Salvador Dali and I share a birthday, and you’d think he would be the clear choice. However, I recall reading about some people who actually met Dali who claimed he had a predilection for fart jokes, which might grow tiresome during dinner.
The next most fascinating person on the list is Louis Farrakhan. He might also be tiresome, but he loves classical music so we’d always have a topic to fall back on.
Che Guevara. He’s by far the most interesting person on the list.
I do have a soft spot for Burl Ives. But after he sings Silver and Gold for me, I don’t know what we would talk about.
I would rather be present for an event that happened on my birthday. The Roswell UFO incident.
Oh, there’s several on my list but it would be hard to chose.
Anthony Hopkins or Ben Kingsley?
Just by a hair I think I’d eat with Hopkins. But only in a restaurant. No chianti or liver, which I don’t like anyway.
:dubious:
Is there something you’d like to tell us?
I’ve never heard of most of the people on my list. Only two: J.M. Barrie (author of Peter Pan) and James L Brooks (the simpsons guy). Of those I think I’d enjoy meeting Barrie. I love his Lemony Narrator and snarky writing style.
No, please don’t make me have dinner with Hillary Duff! :rolleyes: I don’t care about a lot of these people, like Duff and Naomi Watts, and I never heard of most of the people from the late 1800s and early 1900s. So, hmm…Confucius? 
Dangit, just 5 days of separation from a dinner date with Robot Arm. In that case I choose my handsome (and intelligent!) birthday twin, Ben Affleck.
I’ve got a suprisingly large number of awesome birthday partners for May 22: Richard Wagner, Arthur Conan Doyle, Lawrence Olivier, Morrisey, Sun Ra. But I have to pick Bernie Taupin, since I’m a huge fan of Elton John’s early 70s work.
Slim pickings for me. The only people I even heard of on my list are Mike Tyson (no thanks, I like my body parts attached and my punched firmly in), the dude who played Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket (eh :/) and a guy who drummed for Iron Maiden for all of two years (and none of their good albums).
Guess I’ll just stay home and waste time on the Internet instead. Rain check ?
Gary Lockwood was the bad guy in the second Star Trek pilot, so talking to him would be geek-sweet. Jennifer Love Hewitt is easy to look at and seems to giggle a lot in interviews, so she probably would be peppy and upbeat, but I don’t think we’d have much to talk about.
My choice therefore would be Alan Trammell. I have no doubt I could yak with him about baseball for hours and hours. Last time I checked, he has a whole lot more money but me, so I wouldn’t stop him from picking up the tab, but I’d be perfectly happy to pay for dinner for that opportunity. 
Hey, Laggard and Hobbes and Booker T. and I can all have dinner!
Alexander Graham Bell, for sure! We’d obviously talk about inventing the telephone, and his work with the deaf.
I’ve got Jessica Lange, Luther Vandross, Harold Lloyd and George Takei. But, assuming he gets to speak English instead of his native German, I’d feel obligated to have dinner with Adolph Hitler.
Plenty of great choices for me.
John Wayne
James Arness (Gunsmoke)
Matt Stone (TV producer of South Park). I’m sure I could come up with some scripts for him. Blatantly plagiarized from SDMB threads.
Helena Bonham-Carter could be interesting.
But I guess I’ll have to make it an evening with Sally K. Ride. My physics teacher was one of the 5 finalists for that fateful ride.
Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, Jonathan Swift… Just to name a few.
What I’d really love is to sit down to a table with all three of them! Preferably for drinks…
No problem with a common language, either.
If I have to choose just one… Mark Twain, I think. But it’s a really close call.
Or, maybe I’d just go for a candlelight dinner with my SDMB birthday-twin, Anaamika.
Some nice choices, but I will go with Rembrandt.
Perhaps as mutual birthday presents, I can give him a digital camera and he can give me a few paintings that I could sell?
Neither – Henri Matisse.
January 5th.
Bradley Cooper
Robert Duvall
January Jones
Diane Keaton
Marilyn Manson
Alvin Ailey
Mercury Morris
Clancy Brown
It’s tough to choose between Robert Duvall and Clancy Brown.
Happy Birthday! 
Our local NPR station has been airing his show “Here’s the Thing” this week, and I would have to agree with you.
In a similar vein, I could be all cultured and choose George Orwell, but to be honest, as soon as I read the thread title, I thought, “Ricky Gervais.” No question in my mind.