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Michelle and Barack Obama found just the right spot to seat a gent going stag to Tuesday's state dinner: They plopped French President Francois Hollande down right between them in a giant party tent, and put the pshaw to all that drama about his solo trip to the U.S. after a very public breakup from his first lady.

The A-list guest roster for the biggest social event of Obama's second term - flush with celebrities, Democratic donors, politicians and business types - mostly tried not to go there, tactfully avoiding talk about "l'affaire Hollande."

"I don't get involved in those things," demurred actress Cicely Tyson, who at age 80 said she's been to plenty of state dinners over the years.

Former NAACP official Ben Jealous was nothing but admiring of the French intrigue.

"I think the French are way cooler than we are on a whole lot of fronts," he said, including way better gossip.

On a frigid night, the evening's pomp and pageantry were all designed to wrap Hollande in a comfy blanket of warmth, from the moment he stepped out of his limo and onto a red carpet on the White House north portico. The Obamas were there on the front steps to greet him, the first lady clad in a black and liberty blue silk gown by Carolina Herrera.

The dinner's celebrity quotient included actors Bradley Cooper, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Mindy Kaling and Tyson. Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert somehow managed to snag a seat right next to the first lady. There were plenty of politicians, per usual. And in a midterm election year, the Obamas invited in more than two dozen donors to Obama's campaigns and the Democratic Party. Among them were Irwin Jacobs, the Qualcomm Inc. founder who has given more than $2 million to pro-Obama super PACs, and Jane Stetson, the Democratic National Committee's finance chair.

One of the most frequent phrases of the night was "un peu." As in, nope, don't speak much French.

A few brave souls ventured out of their comfort zones to try a word or two.

"Oui, oui, oui," declared the Rev. Al Sharpton, sounding like he was reciting the nursery rhyme about the little piggies.

Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson said wife, Michelle Rhee, taught him a couple of French phrases en route to the White House and declared, "I'm ready to bust 'em out."

Here goes: "bonsoir" and "bon appetit."

Bronx-born singer Mary J. Blige, the evening's entertainment, paused for a second when asked whether she had a French connection, then ventured: "Um, my last name is French."

When it finally came her time to sing - past 11 p.m., on a school night, no less - Blige belted out "Ain't Nobody" with such gusto she had both Obamas rocking in their chairs.

Obama, in his dinner toast, was deliberately sparing with his French.

He welcomed the guests with a hearty "bonsoir" and then confessed, "I have now officially exhausted my French."

He then delivered the requisite praises of all things French - "especially the wine."

Hollande delivered a good portion of his remarks in respectable English before switching back to French.

"We love Americans, although we don't always say so," he told the crowd. "And you love the French, but you're sometimes too shy to say so."

Amidst all the pleasantries and tactful chitchat, there was the occasional moment of candor.

Cosmopolitan editor Joanna Coles, asked about her KaufmanFranco black dress with a leather bodice, told reporters, "I was hoping it wasn't too slutty."

Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., drew a blank when reporters asked who designed her vibrant green dress. She called on her husband, Cass Sunstein, to check the label, and later dutifully reported Badgley Mischka.

Across the room from Hollande and Obama, veep-and-veep sat shoulder-to-shoulder: That would be Vice President Joe Biden and Louis-Dreyfus, star of HBO's comedy Veep.

The White House did its straight-faced best to keep the attention on anything but Hollande's personal life, preparing an outsized dinner-for-350 in a heated pavilion on the South Lawn that had patches of greenery and vines dripping from the ceiling.

The evening's four-course dinner celebrated American cuisine. The main course: dry-aged rib eye beef from a family farm in Colorado, with Jasper Hill Farm blue cheese from Vermont. And about that decadent dessert: The chefs used a paint sprayer to distribute a micro-thin layer of chocolate over the creamy ganache cake.

In the kind of awkward timing that gives protocol officers ulcers, the White House last fall invited Hollande and his longtime girlfriend, Valerie Trierweiler, to come for a state visit, the first such honor for France in two decades. But then just weeks ago, the two abruptly split after a tabloid caught a helmeted Hollande zipping via motorcycle to a liaison with actress Julie Gayet.

Kayla Williams and Brian McGough met in Iraq in 2003, when they were serving in the 101st Airborne Division. She was an Arabic linguist; he was a staff sergeant who had earned a Bronze Star. In October of that year, at a time when they were becoming close but not yet seeing each other, McGough was on a bus in a military convoy when an IED went off, blowing out the front door and window.

"Essentially a piece of shrapnel went through the back of my head, burrowed the skull from the back of my head past my ear, out through where my eye is, and while doing this it also ripped some brain matter out," McGough tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

He was left with physical and cognitive problems he's still recovering from, as well as post-traumatic stress disorder. He has experienced periods of depression, paranoia and rage.

Williams and McGough started seeing each other early in his recovery, after they had returned to the U.S. They've stayed together in spite of the obstacles, including the rages that he directed at her. They married in 2005, just days before she went on a book tour to promote her memoir, Love My Rifle More Than You, about being a young woman in the Army serving in Iraq. Now she has a new memoir about her relationship with her husband, Plenty of Time When We Get Home: Love and Recovery in the Aftermath of War.

Dr. Kevin Fong works on "the edges" of medicine — researching how humans survive extremes of heat, cold, trauma, outer space and deep sea. "We're still exploring the human body and what medicine can do in the same way that the great explorers of the 20th century and every age before them explored the world," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

In his book Extreme Medicine, Fong describes how avant garde medicine is challenging our understanding of how our bodies work and the boundary between life and death.

"You're taking this headlong plunge into the unknown hoping only that good fortune and survival might lie in wait," he says.

Fong is an anesthesiologist who is also trained in intensive care medicine. He's the founder of The Center for Altitude, Space and Extreme Environment Medicine, at the University College London, where he's also a professor of physiology.

In the heart of New York City's Spanish Harlem, women from Morocco to Mexico arrive before dawn to crank up the ovens at Hot Bread Kitchen.

Despite their different cultures and languages, this non-profit training bakery says most of its participants have one thing in common: they all grew up learning how to bake traditional breads.

To work at HBK, women and men have to be foreign-born and low-income. And they have to want to become financially independent through a baking career. At the kitchen, they have the chance to take what they know and blend it with language lessons and commercial baking and management to shape their futures.

HBK is one of a growing number of non-profit kitchens which double as training centers and commercial businesses — like La Cocina in San Francisco and Hope & Main in Rhode Island. The trend has been spurred by a growing awareness of business opportunities for local food entrepreneurs and donors' willingness to give the less-advantaged a better shot at tapping those opportunities.

The Salt

San Francisco Kitchen Lends Low-Income Food Entrepreneurs A Hand