Three's Company

Okay, I'm going to start All-Request Week with Ian's request, because I found it surprisingly easy to answer.  However, the phone lines are still open - keep sending requests.  You've given me some interesting things to think about.

 

You are able to sit down and have dinner with 3 people, past or present and talk to them for 3 hours. Who would they be and why?

 

I feel a bit like I'm on a job interview.  I'm surprised the next request wasn't "Where do you see yourself in five years?"  Thank God it wasn't, because if there's one thing grad school taught me, it's that no matter where I see myself five years from now, I couldn't be more wrong about it.  But anyway, this is the sort of question that people ask to suss out your personality, figure out your priorities, and evaluate your creativity.  And thus, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most of us have heard it at some point, and thought about who those 3 people would be.  Some people go straight for the obvious: Jesus, the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, Oprah, Carrot Top.  Some people go for those they think aren't obvious, but totally are: Hitler, Eva Peron, Sirhan Sirhan, Charles Manson.  Yet others go out of their way to make their choices as obscure as possible: I'll take Evelyn Nesbit, Crispin Glover, and Millard Fillmore for $200, Alex.

 

So my choices aren't going to be terribly original, or very obscure.  But considering the idea essentially boils down to putting together one kickass dinner party, I naturally feel the need to include people that I not only admire, but would really get a kick out of talking to.  If you've been reading this for a while, you'd know that last year was hard on my sense of idol worship.  And you're probably expecting me to put Kurt Vonnegut and Mr. Wizard on this list.  But here's the thing - while Vonnegut is one of the most quotable individuals I've ever run across, with a particular knack for saying the things I'm thinking in far more eloquent, poetic, and viciously sarcastic ways than I can ever hope to achieve...he's also written a lot of incredibly mediocre filler.  And I don't want to sit through a 3-hour dinner for 30 minutes of soundbites I want to listen to.  And as much as I love Mr. Wizard with every fiber of my being...I don't imagine he was a particularly sparkling conversationalist.  Jack Lemmon?  Well, I'd probably just make him re-enact the last scene of The Apartment all night and then snuggle up to him as he strains spaghetti through a tennis racket. 

 

So, while I've ruled out the idols I've spoken of to great extent previously, I'm also sure that my choices will come as little to no surprise to most of you.  Of course, the thing that makes it interesting for me, is that my answer is always different.  So here are my choices right now:

 

Guest #1: Katharine Hepburn.  Within the last few years, I have discovered Katharine Hepburn.  I know, you're thinking, "um, didn't EVERYONE discover Katharine Hepburn, like, 70 years ago???"  But there's a HUGE difference between knowing someone is an icon, and actually watching the movies that MADE them an icon.  Most of the people I know have never actually watched a single one of Kate's movies.  Hell, I've only watched a few (would have been a lot more if Canada had a decent equivalent to Netflix, but no...).  Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, should see The Philadelphia Story.  The plot is fairly simple overall...it is a movie that works (as the original stage play did) because of the charisma of its actors.  Without Kate, Cary Grant, and Jimmy Stewart, it would've been just another romantic comedy.  The Hepburn character is one of those roles that makes me wish a community theater would mount a production of The Philadelphia Story, just so I might have a chance in hell of playing it. I'd never get to, though.  I'm short and chunky instead of tall and slim...cute instead of beautiful...endearingly goofy rather than charismatic.  Kate always played the woman every woman wishes she could be and wants people to think she is.  She was tall.  And beautiful.  And wore pants.  She had this striking, assertive, confident persona.  And somehow, she managed to still be a woman underneath.  While you're at it, watch Woman of the Year.  This was her first movie with Spencer Tracy - the archetype is pretty much the same.  But the thing that's unique about that movie is that you can literally watch a man - an everyman, infinitely relatable...average...and so lovely in his flawed ordinariness - fall in love with this remarkable, strong-willed woman.  And I'm not talking a Gigli, oo, you can really see J-Lo and Ben Affleck fall in love, kind of deal.  No, you can actually see this woman grow on this man, to the point that he can't help but smile while watching her just be her.  You can see how much he has fallen under her spell, in fiction and in real life.  It's incredible.  Spence could not fake that - he never did with any other actress.  But this doesn't really explain why she would make a fantastic dinner party guest.

Last fall, I read Kate Remembered.  Now, if you recall, this was the book that came out almost immediately when she passed away.  It was not some sort of slapped-together attempt to capitalize on Hepstalgia - the author had actually interviewed her once-upon-a-time, at which point they became fast friends.  The book is not so much a biography of a Hollywood icon as a memoir of the author's time spent as Kate's friend.  And much of what she told him was said with the caveat that he not publish any of it until she had passed away.  Reading that book, you get a much better sense of who she was as a person.  And that person is someone I want to know.  The sort of person who says, "hey, you are interesting and I like you.  You WILL come to dinner and meet my friends."  I'm not that person.  I can get as far as the first half...sometimes.  But actually planning parties?  I'm still that girl that's surprised when people actually want to come to one of my parties.  But just READING about her makes me want to sit down with her...watch her in action.  Because that persona wasn't just someone she played on screen...it WAS her.  And it was incredibly entertaining to just sit back and watch.

