Jodie Foster, the 14-year-old version in The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane. I wanted her to babysit me, nudge-nudge-wink-wink, even though I had only the haziest ideas of what nudge-nudge-wink-wink consisted.

To be honest, I had a big crush on Captain Kangaroo. But I also wanted to meet Beverly Cleary, who wrote some of the books I remembered from my childhood.

Bilbo and Frodo Baggins.  Not only did I love the story, they would also have put out a good spread.

Mr. Spock, of course, so that he could discourse about being of mixed heritage as I was and am Eurasians didn’t even exist for the most part in the media of the day.

Rod Serling, we could share theatrical experiences, like me holding book for my mother, and how he came up with “Requiem for a Heavyweight”.

Ironside, you’d take him to dinner in North Beach and someone nearby is likely to drop dead before the gelato gets served.

Bill Cosby

Superman.  No question about it.

Jamie Sommers the bionic woman.

The Lord Humongous.

Try to lure him into a My Bodyguard type situation with a tank of juice.

“I wanted her to babysit me, nudge-nudge-wink-wink, even though I had only the haziest ideas of what nudge-nudge-wink-wink consisted.”
Mrs Peel or Barbara Stanwyck for the same reasons

When I was a kid, Aslan.  Hands DOWN.  Yes, I wass even then aware of the christ-aspects, but it took a bit of deprogramming to get over 12 years of Catholic School.  At the time, meeting the Jesus-Lion would have been the coolest thing EVER.

”Roger Rabbit, who was released the same year as Mandela, come to think of it.”

Conspiracy or Coincidence?

Michael Nesmith of The Monkees.  All my friends were in lust with Davy Jones, but I loved the odd guy in the hat.

And Scotty of Star Trek.  The stories he could tell in that fabulous accent….

OMG Noble, I was in love with Mike as well!  Yeah, Davy was TOTALLY stupid.

John Glenn. Or maybe Wally Schirra, because of the sandwich.

agent John Drake / Number 6 (Patrick Macgoohan)

”Roger Rabbit, who was released the same year as Mandela, come to think of it.”

Conspiracy or Coincidence?

And they both married women drawn as badder than they actually were…

Master Splinter from Ninja Turtles or one of the Ghostbusters, probably Egon.

The smokin’ caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland!  Seriously.  I learned one of my most enduring life lessons from him: mix your buzzes, and mix them carefully.  A little from this side, a little from that…

I never thought about inviting anyone over for dinner.  But if I would have, Bilbo and the dwarves from The Hobbit would have been my guests of choice.  But only if I had a hobbit hole to live in.

Luke Skywalker, because he had such dreamy eyes and he was so much nicer than Han. (yeah, I was too young for the “bad boy” thing.)

Before that, the Six Million Dollar Man.  I would have loved some bionics so I could run faster.

I wasn’t exactly an “Invite them to dinner” kind of kid, but Martin Luther King is my answer.

Winnie the Pooh was ma boy.

JFK and Jackie

No public figures as such- Richie Rich and Paper Moon-through-Bad News Bears-era Tatum O’Neill.

Michael Jackson, Mr. Spock, or Alf.

Probably Alf.

When I was young I loved a TV show called “Broken Arrow” about the friendship between an Apache chief named Cochise and a white man named Tom Jeffords in the 19th century. It was based on a book by Elliot Arnold who wrote that while the book was based on facts no one alive really knew the true story of that friendship. Back then I would have loved to be able sit down with the two men and find out what really happened. To me their friendship exemplified Kipling’s “there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!”

When I was a kid? 

Aside from missing family, the only public figured I cared very much about was Walter Payton.  I would have very much loved to have Julie from the novel Julie of the Wolves to dinner.

I grew up dirt poor.  I mean that I literally ate dirt because I had a huge amount of mineral and vitamin deficiencies.  My father was a drunk.  Only perhaps 1/3 of his pay made it home.  “he had a great hand at poker,” or “shorty creason in town and I rented him a room at the hotel.” 

