Palm-Mensa, Palm Beach County, Fla.`s collection of well-above-average IQ folks, suggests some new seating arrangements for Miami`s expected expansion baseball team. For men named Jack: box seats; for people who don`t cheer:
reserved seating; for pro-Solidarity fans: behind a Pole; and for women with difficult pregnancies: the C Section.
ROYAL UNDOINGS It has not been a good week for Britain`s royal family. First Prince Harry, 6-year-old son of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, gashed his knee at school and was taken to the hospital for two stitches. Then on Wednesday, Parliament debated whether Queen Elizabeth II, often called the world`s richest woman, should have to pay income taxes. But all this is just a warmup act for the British tabloids` main concern: the future of Charles and Diana. When Di decided to spend her 30th birthday away from her husband, press gossip was fueled to Himalayan heights. ”YES, there is a problem between Charles and Di, says palace aide,” the Daily Mirror told its, ahem, readers. The Daily Star said the marriage that began with a fairy tale wedding was now ”in tatters.” Cool it, advised some royalty watchers. A prince and princess going their separate ways is not unusual. ”The golden handcuffs may chafe from time to time,” said Jane Moore of the British newspaper Today. ”But the Prince and Princess of Wales have settled down happily to a mutually agreed pattern of marriage.”
WOWED AT THE WHITE HOUSE British journalists weren`t the only ones working themselves into a lather. On this side of the Atlantic, Jessica Lee, White House reporter for USA Today, dropped all professional detachment in recounting her first state dinner at the White House in a computer memo to colleagues that was leaked to the Washington Post. ”It was like being Cinderella at the prince`s ball,”
Lee wrote of the ”unbelievably seductive” party honoring Brazilian President Fernando Collor de Mello. ”Driving through those big iron White House gates” was ”awesome” while ”waiting to escort me was a handsome hunk of a U.S. Marine-captain class-with biceps as big as footballs.” As seasoned sportswriters might say: ”Please, Jessica; no cheering in the press box.”
NOT SO SILENT CAL Speaking of emotion at the White House, a letter containing an unusual flash of feelings from Calvin Coolidge was added to the main collection of his public papers on Wednesday in Northampton. Mass. The letter, written by
”Silent Cal” in 1923 a few days after he became the 30th president, praised Northampton cobbler James Lucey, a homespun philosopher who had been Coolidge`s mentor. ”I want you to know,” wrote Coolidge, ”that if it were not for you I should not be here and I want to tell you how much I love you.” William Allen White, a Coolidge biographer, said the future president mastered his quiet way of winning votes by hanging out at Lucey`s shop.
GIFT FOR THE GOP And while on the subject of presidential politics, Houston, host city for the 1992 GOP National Convention, will have something more for visiting delegates besides straw hats and cardboard elephants. Rick`s Cabaret, the topless bar whose seductive billboard at the corner of Chimney Rock and Richmond could cause a 10-car pileup, is making available ”We Salute Bush”
T-shirts. Ah, but these are no ordinary T-shirts, Newsweek reports. They feature a photo of four dancers, each wearing a military uniform that looks as if it has been partly torn during hand-to-hand combat. T-shirts go for $17 and the tank tops for $15.