Night at Bar Is Sober Experience

--When Doug Finley spent a recent evening with friends at the Omaha Brewery, he wore a red plastic wristband that told the bartender to give him nothing stronger than coffee. On his way out, the manager gave him a coupon for a free bottle of champagne. Finley was taking advantage of Omaha, Neb., tavern manager John Norton’s “designated driver” plan to keep at least one member of every group sober enough to drive safely. Since the program was started on Oct. 15, Norton said, he has passed out more than 200 certificates redeemable for champagne. The Omaha Brewery features a dance floor, recorded music, colored lights and a fog machine. It attracts “a good class of young adults on their way to someplace,” Norton said--with more than 300 customers squeezing in on most weekend nights. “I’ve been amazed because people have really been taking it seriously,” waitress Janie Stoysich, 21, said of the designated driver program. The number of designated drivers will vary from night to night, Stoysich said. “On our busiest night, we’ll have five to 10 who don’t drink,” she said. “If we can keep that many drunks off the road, great.”

--Massa, the world’s oldest gorilla and “top banana” among the 300 gorillas in captivity around the world, is dead, succumbing to a stroke caused by hardening of the arteries just hours after he celebrated his 54th birthday at a party held in the Philadelphia Zoo, where he had lived since 1935.

--Actress-model Margaux Hemingway suffered a fractured pelvis when skiing in Austria’s Tyrolean Mountains during the weekend and underwent surgery at the Innsbruck University Clinic. The granddaughter of the late writer Ernest Hemingway will be hospitalized for 10 more days before returning to London, where she will be bed-ridden for five to six weeks.

--Geraldine A. Ferraro says that she “caused a lot of her own misery” during her Democratic vice presidential campaign because she was “flip” with the press. If she had it to do over, “I would’ve become an immediate expert with the press,” she said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “I messed up and caused a lot of my own misery, with the taxes, perhaps because I was a little bit flip,” she said. The campaign taught her also that “I really am a tough broad,” Ferraro said, but she noted that she now knows she shouldn’t use words like that on the political trail. “That comment, ‘I found out I’m a tough broad’--I can kid like that now; I couldn’t do that then, because the headline would’ve been, ‘She Puts Down Women,’ ” she said.