HANK RANKS No. 19
My 19 Dream Dinner Parties
You know the scenario - If you could have dinner with any three people, living or dead, who would you choose?
This has long been one of my favorite little daydreaming activities, just sitting around with soft music in the background, thinking about interesting combinations of personalities and the kinds of conversations that might arise...And also being able to ask questions of historical figures, to sift the myth from fact...For this reason, alot of my favorite combinations are dead people, but I sometimes wonder if Beethoven would be any more enlightening or fun than Philip Glass.
So, anyways, I've written down dozens of these combinations of Dream Dinner Guests over the years, littering the margins and open spaces of countless notebooks and index cards...Here are my favorite nineteen cuz I'm self-indulgent like that...Here comes some blather on a lazy afternoon...Just remember, as always, this information is not knowledge...
HPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHP
19: John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby...Uncomfortable! For the meal, I'd serve a variety of "Five Dollar Footlongs" from Subway, assorted bags of Frito-Lay chips, and whatever Coca-Cola brand soft drink flavors they've got on the self-serve machine...
18: Lewis Carroll, Theodor Seuss Geisel, Fred Rogers...This dream dinner best represents my childhood, I suppose...Now, if I could have a dream dinner with fictional characters from my childhood, I'd probably choose Grover from Sesame Street, Leroy "Encyclopedia" Brown (or maybe even Sherlock Holmes), and Paul Bunyan (or maybe Bigfoot)...Anyways, for the meal, I'd serve grilled cheese sandwiches, tater-tots with tartar sauce for dipping, cottage cheese, celery with peanut butter, and ice cold 2% milk...For dessert, warm oatmeal raisin cookies and more milk...Marjory The Trash Heap???
17: King George III, Marie Antoinette, Thomas Jefferson...Three prominent figures from the late 1700's, and the revolutions in America and France...For the meal, Chinese take-out from China Wok, where I get those messed-up fortunes every Tuesday at lunch...
16: Abraham Lincoln, Audrey Hepburn, Richard Pryor...I think this dream dinner is pretty self-explanatory...LOL...For the meal, I'd serve soft-shell steak tacos, heavy on the guacamole and onions...Pitchers of Horchata, and soft snickerdoodles for dessert...
15: Meg White, Rosario Dawson, Monica Bellucci...What can I say? This dinner party is all about the company of three luxurious, voluptuous ladies...For the meal, Oysters Rockefeller, caviar, steamed artichoke hearts, Pernod, Absinthe and Champagne, strawberries and chocolate sauce, butterscotch pudding...
14: "The Leatherman", Tom Waits, "Johnny Appleseed" Chapman...The Leatherman was a famous vagabond who travelled western Connecticut and the length of the Hudson River in New York in the latter half of the 19th century...He was that rare famous hobo, famous because he wore nothing but handmade leather garments from head-to-toe = shoes, pants, shirt, suit coat, top hat...All dirty, stinky leather...Rather than re-tell his fascinating story here, I'll direct you towards a handy Wiki link...Johnny Appleseed was another traveller, though he had a more defined purpose for wandering around...Tom Waits is simply cool, and he gets around, you know? For the meal I'd serve tins of sardines, fancy crackers, loaves of thick-sliced bread to sop up the sardine oil, a five pound block of cheese, a large quantity of hot apple pies, Thermoses™ of hot, black coffee, flasks of Korbel brandy, and one pint of beer for each of us. For dessert, more hot apple pie, a la mode...And a bushel of apples for each of us to take with us afterwards...
13: E.E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara...I've got 11,640 pages of half-baked metaphors and dull images from my 20's sitting in boxes in my closet that my two cats take turns protecting...At 32 I burned myself out on a few meager accolades and 12 credits of Poetry labs on my transcript ...Nowadays I contemplate burning some of those volumes while I try to figure out how to hot poop...These are my three favorite American poets of the 20th century, tokens of the years before my own millenial crash...For the meal I'd serve all-beef hot dogs with ketchup, Peppadew mustard and diced onions, a huge pot of baked beans, salt & vinegar potato chips, and 4 gallons of creamy root beer...For dessert, Bananas Foster...