 

Guest #2: Albert Einstein.  This one probably qualifies as the cliche science geek answer, but my reasons extend beyond the fact that the man was just plain fucking brilliant.  I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd love to know how he would react to the knowledge that, in this day and age, physicists are STILL performing experiments that prove how dead-on his reasoning was nearly a century ago.  And I'd love to ask him why my devices just don't quite work the way they should sometimes.  By far my favorite part of taking physics in undergrad was when we covered special relativity...it takes a unique sort of creativity to imagine circumstances under which a 300-foot train can disappear in a 200-foot tunnel.  The things I find the most interesting in science are those I can work with, but not quite fully get my head around - sort of a scientific functional illiteracy.  It feels more like magic that way.  Spending all day doing the things that come easily to you gets really boring - but when you can do the things that you don't think you should be able to pull off, that's a special feeling.  When I was teaching basic quantum mechanics to first-years last year, I was surprised to find that those were some of my favorite lectures, because out of what I was required to teach, it was the material I had the least intuitive understanding of.  I've never felt like I had a good grasp on electronics, but found myself really enjoying teaching electronics labs to fourth-years at Purdue.  It's true what they say - the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else.  I like to think that Einstein would agree with me to an extent - one of his more famous quotes was, "Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater." 

About the time I was wrapping up my quantum lectures last year, I began reading Einstein in Love.  The book jacket was a bit misleading, since it was subtitled A Scientific Romance and ostensibly the story of his life, told through love letters and his relationships with various women.  It wound up being far more technical than I had expected it to, and much more a Romance with Science than a Scientific Romance.  However, it did give a glimpse into the man as he was in his personal relationships, flaws and all.  For an uber-nerd, he could be quite the romantic: "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity."  My quote book might as well have an entire chapter devoted to Einstein ("Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand."), so I remain firmly convinced that having dinner with him would be a hoot.  I can only imagine how much fun it would be to get him drunk. 

 

Plus, I think Kate would get one hell of a kick out of him.

 

Guest #3: Christopher Moore.  This may be my only left-field kind of choice, but if you know me, you know it's not random at all.  One of my all-time favorite books is Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal.  Some people write this book off as sacreligious on the basis of the title alone, without ever having cracked it open.  If you actually do open the cover, what you'll find is the story of Biff, who has been resurrected 2000 years after Christ's death to write a Gospel that will fill in all of the years that are missing from the four existing books of the Gospel (i.e., pretty much anything before the age of 30 or so).  Biff is a regular guy, kind of an asshole, who happened to meet Jesus when they were 7 and became his best friend.  Perhaps most importantly, he was the one that was with him when he was trying to come to terms with what exactly he was supposed to DO as the Son of God.  If you actually READ the book, you'll see that there's really nothing sacreligious about it - Jesus, although very much human, is always a picture of piety and propriety - it's Biff that is the irreverent, amoral goofball.  Okay, fine, once or twice he gets frustrated trying to get his message across and lets out a "dammit!" but that's as bad as it gets.  And that's what I like about it - it's a wonderful portrait of male friendship (what, you've never met a ridiculously nice guy with an asshole for a best friend?), and it imagines Jesus as a real person - with a sense of humor, and curiosity, and an incredible burden on his shoulders.  It's also screamingly funny.  No, seriously - I've gotten some weird looks on the bus while reading it.  And Biff's account of the Passion is quite possibly the most heartbreaking thing I've ever read - even if you don't believe in Jesus, just imagine watching your best friend put himself through that, willfully and out of love for you and everyone around you.  I like to re-read this book during Lent...ever since the first time I read it, I've thought, yeah, THAT'S what I've always thought Jesus was really like, and what I think faith is all about.  "Faith isn't an act of intelligence, it's an act of imagination."  What we know from books only gets us halfway - at that point, you've gotta take what you know and just let your imagination run wild.

 

Moore has written plenty of other books as well, and the others are far less heavy in terms of subject matter.  They tend to be about odd, supernatural things, everything from giant sea creatures to Native American spirits to vampires and grim reapers.  When I read the opening chapters of Fluke (or I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings), I thought, "man, this guy REALLY gets how scientists actually work."  They are all ludicrously funny and I can't recommend them enough.  Most of them do have a spiritual element to them, even if you have to squint and tilt your head just so to get it.  But above all, he is creative, he is hysterical, and I can never wait to see what he'll come up with next.  And that's why he gets a spot at my table.

 

Guest #4: There is no Guest #4. 

 

However, I am totally going to cheat here, because the rules never said that I wasn't allowed to pick a person to MAKE the meal.  That person would be Heston Blumenthal.  Most of my regular readers have probably not heard of him.  He's a 3-Michelin-star chef who takes the molecular gastronomy approach to cooking.  Simply put, he has a deeply analytical and scientific take on developing recipes and cooking methods.  He has a show called In Search of Perfection that is currently airing on Food Network Canada - it is the only cooking show that actually makes this foodie/science geek horny.  And before you start going all "whoa, that was TOO MUCH INFORMATION" on me, just think about the number of food-porn shows out there that are TRYING to do just that.  Heston's just the only one who succeeds.  I mean, the man makes ME go, "whoa...you may be thinking just a little too much about your food."  But I love him.  I'm not the sort of person who makes a list of things to do before I die, but if I did, they'd probably all be food-related, and at the top of the list would be the tasting menu and wine pairings at The Fat Duck.  Chances are, that would do me in anyway, both financially and cardiovascularly, but dammit, what a way to go.

 

And with that, so begins All-Request Week.  Request lines are, as I said before, still open - there does seem to be some demand along the "What, exactly IS it that you do?" lines, so one post will definitely cover my research.  However, that post will be significantly more entertaining if Fearless Leader gives me his blessing to post some of my silly movies on YouTube (under a personal account, not the lab one, unless otherwise instructed), so I may hold off for a bit.  In the meantime, keep the requests coming, or else you'll be hearing an awful lot about bananahammocks and ramen noodles...