Singles Night at Grocery: You Find a Lot of Turkeys

--More than 1,000 people cruised the aisles of a supermarket at its first Singles Night, but no one wanted to be caught dead in the fresh meat section. Shoppers entering the Star Market in East Providence, R.I., were each given a tag bearing the name of half of a famous couple and sent on their way to find the other half. Duplicate names were handed out, and Mary Mijal of Smithfield, whose tag read Lois Lane, met four Clark Kents before the night was over, apparently none a Superman. “A lot of them were at, well, different ends of the age spectrum. Like 12 to 72,” Mijal said. Laura Guisti confessed to ditching her Madonna tag when an unappealing Sean Penn headed her way, and Maureen Bedard of Pawtucket got more than she expected when she found her match. “The guy who came up to me was married (and) his wife was with him,” she said. “It kind of blows the whole idea of a singles night.”

--Seven Swedes have come up with a masterpiece in the art of compromise. Unable to agree on whether to spend their vacation sailing or driving, the seven decided to remodel a Mercedes 220 into a boat and sail with a house trailer in tow. Vacationers reacted with surprise when the odd vessel arrived in Smoegen, on the west coast of Sweden, the Swedish media reported. “Half the gang wanted to spend the vacation sailing, the others wanted to go by car, so we had to figure out something,” Gunnar Haraldsson, the craft’s driver-skipper, told the newspaper Goteborgs Tidningen. The group spent a week sealing the car chassis and the trailer with plastic and replacing the car engine with an outboard motor. The craft was allowed to parallel park for free by the quay in Smoegen--the harbor warden said he didn’t know what to charge and refused to endanger his job by trying to explain the situation to his superior.

--Britain’s Prince Andrew celebrated his last days as a bachelor at a party where the guests included singer Elton John, television personality David Frost and Andrew’s brother Prince Charles. The stag party at the London mansion of Andrew’s cousin Viscount Lascelles contrasted with 38-year-old Charles’ farewell to bachelorhood before he married Princess Diana in 1981. He had a low-key dinner party with friends in a private room at the London club Whites. Prince Andrew will marry Sarah Ferguson on July 23.