12: Piet Mondrian...Max Ernst...Bill Griffith...This dinner party would satisfy the comic-stripping, MUCKO-ing artsy-farter in me...Mondrian was part of the De Stijl movement in the first half of the 20th century, and his colorful geometric paintings wholly satisfy my right-brained tendencies...Ernst was a German Dada/Surrealism artist in many different mediums...Griffith is the creator of the Zippy The Pinhead comic strip, my favorite strip of all-time, and loaded with tons of absurdity (and stellar art)...For the meal, I'd serve porcupine meatballs, mashed potatoes and sweet peas, ice cold milk, and for dessert, hot apple pie leftover from a previous dream dinner...
11: Woody Allen...Terry Gilliam...Joel & Ethan Coen...After music, movies are the biggest passion in my life. I watch tons of films, and I take alot of notes cuz I've got Final Draft on my computer and farfetched dreams of screenplay glory in my head. If I had to choose my three favorite filmmakers, it would have to be these four because the Coens come as a pair, natch...What I like best about all of these guys is that they write most of their own scripts, which is what kept Scorsese from making this table...For the meal, I'd put a pitcher of ice water and an enormous bowl of Cobb Salad in the middle of the table and just let everybody have at it...
10: Amelia Earhart, Joni Mitchell, Emily Dickinson...This is a strange one...A WTF? kinda dinner party....But I'd really like to find out what happened to Ms. Earhart...And Joni Mitchell because she wrote a beautiful song called "Amelia" , and simpy because she's Joni, you know?...I am fairly ambivalent about Emily Dickinson's poetry, but I always understood the reclusive life she led...For the meal I'd serve ham & cheese omelets and potato pancakes, warm buttermilk...For dessert, coffee and cigarettes.
09: Hunter S Thompson, William S Burroughs, Ulysses S Grant...My best guess is that we'd talk about guns, and probably shoot off a few rounds...Maybe go hunting for our meal before actually sitting down to eat...Grilled rabbit, squirrel, pheasant, wild turkey...Maybe some venison...Mashed potatoes and sweet corn...Heavy mugs of dark lagers, possibly some port wine...Scotch and cigars and LSD for dessert...
08: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill...The Yalta Conference revisited, around my kitchen table...Nuff said...For the meal, I'd serve cheeseburgers, onion rings and milkshakes of many flavors...For dessert, a very large platter of assorted Hostess products = Twinkies, Ding Dongs, HoHo's, Snowballs, Chocodiles, Suzy Q's, Pudding Pies...
07: d. Boon, Jimi Hendrix, Sonny Sharrock...My three favorite dead guitar players...Kurt Cobain was a close fourth, and then there's Eddie Van Halen and Jeff Beck still among the living...I figured this dinner party would be a good chance to get some guitar lessons...For the meal, fucking corndogs on sticks (Minutemen fans will get the reference) and a vat of ketchup to dip 'em in, plenty of tater-tots, and a fridge full of bottled pure-cane sugar Coca-Cola that you can only get at the Mexican grocery store and/or during Passover...
06: Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos...Paris after the the first World War...The feast moves to my dining room, if only for a night...Racks of roasted lamb with carmelized shallot and thyme crust, a sizzling casserole dish of Gruyere Potato Gratin, a big bowl of steamed cauliflower, and bottles of fresh Beaujolais Nouveau...Crème brûlée and dark roast coffee for dessert...
05: Jesus Christ, Siddhartha Gautama, Lao Tse...I was raised and confirmed Catholic, before lapsing into Buddhism for awhile and finally falling into Taoism...For the meal I'd serve a good old-fashioned Wisconsin Friday night, all-you-can-eat fish fry = An endless serving of delicate pieces of deep-fried perch filets and piles of golden french fries...Tubs of creamy coleslaw and bowls of tartar sauce, tall stacks of buttered rye bread, and a never-empty pitcher of Spotted Cow Farmhouse Ale...
