The Legendary Women I’d Love to Invite To Dinner
It starts with author Nora Ephron. Ask me who I would invite to dinner if I could choose any woman in the world, and her name is at the top of the list. It’s because she was a writer, and funny, and whenever I need inspiration for my own writing, I read her lines over and over again. It’s not just that she was so good with words – she penned the script to When Harry Met Sally... – but that she could find a way to flip bad situations and make them less painful.
When her husband Carl Bernstein (of Woodward and Bernstein, The Washington Post reporters who broke Watergate) left her for another woman – while she was pregnant! – she took all that anger and resentment and sadness and turned it into a best-selling book. Heartburn contained lines like this: “I think I was so entranced with being a couple that I didn’t even notice that the person I thought I was a couple with thought he was a couple with someone else.” I loved the book, and I loved Nora.
I finally got to meet her, when I interviewed her about a movie she directed. (It was Michael, which sadly was not such a good movie, nothing like Sleepless in Seattle, which she also directed.) I walked into that hotel room all flushed and nervous and thrust about four different editions of Heartburn into her hand, asking her to sign them. She did, but also spent a good amount of time correcting one edition’s mistakes (the book weaves recipes in, and some of the measurements were wrong), and I think I came across somewhat fan-girly. You can only imagine how I felt when a fellow journalist and friend who interviewed her a few years later asked her to dinner, and Nora accepted.
I’d love to have Nora over for dinner, even though she was a famously great cook and composed a legion of dinner party rules that I might not be able to adhere to (“It is absolutely essential to have a round table!” and “Fish is boring!”). So what other women, living or dead, would make my ultimate list?
Before I tell you, you should know one thing: this is not a conclusive list of the world’s most accomplished women. Of course I want to meet Michelle Obama and Marie Curie and Anne Frank, but we are talking about a dinner party. If Michelle Obama was at my house for dinner, I’d have to a) redecorate and b) just prop her up on a stage so we could all fawn over her all night. That’s not a dinner party; that’s a fan club meeting.
“I’d love to have Nora over for dinner, even though she was a famously great cook and composed a legion of dinner party rules that I might not be able to adhere to (“It is absolutely essential to have a round table!” and “Fish is boring!”). ”
Instead, I’d want to ask poet and writer Dorothy Parker, who would surely not behave well, and isn’t that sometimes the point? You don’t want just the well-behaved folks. You want someone like Parker, too: slightly obnoxious, witty, memorable. She’d drink too much, she’d be loud, she’d be inappropriate, but all the guests would dine out on her caustic wit for months afterwards. This is the woman who, having had an affair that resulted in a pregnancy, famously said, “How like me, to put all my eggs into one bastard.”
Someone has to hold their own in that crowd, so that would be comedian Amy Schumer. (Much needed, at this point, because she’s the first living dinner guest I’ve named.) Amy is funny, but she’s self-deprecating (“in LA, my arms basically register as legs”); based on her recent tweets about mayonnaise, I feel like she wouldn’t be too critical of my cooking, either. If she was unavailable, I might call Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby, and that sounds like she’s my second choice, but she’s not. Here’s one big bonus: apart from being brilliantly funny, she’d step in if I started burning stuff. As she said in her comedy special Nanette, “I cook dinner way more than I lesbian.”
That’s not to say I wouldn’t want a host of other Australians to join this group. I have to start with one of my childhood heroes, Evonne Goolagong Cawley, who became the No. 1 one female tennis player in the world and who also made me love tennis. These days, she heads up the Goolagong National Development Camp for Indigenous boys and girls, and you just know she’s just going to make you feel better about humans in general;. Yes, I have to backtrack a little on my no-fawning policy, but still, I can’t resist this invite.
So that’s it. My dinner party. Is it well-rounded? Nope. I don’t have a politician in there; and I’ve also left out author and Nobel Peace prize winner Toni Morrison (fawning problem) and artist Mirka Mora (I feel like she’d clash with Dorothy). I wouldn’t mind Nigella Lawson, although she’d definitely have something to say about the food I am serving up, and I’d like to squeeze in some of my best girlfriends. After all, if you’ve had a dinner party and there was no one to debrief about it with, did it really happen?
Words_ Rachelle Unreich
Photos, left to right_ Evonne Goolagong Cawley, Mirka Mora, Toni Morrison, Nigella Lawson, Nora Ephron, Amy Schumer, Dorothy Parker, Hannah Gadsby