Opinion: Darwin! Galileo! Emily Dickinson! Attila the Hun! All playing in Hollywood!

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Years ago, in an antique store on the Kentucky-Ohio border, I happened across a piece of embroidery that made history leap off the page and onto my living room wall.

It’s a kind of sampler, stitched in faded ivory silk on a large square of black wool. I peg its age at some time between the Civil War and the Scopes Trial. Its indignant message reads, in part, ‘I hearken not to evolution’s drone/The Godless critic or the cynic’s tone/I ask but grace to walk with God alone....’

Darwin’s seminal book, ‘On the Origin of Species,’ was published 150 years ago, and the furor over it still hasn’t died down, even as we celebrate Darwin’s 200th birthday this week. That message on my sampler could be sold today by the millions. Poll after headscratching poll shows that a majority of Americans still don’t believe that evolution is a fact.

I was going to celebrate Big D’s big birthday by putting a candle on a cupcake and lighting it with the help of my evolved opposable thumb. But this may be an even better way:

The first PBS program I ever remember watching was Steve Allen’s ‘Meeting of Minds,’ an enthralling round-table discussion with dissonant historical figures from different times and different cultures who engaged one another in passionate conversation, always in character.

And it’s back for one night only -- Darwin’s birthday, February 12, at the Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood, at the Center For Inquiry West.

The whole crowd’s there -- Darwin! Emily Dickinson! Attila the Hun! Galileo! Steve Allen! Their parts will be played by, among others, Gary Cole and Robert Forster and Wendie Malick. It’s a table reading of the original PBS show, and it’s such a huge pity that they won’t be in period costume, but just use your imaginations.

Maybe at the end of the performance there’ll be a birthday cake with 200 candles, and everyone can sing, ‘Happy Birthday, Evolved Charlie ...’