04: William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, King Henry VIII...The "Bard Of Avon" and two of his most famous and interesting subjects...A chance compare stories, so to speak...For this dream dinner I always imagine a spacious hall of feast befitting kings...Perhaps a small troupe of actors would perform the two relevant plays for us...Perhaps the four of us would simply do a table read...For the meal, a fat pig, roasted on a slowly-turning spit, roasted turkey, duck, and chicken, racks of lamb, grilled venison tenderloin, baked potatoes, carrots and turnips and onions...Mead and milk and heavy lagers...For dessert, prostitutes...
03: Philip K Dick, Brian Eno, Winona Ryder...PKD is perhaps my favorite writer, if I had to choose one...Eno is one of my favorite producers and the name of one of my cats, and I believe he would have some interesting things to discuss with PKD, able to bridge that gap into the esoteric and metaphysical sci-fi...And Ms. Ryder? I think we all ought to be surprised she isn't on the #1 guest list...For the meal, I'd set about 50 kinds of cereal on the counter in my kitchen, and gallons of ice cold whole milk on the table...
02: Frank Zappa, Groucho Marx, Salvadore Dali...Three smart and funny men in the vanguard of their respective fields, all sporting distinctive facial hair configurations...Strange, dry, trim and sarcastic...For the meal, I'd serve fried leftover spaghetti, baked garlic bread soaked in butter, bottle after bottle of robust red wine, and amaretto cheesecake and espresso for dessert...
01: Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, Bob Dylan...What can I say, when I think of America, I think of these three men probably more than any others...Ben Franklin, the witty and ribald statesman, inventor and storyteller of the 18th century, Mark Twain the wittier and more sardonic storyteller and world traveller of the 19th century, and Bob Dylan, folk poet and singer of American myths in the 20th century...Man, I gotta believe this dinner would be wild and drunk and loud...And between Twain and Franklin and me, I bet we could get Dylan to smoke a pipe...For the meal, I'd serve roasted Cornish game hens with wild rice stuffing, steamed asparagus, sweet iced tea, and bread pudding for dessert...
Hotcha! Hank
You know the scenario - If you could have dinner with any three people, living or dead, who would you choose?
This has long been one of my favorite little daydreaming activities, just sitting around with soft music in the background, thinking about interesting combinations of personalities and the kinds of conversations that might arise...And also being able to ask questions of historical figures, to sift the myth from fact...For this reason, alot of my favorite combinations are dead people, but I sometimes wonder if Beethoven would be any more enlightening or fun than Philip Glass.
So, anyways, I've written down dozens of these combinations of Dream Dinner Guests over the years, littering the margins and open spaces of countless notebooks and index cards...Here are my favorite nineteen cuz I'm self-indulgent like that...Here comes some blather on a lazy afternoon...Just remember, as always, this information is not knowledge...
HPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHP
19: John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby...Uncomfortable! For the meal, I'd serve a variety of "Five Dollar Footlongs" from Subway, assorted bags of Frito-Lay chips, and whatever Coca-Cola brand soft drink flavors they've got on the self-serve machine...
18: Lewis Carroll, Theodor Seuss Geisel, Fred Rogers...This dream dinner best represents my childhood, I suppose...Now, if I could have a dream dinner with fictional characters from my childhood, I'd probably choose Grover from Sesame Street, Leroy "Encyclopedia" Brown (or maybe even Sherlock Holmes), and Paul Bunyan (or maybe Bigfoot)...Anyways, for the meal, I'd serve grilled cheese sandwiches, tater-tots with tartar sauce for dipping, cottage cheese, celery with peanut butter, and ice cold 2% milk...For dessert, warm oatmeal raisin cookies and more milk...Marjory The Trash Heap???
17: King George III, Marie Antoinette, Thomas Jefferson...Three prominent figures from the late 1700's, and the revolutions in America and France...For the meal, Chinese take-out from China Wok, where I get those messed-up fortunes every Tuesday at lunch...
16: Abraham Lincoln, Audrey Hepburn, Richard Pryor...I think this dream dinner is pretty self-explanatory...LOL...For the meal, I'd serve soft-shell steak tacos, heavy on the guacamole and onions...Pitchers of Horchata, and soft snickerdoodles for dessert...
