soprano in church choir, sometime embodiment of certain moderate Midwest progressive values*, passionate collaborator in what the two of them do (she did this blog’s drawings, for instance), and then some. (Our firstborn did the web design.)
Aside from some boxing in his youth, Rick had his best rounds doing advocacy research at a human-rights agency and later working at big universities. In this space, though, he post-mortems ‘parties’ more as a Host than as an civil libertarian or as an emeritus prof who gave all his professional books away. He gets a charge out of straying from subjects in which he’s “educated.” The blogosphere is one subject that Rick has been drawn to -- from that distant time when less than 500,000 were out there.
Over the years, Baby-cakes and Rick have moderated each others’ themes. One result, we frankly fear, is that at bottom Barb and Rick tend towards the bourgeois. Our kids tell us so and you’ll see signs of that conventionality in our contributions to the conversations. And at other times, while we don’t exactly finish each others’ sentences, we do elaborate on each other’s stories, trotting out anecdotes that sometimes miss the point but which we relish anyhow. While we hosts have come to sound alike, our three uncommon guests each month generally are more edgy, new, fearless, and substantive in their talk.
We differ on mentioning our little family in these posts. Thinking that too many people these days blather on about themselves, Barb wants to avoid references to our personal lives. Rick thinks, though, that personal references sometimes do belong in these reckonings, at least marginally. Such allusions are parts of natural discourse within your home too, yes?
Fifty years ago, when both skeptical of authority, Barb and Rick might have out-and-out criticized greats with the sunny creativity of our blogged-about guests. Less critical about others today, we’re probably more secure in ourselves, having somewhat realized more of our goals: no longer are we so given to deprecation or sheer envy. Hence, if it’s bite and scathing commentary that you seek here, back off. Sure, in these renditions, there’s the occasional ‘What did you mean by that?’ -- but mostly we just appreciate these visitors.
For what it’s worth, we also enjoy dinner-partying with local or visiting-from-afar friends who aren’t pooh-bahs in the news. Some of these, from 50 and 60 years ago, are our huckleberry friends with their huckleberry and later-day lovers. We also hobnob with our own relatives, which of course brings its own careening triumphs, hot disappointments, as well as private imprudences and impudences. Such occasions include some of our best dinner-time discussions, as we swap gossip about our children and grandchildren, in-laws, jobs, politics, travels, ethics, miracles, mysteries, first jobs, lucky breaks, our virtues and others’ vices, happy times remembered or anticipated, and so forth. (We’ve learned not to bring up the blogosphere – most of these confidantes just aren’t interested.)
Those folk meetings, though, are grist for some other blog some other time. There too, we’ll probably blur the line between fiction and reality.
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