An Encyclopedic Array of Dining Opportunities

You’ve heard of “My Dinner With Andre”?

This could be your dinner with cinematic wild angel Roger Corman. Or with immortal surprise dinner guest Sidney Poitier. Or your dinner with a bevy of belly-dancing Scheherazades.

This--the Nov. 5 Literary Odyssey Dinners--could be your big night.

The 50 dinners-for-hire, which benefit the literacy programs of the Los Angeles Public Library, are the “Survivor” of philanthropic fine dining. Except the only thing you need to vote yourself onto the island is your checkbook.

You know how you’re always struggling to come up with an impressive answer to that question about whom you would have a dinner party with if you could pick any dozen people in history? At the Literary Odyssey Dinners, philanthropists choose for you.

Within reason, of course: Che Guevara and Marilyn Monroe are dead, Nelson Mandela’s in Africa and Fidel Castro couldn’t get a visa.

But Gregory Peck is within the realm of the possible. So is Mona “Anywhere But Here” Simpson, “Jurassic Park” writer Michael Crichton, and a mob of current affairs authors who run the gamut from Arnaud de Borchgrave and Letitia Baldrige to Larry King and Arianna Huffington.

All of these people have actually written books, creating a literary Tower of Babel that truly offers something for all tastes. And each will host a dinner at a private home.

There will be just one or two dozen people at each dinner, so getting your first choice is like winning a lottery. Your chances are greatly enhanced by what you are willing to pay. Pay $300 and you will get one of six choices. An $800 ticket will get you your first or second choice, and for $2,500, you also get to attend a reception with Peck and all the authors and hosts on Nov. 4, the eve of the dinners.

Organizers hope to raise $400,000.

The intimate dinners--a twist on the gala fever roiling the charity world--were started in 1997 and are held every other year. Reservations can by made by calling (323) 466-8977.

If anyone is counting on intellectual man-of-all-seasons George Plimpton to kick off this year’s dinners with a seriously mind-warping literary feud, they will be disappointed.

Instead, he will be serving as “dinner guest par excellence” at a “stunning Georgian home.” That’s par for the course: The dinner guidebook is suffused with over-the-top superlatives that seem to have leaped from an L.A. Realtor’s Roget’s: Every dinner is at a “French chateau,” “Italian farmhouse” or an “architectural gem originally built for Gary Cooper.”

In other words: Caligulan palaces where, for a night, you can savor echoes of the decadence of pre-revolutionary France, pre-revolutionary Iran, or postmodern Martha Stewart. There’s a serious undercurrent of culinary one-upmanship, judging from such features as carefully crafted chocolate leaves, wine-sipping in private wine cellars and unspecified “gourmet delights.”

So rise up, citizens. Giving good indulgence is part of the deal in this city, so these enticements are probably not empty threats. The proceeds from this bonfire of the humanities will benefit the city library, which serves 3.8 million people with books in 500 languages.

Twelve million people visited the library system last year and 45 million signed on to its Web site, https://www.lapl.org.

People love books.

That’s why Julie Corman took time off from her bicoastal schedule--she is an award-winning film producer who teaches in New York University’s graduate film and television program--to host one of the dinners, with her husband, cult film director and producer Roger. She still recalls the magic of working in a library, and learning to bind books, when she was in grade school.

“I love libraries,” she said. “Some people go and look at gardens, and I look at libraries. I’m very connected to books. This seems like a way to contribute.”

Both she and her husband have produced films adapted from books. He made three Vincent Price films--”The Raven,” “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Masque of the Red Death”--just from the works of one of his favorite authors, Edgar Allan Poe.

Why not see if you can buy several dinners? Think of the networking possibilities:

You could drive to Corman’s and see if he’s interested in doing a remake of “Cars That Eat People.” Drive to Nancy Daly Riordan’s dinner for Poitier and see if he wants to star in it. Continue on to a venture capitalist’s dinner and try to get financing. Then shanghai everybody to attend the dinner of Persian author Gina Nahai, for some belly-dancing bongo-bongo--an all-important bonding moment that could seal the deal.

That, of course, could set you back some. But what a small price to pay to further the cause of a more literate Los Angeles.