15: Meg White, Rosario Dawson, Monica Bellucci...What can I say? This dinner party is all about the company of three luxurious, voluptuous ladies...For the meal, Oysters Rockefeller, caviar, steamed artichoke hearts, Pernod, Absinthe and Champagne, strawberries and chocolate sauce, butterscotch pudding...
14: "The Leatherman", Tom Waits, "Johnny Appleseed" Chapman...The Leatherman was a famous vagabond who travelled western Connecticut and the length of the Hudson River in New York in the latter half of the 19th century...He was that rare famous hobo, famous because he wore nothing but handmade leather garments from head-to-toe = shoes, pants, shirt, suit coat, top hat...All dirty, stinky leather...Rather than re-tell his fascinating story here, I'll direct you towards a handy Wiki link...Johnny Appleseed was another traveller, though he had a more defined purpose for wandering around...Tom Waits is simply cool, and he gets around, you know? For the meal I'd serve tins of sardines, fancy crackers, loaves of thick-sliced bread to sop up the sardine oil, a five pound block of cheese, a large quantity of hot apple pies, Thermoses™ of hot, black coffee, flasks of Korbel brandy, and one pint of beer for each of us. For dessert, more hot apple pie, a la mode...And a bushel of apples for each of us to take with us afterwards...
13: E.E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara...I've got 11,640 pages of half-baked metaphors and dull images from my 20's sitting in boxes in my closet that my two cats take turns protecting...At 32 I burned myself out on a few meager accolades and 12 credits of Poetry labs on my transcript ...Nowadays I contemplate burning some of those volumes while I try to figure out how to hot poop...These are my three favorite American poets of the 20th century, tokens of the years before my own millenial crash...For the meal I'd serve all-beef hot dogs with ketchup, Peppadew mustard and diced onions, a huge pot of baked beans, salt & vinegar potato chips, and 4 gallons of creamy root beer...For dessert, Bananas Foster...
12: Piet Mondrian...Max Ernst...Bill Griffith...This dinner party would satisfy the comic-stripping, MUCKO-ing artsy-farter in me...Mondrian was part of the De Stijl movement in the first half of the 20th century, and his colorful geometric paintings wholly satisfy my right-brained tendencies...Ernst was a German Dada/Surrealism artist in many different mediums...Griffith is the creator of the Zippy The Pinhead comic strip, my favorite strip of all-time, and loaded with tons of absurdity (and stellar art)...For the meal, I'd serve porcupine meatballs, mashed potatoes and sweet peas, ice cold milk, and for dessert, hot apple pie leftover from a previous dream dinner...
11: Woody Allen...Terry Gilliam...Joel & Ethan Coen...After music, movies are the biggest passion in my life. I watch tons of films, and I take alot of notes cuz I've got Final Draft on my computer and farfetched dreams of screenplay glory in my head. If I had to choose my three favorite filmmakers, it would have to be these four because the Coens come as a pair, natch...What I like best about all of these guys is that they write most of their own scripts, which is what kept Scorsese from making this table...For the meal, I'd put a pitcher of ice water and an enormous bowl of Cobb Salad in the middle of the table and just let everybody have at it...
10: Amelia Earhart, Joni Mitchell, Emily Dickinson...This is a strange one...A WTF? kinda dinner party....But I'd really like to find out what happened to Ms. Earhart...And Joni Mitchell because she wrote a beautiful song called "Amelia" , and simpy because she's Joni, you know?...I am fairly ambivalent about Emily Dickinson's poetry, but I always understood the reclusive life she led...For the meal I'd serve ham & cheese omelets and potato pancakes, warm buttermilk...For dessert, coffee and cigarettes.
09: Hunter S Thompson, William S Burroughs, Ulysses S Grant...My best guess is that we'd talk about guns, and probably shoot off a few rounds...Maybe go hunting for our meal before actually sitting down to eat...Grilled rabbit, squirrel, pheasant, wild turkey...Maybe some venison...Mashed potatoes and sweet corn...Heavy mugs of dark lagers, possibly some port wine...Scotch and cigars and LSD for dessert...
