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Your Ideal Dinner Party — RushBabe49
On April 26, 2013, I did a post entitled “Your Ideal Dinner Party”, asking which 12 (living) people you would most like to sit across the dinner table from? This can include famous people, or anyone else you think you’d like to talk to late into the night over dinner. List your dinner-party invitees. I find that my list has changed dramatically from last year’s list, with only a couple of carry-overs:
Rush and Katherine Limbaugh
Ten Cents and Wife
Roupen and Shirley Shakarian (local friends, Roupen is an orchestra conductor who was a great guest at my very first holiday party)
Mark Steyn and Wife
Dr. Larry Arnn and Penny (President of Hillsdale College)
Mark Helprin and wife (I have always wanted to meet him and get him to autograph my first edition of Winter’s Tale)
Published in General
Nancy Pelosi
Hilary Clinton
Madeline Albright
Valerie Jarrett
Susan Rice
Samantha Power
that’s one side of the table
on the other
Bashir Assad
Ayman al Zawahiri
Omar al-Bashir
Nicolas Maduro
Kim Jong Un
Robert Mugabe
( seat folks boy/girl/boy/girl, maybe just butcher/enabler/butcher/enabler)
Now…what to serve ?
And where to post the GPS coordinates in case anyone wanted to crash this fancy soiree of progressive socialists.
I like 8 person round tables for good conversation so my list would include:
1. Mitt Romney
2. John Bolton
3. Natan Sharansky
4. Thomas Sowell
5. Charles Murray
6. Robert Lux
7. James of England
8. Michael Labeit
Politics Dinner:
Gertrude Himmelfarb
Roger Scruton
Joseph Epstein
Hadley Arkes
Paul Rahe
John Bolton
Robert George
Charles Krauthammer
Literature Dinner:
Hilary Mantel
Marilynne Robinson
Mark Helprin
Neal Stephenson
Kazuo Ishiguro
Gene Wolfe
Tom Wolfe
The reanimated ghost of Willa Cather
@TR: I could possibly squeeze in 9 to accommodate Krauthammer. :)
I know this is a rule violation, but I’d love to have a dinner attended by deceased Brits:
C. S. Lewis
G. K. Chesterton
Benjamin Disraeli
Winston Churchill
Cardinal Manning
Joseph Conrad
Charles Dickens
George Eliot
Christopher Dawson
Richard III
Just water down the soup a bit.
Any eleven Ricochetti.
And the reanimated corpse of Milton Berle.
Charles Krauthammer
Jonah Goldberg
Troy Senik
George W. Bush
Iowahawk
Ben Carson
Bobby Knight
I’d invite John Podhoretz or Richard Epstein, but then no one else would get to talk.
Newt Gingrich
Tom Wolfe (Good Choice, TR)
Stephen Harper
Scott Walker
Mark Steyn
Dennis Prager
Phil Robertson
Camille Paglia
Shrinking the list to just twelve proved to be a very difficult exercise. I decided to pick a theme and cater my list to it. For an evening discussing global politics and economics here is my short list of twelve.
Michael Barone
Melvyn Bragg
Tyler Cowen
Richard Epstien
Niall Ferguson
Ulrike Guérot
Robin Hanson
Veronique de Rugy
Christina Hoff Sommers
Thomas Sowell
Nassim Taleb
Amy Zegart
Swap Samuel Johnson for the murderer/usurper and you have an extraordinary list.
Mark Steyn
Tom Wolfe
Shelby Steele
Laura Ingraham
Charles Murray
Thomas Sowell
Charles Krauthammer
Heather Mac Donald
James Taranto
P.J. O’Rourke
Barack Obama
…and Peter Robinson to moderate the discussion.
My 12 are a bit eclectic. Some political folks, comedians, authors and royalty (both temporal and ecclesiastical.)
1. Dennis Prager
2. Mark Steyn
3. Ann Coulter
4. Michael Medved
5. Jonah Goldberg
6. John Podhoritz
7. Rob Long
8. Eddie Murphy
9. Elizabeth II
10. Pope Francis
11. Tiger Woods
12. Dean Koontz
Twelve people would almost certainly ruin my ideal dinner party, regardless of how much I like them.
;-)
I’d cut to the chase and dig up Cicero, then spread his wisdom.
I wanted Richard III present so we could all hold him down until he admitted he usurped the throne.
Samuel Johnson would be great, but we’d have to have a method to keep him and Churchill from sucking all the air out of the room. Maybe have Maggie Thatcher sit between them and poke them when they talk too much.
I love having Robertson and Paglia present–I’d want them to sit by each other.
RushBabe,
Thank you for including me in your list. That was sweet of you. My list would probably be my AMU friends. I like the eclectic fun of it. Getting a group of A list conservatives seems boring to me. They would all be trying to outshine each other and subtract more than add.
Hey, Sock, you’ve never met Roupen and Shirley. With them at the table, conversation would never be boring. And none of my guests is a one-trick pony. We conservatives can have all sorts of fun discussions about technology (Macs vs PCs), golf, wine, and music. Don’t forget that Ray and I would be there, and don’t you want to hear about accordions? Rush has been fishing on Vancouver Island, and I’d be interested to hear about that. Shoot, we can even talk cats, as we would not put Kikyo out, so she’d be around underfoot. Rush recently got a new Abyssinian kitten, and she’s just gorgeous. And you can tell us all about Japan. Speaking of, how do you like my new avatar?
Yes, and I think that the rest of us would sit and watch. Great fun to be had by all. I have a sneaking suspicion that they would get along very well.
I find that having more than six guests ensures that I don’t get time to have a good conversation with any of them, except perhaps the most talkative one or two. Here are the six I would love to spend an evening with:
Brett Favre and Dion Sanders because they would be hilarious together and oh the stories they could tell.
Peter Robinson and George W. Bush because they both know have to bring class and common sense to any particular topic and can keep the ball rolling.
Comedian Tim Hawkins because he’s simply fantastic, and finally… Harrison Ford (need there be a reason?)
Basically, I’d like to invite people who would make me laugh and whom I don’t get to hear speak very often.
Crash it with a 1000 gravity bomb?
Sorry to burst everyone’s bubbles, but take it from a real dinner party expert: ALL of these combinations would be colossal failures.
A dinner party does not work well with more than two people who instinctively hold court. It just becomes an exercise in seeing who takes he fastest breaths before someone else can grab the floor. The very best dinners have 1-2 Big Talkers and 4-6 very bright and sarcastic people sniping and heckling.
Ideally, the Big Talkers are only Big Talkers in real life only as a default, not because they love hearing themselves talk. A Steyn who does not always need to dominate would be much better than a Gingrich who is clearly insecure when not the center of attention.
I’ve never heard Newt described this way by people who know him.
Troy? What do you say?
Well, I have spoken with Rush, and he was a very gracious host, carrying on a smooth conversation. I’m betting Steyn would be too, in a room full of mostly congenial people.
I am sure he is indeed quite gracious.
Think of it as a dish. You may like beef and fish and herbal tea and ice cream and Oreos and caviar and tequila. But you don’t really want them all in your mouth at once, competing for attention.
We have two formal dinner parties every week (Shabbos meals). We invite a wide range of guests (including Ricocheteers anytime someone is in the area!), and most meals have 12-16 people, half of them kids. That means there are 2-3 conversations going on most of the time.
But if we have just a few more people, OR three of the adults are used to doing most of the talking, then the conversation fractures quickly, and not particularly elegantly. Every talker needs an audience, and it feels quite rude to listen to a more interesting speaker when a nearer (talking) person wants your attention.