I started delivering newpapers from 7 years old.  Weekends my older brother and I would collect beer bottles dropped by the road. $0.01 apiece.  Maybe 3 dollars for a full day.  My right shoulders two inches lower than the right, I have mild scoliosis of the spine.

When I went into the miliary as a volunteer. I was good ak47 bait but that did not stop my drill sergeants from “get those shoulders” square.  That was for good fist into a real good section of my upper stomach.  Some classmates took me aside and finally got me trained as to how to square should be. 

Asking someone to visit, was crime that going to cause “pain” and a phone call canceling the invitation.
I lived across the from a boy i considered my best friend.  When I put the B on him as to what happened to our friendship, he simply replied, “you never asked me over.”  Ask him over, I never knew what ig it would it be beans and ham ends that that had been flavoring the bean for 4 or 5 days.Maybe my older brother would steal a steak from, from a store because my father had been yelling and screaming that all these children (6 actually) were breaking him and if he didn’t have steak the next night hell would break loose.

Relatives dropped by unexpected, my poor mother would be going around the neighbor hood begging for flour, sugar, coffer, any meat.  Anything that would help.  Everything got repaid promply.
We might be eating early picked garden produce peppered till it burned, but there was a lot less because my father loved eating early garden plants.

Invite someone HOME.  I was twenty years old when I invited someone over to my place and ordered in a pizza.

There was probably relief, but my father made too much.  My mother could never scratch up the money to keep us going till welfare cut in.  If she had only told me the truth when I was 13, I could have carried the family on the 900 to $1000 that I had collected in my college account.

When she died I put her through a very brutal interrogation, why did you do this, why did you tell me I was stupid, why did you steal all of my pay that was allocated to a bank account we both had access will I was in Vietnam.  All she said when I asked why she didn’t write was that my letters were getting more and more strange, but she finally had enough money for a divorce and to go on welfare.  I told her it was her own fault for not telling me, that I could have earned 3 times my military pay from side projects.  Then we went into why we married my stepfather. 

My mother was one the three most beautiful women that I ever met.  I only met about 10 people that I would have rated as more intelligent.  The relative and neighbors filled me in on mom needed a gun, the man who became my stepfather and the head of Federal Congressional budget committee in Congress had had a knife fight in her front yard.  Someone got hurt. My stepfather showed me a deep gash in his arm when we go drunk the night she died.  He said, “I didn’t think Wilbur carried a knife.  When I asked why mom chose Claude, she said ” He need me.

Visitors? You must have been rich from my point of view to have had visitors,

yeah, would, if we didn’t ignore it.

As a child of a home that made about 15000 a year and who grew up with friends even worse off, you didn’t have to make anything resembling real money to have people over for a good dinner. I knew people who at school got free lunch, and who actually received food stamps who would have company for dinner on occasion (if it got to 6:00 and I was still at a friends house, no one’s parents would even think to say anything other than “would you like to stay for dinner?” and if your parents raised you right, you never said yes more than once every other week)

Incidentally, my answer is probably LeVar Burton. Reading Rainbow was one of my favorite shows, and we’re a family of trekkies.

Less is More is wrong about attributing lack of guests to poverty, right about how you don’t want to ask people home if you have an abusive family background.

I never used to ask people home. Not because we were poor. Because I didn’t trust my family.

Isaac Asimov, oddly enuf.

How about Tom Swift?  Or Aahz?  Or the Hardy Boys… They were always going neat places…

Anyhow, I got invited over to my friend’s houses, and reciprocated… When my parents were actually at home, which was actually sorta rare.  Some of them had dirt-floor houses.  Even in high school.  Some were a step from welfare.  Heck, one place I remember staying was this foster home, while mom worked 4-10 and dad was away… They had this hard candy that we were allowed one piece after dinner and it was all stuck together - I never wanted any, ‘cept before dinner - and we’d watch Dukes of Hazard and I’d fall asleep during the theme to Dallas and mom would come and get me at some point right after and I’d get to come home.

Hard question.  Some of the answers given above—Bilbo and Frodo among them—would be from books I didn’t read until well into adulthood.