08: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill...The Yalta Conference revisited, around my kitchen table...Nuff said...For the meal, I'd serve cheeseburgers, onion rings and milkshakes of many flavors...For dessert, a very large platter of assorted Hostess products = Twinkies, Ding Dongs, HoHo's, Snowballs, Chocodiles, Suzy Q's, Pudding Pies...
07: d. Boon, Jimi Hendrix, Sonny Sharrock...My three favorite dead guitar players...Kurt Cobain was a close fourth, and then there's Eddie Van Halen and Jeff Beck still among the living...I figured this dinner party would be a good chance to get some guitar lessons...For the meal, fucking corndogs on sticks (Minutemen fans will get the reference) and a vat of ketchup to dip 'em in, plenty of tater-tots, and a fridge full of bottled pure-cane sugar Coca-Cola that you can only get at the Mexican grocery store and/or during Passover...
06: Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos...Paris after the the first World War...The feast moves to my dining room, if only for a night...Racks of roasted lamb with carmelized shallot and thyme crust, a sizzling casserole dish of Gruyere Potato Gratin, a big bowl of steamed cauliflower, and bottles of fresh Beaujolais Nouveau...Crème brûlée and dark roast coffee for dessert...
05: Jesus Christ, Siddhartha Gautama, Lao Tse...I was raised and confirmed Catholic, before lapsing into Buddhism for awhile and finally falling into Taoism...For the meal I'd serve a good old-fashioned Wisconsin Friday night, all-you-can-eat fish fry = An endless serving of delicate pieces of deep-fried perch filets and piles of golden french fries...Tubs of creamy coleslaw and bowls of tartar sauce, tall stacks of buttered rye bread, and a never-empty pitcher of Spotted Cow Farmhouse Ale...
04: William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, King Henry VIII...The "Bard Of Avon" and two of his most famous and interesting subjects...A chance compare stories, so to speak...For this dream dinner I always imagine a spacious hall of feast befitting kings...Perhaps a small troupe of actors would perform the two relevant plays for us...Perhaps the four of us would simply do a table read...For the meal, a fat pig, roasted on a slowly-turning spit, roasted turkey, duck, and chicken, racks of lamb, grilled venison tenderloin, baked potatoes, carrots and turnips and onions...Mead and milk and heavy lagers...For dessert, prostitutes...
03: Philip K Dick, Brian Eno, Winona Ryder...PKD is perhaps my favorite writer, if I had to choose one...Eno is one of my favorite producers and the name of one of my cats, and I believe he would have some interesting things to discuss with PKD, able to bridge that gap into the esoteric and metaphysical sci-fi...And Ms. Ryder? I think we all ought to be surprised she isn't on the #1 guest list...For the meal, I'd set about 50 kinds of cereal on the counter in my kitchen, and gallons of ice cold whole milk on the table...
02: Frank Zappa, Groucho Marx, Salvadore Dali...Three smart and funny men in the vanguard of their respective fields, all sporting distinctive facial hair configurations...Strange, dry, trim and sarcastic...For the meal, I'd serve fried leftover spaghetti, baked garlic bread soaked in butter, bottle after bottle of robust red wine, and amaretto cheesecake and espresso for dessert...
01: Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, Bob Dylan...What can I say, when I think of America, I think of these three men probably more than any others...Ben Franklin, the witty and ribald statesman, inventor and storyteller of the 18th century, Mark Twain the wittier and more sardonic storyteller and world traveller of the 19th century, and Bob Dylan, folk poet and singer of American myths in the 20th century...Man, I gotta believe this dinner would be wild and drunk and loud...And between Twain and Franklin and me, I bet we could get Dylan to smoke a pipe...For the meal, I'd serve roasted Cornish game hens with wild rice stuffing, steamed asparagus, sweet iced tea, and bread pudding for dessert...
Hotcha! Hank
Labels: Blather, books, Chicks, China Wok, comic stripping, Food, Hank Ranks, music, politics, religion, RIP, Sesame Street, Tuesday Fortune, William S Burroughs, Winona Ryder, zappa
posted by Hank Mohaski at 9:20 PM
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