Dream.

The working guest list for my dream cook-out ...

1. Jim Harrison: It's a cookout. Food and drink must be prepared, consumed ... and the whole process repeated as needed.
2. Thomas Jefferson: Architect, musician, designer, gourmand ... we'll learn along the way.
3. William Wordsworth: Poetics, awareness, and exuberance (He's the Hold-My-Beer, "Surprised by Joy—Impatient as the Wind" Guy) ... plus he's had plenty of experience sleeping under the stars.
4. Franklin Furman: My all-time favorite customer, a daily source of peace, quiet, and simple contentment; "Enjoy the day."
5. Leonardo: It's a cookout. Something will need to be fixed, rigged, modified, figured out.
6. Georgia O'Keeffe: A great cook, exuding beauty within and without.
7. Jerry Jeff Walker: Cookouts require great music ... and childish humor.
8. Mozart: Cookouts require great music ... and childish humor.
9. John Colter: A master at field-dressing, plus a campfire will follow and stories will be told.
10. Great-Grandpa Firchau: Someone to teach us all something and I have more questions for him.
11. A stump left for a walk-in.

I please my imagination more with a circle of godlike men and women variously related to each other, and between whom subsists a lofty intelligence. But I find this law of one to one peremptory for conversation, which is the practice and consummation of friendship. Do not mix waters too much. The best mix as ill as good and bad. You shall have very useful and cheering discourse at several times with two several men, but let all three of you come together, and you shall not have one new and hearty word. Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort. In good company there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present. No partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorly limited to his own. Now this convention, which good sense demands, destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running of two souls into one.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Friendship"