Fantasy Thanksgiving Party

I had a very busy Thanksgiving. Nothing happened, except in my head. The bash was my fantasy dinner. Not to offend any friends, I invited only dead people.

Robert Kennedy shows up but is inconsolable, grieving over his son who has besmirched his name in the great hereafter. 

Carl Sagan is briefed at the guest list but decides to opt for a table in one of those other galaxies.

James Madison is in distress over what we’ve done to his Constitution and joins RFK in the corner.

Fellow plantation owners, George and Thomas, will only eat white meat. They are seated between Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin getting an earful on the soul of America while Billie sings about strange fruit.

Fred Ebb is composing, Come to the Cabernet, My Friend. Dorothy Parker says, I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy. Mark Twain has stopped smoking cigars for the third time today. When told how books were written on the dangers of tobacco, he says he never reads health books because one can die of a misprint.

Molly Ivins says if Bush was a shrub then Trump is a stump. His brain is so shriveled he needs to be watered twice a week. Winston Churchill arrives, uninvited, when he heard something about the soft-underbelly of Turkey.

Homer and Virgil are having a food-fight over the Iliad and Aeneid. Homer accuses Virgil of ripping off his epic work. The Roman admits he’s always had it in for the Greeks since he heard Cleopatra was in bed with laryngitis.

Freud arrived declaring that he never travels without his couch. He is upset when Sinatra starts to sing, You Make Me Feel So Jung.

Here comes Spencer Tracy showing off his red hair which no one ever saw on the big screen. I have to include him because he always reminds me of my father, even though my mother could never be mistaken for Katharine Hepburn.

John Keats and W.B. Yeats are over there in the corner trying to get their names to rhyme. In the other corner Einstein is talking to the Barber of Seville about, at least, a trim. Descartes is quibbling with him whether mc should be cubed instead of squared. When offered a glass of champagne he says, I think not, and disappears.

Socrates declines a swig of Merlot remembering the last time he had a drink. Euripides is conferring with Shakespeare whether or not to be or have been.

Lincoln wants me to check if the current president ever slept in his bedroom. I assured him Biden had the sheets changed since Donald probably donated them to the KKK.

Antonin Scalia crashes the party. He is arguing with everyone citing Hammurabi's Code and a list of proclamations from the Oracle of Delphi to support his notion of originalism. When he gets up to scream at the assembled, Rosa Parks takes his seat.

John Donne just popped in reminding us all that it is an astonishment to be alive and it behooves us all to be astonished... even though he is enjoying his afterlife.

Charles Simic, newly unalive, says that he wrote to annoy God and make death laugh.

I work the room seriously overhearing.