As a kid, I’d probably have picked Roy Rogers; I went toi my grandparents every Saturday morning to watch Roy Rogers and other Westerns on TV.  As a teenager, assuming I ignored Annette Funicello—stop laughing!  I really am that old!—I think I’d have wanted to talk to Henry Kissinger.

Myth Adventures FTW! Aahz was my very image of a hardened and cynical older brother (who has my back nevertheless).

I would have wanted to invite Carl Sagan. That guy was like a beacon to me for many years.

Dana, it might certainly be interesting to talk with Henry Kissinger. Though I think the conversation might run into areas that would discomfit him, were he at my table.

Fictional: The Robber Hotzenplotz, (after he’d been reformed, because otherwise he’d just steal the dessert and the spoons and run).

Real: I don’t think I had sufficient interest in real people as a kid, and I was too intimitdated by them as a teenager.

Jesurgislac: I never used to ask people home. Not because we were poor. Because I didn’t trust my family.

I had that the other way around, my family did not trust people. We never had anyone over for dinner, fictional or not, because my mother’s deep dark secret was that she hated to cook (and was very bad at it) and dinner for us meant sandwiches or scrambled eggs at the kitchen table, and That Must Neve Be Known, because it would get us into hot water with child protection services. Later, when I was a teenager, I started to share the fear of dinner guests: my deep dark secret was that we did not have food in the house because by then my mother and stepfather were always on some diet or the other. (I should have been, too, but I hoarded sweets for myself and for friends who visited over the afternoon, so at least no one went hungry in my room. It’s strange how my attitude to feeding guests is closer to my age cohort’s grandparents who lived through war and famine, than to our parents.)

Captain Picard.  I would still sex him up.

Although, at five, I think that I would have more just kind of sat and stared at him, but the sentiment hasn’t changed much.  I was telling my partner in crime a few days ago that Captain Picard spoiled me for foolish men for the rest of my life.

Captain Nemo, Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes…

Oh, hell yeah, dude, Allison, I would have had a lot to talk about with Jo March.  She was honestly my hero when I was a kid.

As a kid?

Fess Parker (Davy Crockett)
The Boys of Summer aka the Brooklyn Dodgers (Newcombe, Hodges, Snyder, Gilliam, Reese)

As a teenager, I have to agree with jefft452 Mrs Peel (Diana Rigg)... definitely Mrs. Peel… did I mention Mrs. Peel?

We never really invite people over for dinner, as in calling up someone and saying, “C’mon over for dinner,” but we seem to wind up with extra teenagers a lot.

Wile E. Coyote or Sylvester the Cat. They didn’t have much luck scoring meals on their own.

Laura Ingalls Wilder.  We’d wear calico dresses and she’d show me how to churn butter.

When I was very little, Fred (“Mister”) Rogers.

Later it would have been almost any one of the Muppets, or Daffy Duck, or Ranger Rick (the raccoon mascot of a childrens’ nature magazine, for whom I could imagine a whole personality and backstory).

Robin Hood would have been my first pick, but I loved Mr. Spock and Mr. Rogers too!

Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins.

“As a teenager, I have to agree with jefft452 Mrs Peel (Diana Rigg)… definitely Mrs. Peel… did I mention Mrs. Peel? “

I had impure thoughts about Tara King too

Tamora Pierce’s Alanna, definitely. I read that series over, and over, and over…

I was in grade school when Ella Grasso was elected first female governor of CT (30 years later and we’re on our second: way to go, Nutmeg State…): I would have loved to have her over for dinner, tiny little feminist I was.
Or else Mr. Green Jeans, from Captain Kangaroo. But only if Bunny came with him.

After Mom explained that the people in “The Dark Crystal” were puppets, I totally wanted to meet Jim Henson. Fraggles, man, Fraggles! And we didn’t really have people over when I was little (we lived out in the boonies, really our only visitors were family), but like Dana, my sisters and I always had someone over in high school.

Betty Ford.  Thog from The Muppet Show.  I found both of ‘em adorable when I was a child.