The Dinner Is Off--Muskrat Cooks Have Rambled

--St. Philip’s Episcopal Church canceled its annual Muskrat Dinner because of a lack of young cooks to prepare the traditional “marsh rabbit,” a parishioner said. “It’s like a passing era. The young people don’t want to be bothered with all the work--and now we’re too old to do it alone,” said Eula Hill, 83, who lives in one of the 30 homes that make up the tiny town of Quantico, on Maryland’s marshy Eastern Shore. For more than 50 years, Hill said the church has held a Muskrat-Turkey Dinner at the end of January. “It’s sad,” said Hill, who said the first dinner featured only six muskrats and later dinners grew to require about 100 of the swamp-dwelling rodents to feed crowds of up to 1,000. Muskrat connoisseurs came from as far away as Pennsylvania, West Virginia, New Jersey, Delaware and Virginia to dine on the rich, red meat. “It has a taste all its own--sort of like duck,” said Hill. “I’m telling you, if you like it, you really enjoy it.”

--The founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Candy Lightner, has been honored at the University of Delaware, in Wilmington, with the Common Wealth Award for Public Service for making the fight against drunken driving a national crusade. She is the first person to receive the award. Lightner, who now lives in Texas, established MADD after the death in 1980 of one of her twin daughters in an accident involving a drunken driver. “I’m very proud of the fact that my name and my daughter’s name have become synonymous with saving lives. I would trade it all to have her back,” she said.

--House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. settled his portly frame into one of the new chairs with a happy sigh. “One of the greatest improvements in American theater,” he called it. “Ahhh,” said Senate Majority Whip Alan K. Simpson, who is 6-foot-7, “Very, very comfortable.” Historical Ford’s Theater in Washington is replacing its 738 hard-backed, cane-bottomed wooden chairs because of numerous complaints about their uncomfortableness. The old chairs are being given away in exchange for a $500 donation--with all but $20 of it tax-deductible. The old ones are replicas of the original seating from President Abraham Lincoln’s time and many a Washingtonian has suffered from them. Frankie Hewitt, executive producer of Ford’s, said former Senate Majority Leader Howard H. Baker Jr. had bought a couple of the old chairs for his desk “to keep his phone calls shorter.”