Oh, Boy! After 11 Attempts, Mother Finally Delivers

--Rina Kramer got sore feet delivering the news about Rabbi Shalom Blank and his wife, Sarah. “Finally, it’s a boy!” she shouted time and again on a trek through her Miami Beach neighborhood. In a delivery room at Mount Sinai Medical Center, Sarah Blank, 36, heard her doctor say the same words: “Finally, it’s a boy.” On 11 previous occasions, the doctor had said: “It’s a girl.” “We went nuts,” Kramer said after delivering word of the rabbi’s first-born son to neighbors and members of Blank’s Congregation Lubavitch. “We couldn’t believe she finally had a boy. Everybody was dancing a Jewish jig.” “The First Commandment of the Torah is to be fruitful and multiply,” Blank said. “But the minimum requirement is to have one of each--a boy and a girl. We’ve finally fulfilled the commandment!”

--Halley’s Comet is coming back and so is Alan B. Shepard Jr. The ex-astronaut, one of 12 men to walk on the moon, will make his television debut in narrating “Halley Returns.” Except for exhibitions of his art in Houston, Shepard has avoided the spotlight since leaving the space program. His reason for taking the job is to combat some of the hype that the comet is generating. “I agreed to do this show to give people a better perspective of Earth in the concept of the universe,” he said.

--Actor and environmentalist Robert Redford brought government, industry and academic leaders to his Utah resort in Sundance to talk about water: shortages, markets and the allocation of supplies. Participants at the two-day conference over the weekend included former Interior Secretary Stewart L. Udall and Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez). “It would be naive to think we could solve all the problems in a two-day conference, but we developed a foundation to start from,” Redford said.

--Louise Bergee says the three dozen mice in her house are pets--There’s Widgett, Cricket, Mitsy and . . .--but Brooklyn Center, Minn., officials say they’re illegal rodents and they’ll have to go. Her menagerie also features squirrels, gophers, ducks and a starling that rides around the house on Bergee’s head. The city has asked her to cut down feeding animals and birds and get rid of the mice. But Bergee couldn’t see what was wrong with feeding them. Loving animals is all right, an official said, but “this is too much.” Bergee defends the mice as “among the world’s cleanest inhabitants.”