Arranging Romantic Interlude Is an Elephantine Task

--She’s an attractive, full-figured 27-year-old Florida belle. He’s a Canadian who’s tall, dark and gray. Although they’ve never met, they’ll soon pack their trunks and be off on a long, romantic interlude. “It’s a huge love affair,” said Joe Abrahams, the matchmaker who’s arranging the first of two romantic encounters for Shena, the star elephant of Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo, and Buke, a featured pachyderm at African Lion Country Safari near Toronto. Tampa City Hall got involved when the City Council approved two 1,400-mile trips, one to bring Buke to Tampa for a brief courtship, the second to ship the couple to Canada while the Tampa zoo undergoes a $14.3-million renovation. Abrahams, the city’s Parks and Cultural Services administrator, is hoping that Shena will come back pregnant. When asked the cost of arranging their tryst, Abrahams replied, “More than peanuts.”

--Mother Teresa, whose work with orphans in Calcutta earned her the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize, has accepted an invitation to speak at an anti-abortion rally in Lincoln, Neb., on June 30. “Isn’t that something? That’s as close as I’ll ever get to being in the same town as a saint,” Catholic laywoman Melba Scott said.

--Actress Jane Fonda has returned to the Emma Willard School in Troy, N.Y., for her 30th high school reunion, saying she is disappointed that the nation’s oldest girls’ boarding school now allows smoking. Fonda, 47, reminded students of the advantage of attending a secondary school without boys. “You’re not at all aware of it,” she said. “But by attending school with 200 intelligent women you don’t have any doubts that a woman can do anything.” She helped celebrate the school’s 171st anniversary.

--Just because artificial hearts are expensive doesn’t mean that doctors should stop experimenting, says Dr. William C. DeVries, who has implanted four of them. “If we don’t pursue the possibilities of (the artificial heart) because it’s expensive, we’ll enter the intellectual Dark Ages,” he said. DeVries, head of the artificial heart program at Humana Heart Institute in Louisville, Ky., made the comments in a talk at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Va. Humana reportedly paid $15,500 for the polyurethane and aluminum Jarvik-7 heart implanted in DeVries’ second patient, William J. Schroeder, and its drive system. The 1982 hospital bill of his first patient, Dr. Barney Clark, was reported to be $200,000, not counting the heart itself.