The Hypothetical Dinner Party

If you enjoy reading waste-of-time interviews* as much as I do, you'll be familiar with the question: If you were to have dinner with 10 people, living or dead, who would they be? It's also the sort of thing that turns up in Table Topics.
* Waste-of-time interviews include mid-campaign questionnaires filled out by politicians who would prefer that you focus on their zany high school exploits or personal work-out schedules rather than anything as alienating as actual policy, those "A Talk With the Author" sections in the book club guides at the back of paperbacks, and "5 Minutes With..." features that magazines like to put on the last page to make you happy before you flip the cover closed to be confronted with the scary brooding man in the inevitable perfume ad. I love waste-of-time interviews (also Table Topics).
This question, despite being asked with a frequency that renders it quite banal, provokes in me, anyway, a whole host of other questions. Like: what would we eat? Am I allowed to tell the dead people about the future? Come to think of it, do the dead people show up as zombies? If not, what stage of their life do they show up at? Is this a time travel thing? Can I invite, let's say, young Einstein and old Einstein? What if I invite Adam Smith and Karl Marx and they don't get along? Am I allowed to deliberately provoke controversy by inviting people with differing ideologies? If I invite Gandhi, am I obliged to serve a vegetarian meal? And what would I wear?
Maybe not such a banal question after all. But I think it could be better. I have some propositions for rules and improvements:
(For those of you whose hypothetical dinner party guest lists differ from mine, I've include links to Wikipedia and iMDB to things that seemed like they might cause confusion.)
1. Allow me to invite fictional characters too. Come on. You already allowed me to invite dead people. Why not fictional? The line's not that sharp anyway. People who lived as long ago as Charlemagne almost might as well be fictional for how much anyone knows about them as people. And what if I say I want to invite Homer? Are you going to assemble a bunch of classicists to argue for days about whether one person wrote all the works attributed to Homer? The soufflé will collapse and get cold.
2.Now that I've massively expanded the potential pool for guests by opening up all of fiction, I would like to make a few restrictions too. I know, I know I said anyone living, dead or fictional, but without restrictions there's less creativity. So. May I propose that we not invite
a) Any fictional characters who are not at least vaguely humanoid. It seems discriminatory I know, but just think how awkward Aslan or Charlotte would feel sitting at a dinner party. Have you ever tried eating coq-au-vin without opposable thumbs?
b)  No more than one of the usual suspects (Gandhi, Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr...). Seriously, everyone invites them and no-one invites Emma Goldman or Murasaki Shikibu anywhere. It's just not fair. And maybe this way you'll be able to sidestep the whole vegetarian issue.
c) No more than one current celebrity. You have all of history and fiction to choose from. You don't need the entire cast of Valentine's Day.
d) No more than one dead relative. Not to be insensitive, but more than one just gets boring.
e) God, whatever your conception of God is. Think about it. God can never really be your guest anywhere. You welcome Him (choice of the masculine pronoun is for my own convenience, ok?) into your home. He created it. You serve Him food that you've cooked. He created it. You offer Him an after-dinner cigar. He created it. The whole thing is just socially awkward.
3. To make up for the cruel imposition of restrictions on the guest list, I propose to allow one hypothetical dinner party a month. Because it's just too hard to pick only ten people. See? It's going to be OK. You can invite both Taylor Lautner and Zac Efron. Just not to the same dinner party. More interestingly, you can throw theme hypothetical dinner parties. You can invite Elizabeth I, Cate Blanchett and eight fictional representations of the Virgin Queen for an evening of discussion about being at the top of Elizabethan England. You can have H.G. Wells, Henry and Clare (in all their "we're the world's most pretentious couple" glory), Douglas Adams, Stephen Hawking and the Doctor get together to talk about the scientific, emotional and grammatical difficulties of time travel. Wow. I should go into dinner party fan fiction. A whole new frontier. Anyway, moving on.
4. You're allowed to bring a friend as a bonus eleventh dinner guest. To even out the numbers and because shared experiences build friendships. Yay.
5. Don't let the cyborgs drink cocktails. It'll all end in tears, mark my words.
Smiling to herself very broadly indeed,
Charlotte