At 76, Lucy Isn’t Going to Pot; the Pot Is Going to Her

--Harvard showed how much it loves Lucy as it honored Lucille Ball, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals’ Woman of the Year. “I’ve waited 20 years to make this gig,” the 76-year-old comic actress said in accepting the traditional copper pudding pot award from the nation’s oldest undergraduate drama group at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. “Back in the ‘60s they asked me, but I was working and I was having a baby and I couldn’t come and I regretted it,” she said, adding: “Then they didn’t ask me for a while.” Ball attracted adoring crowds as she was paraded around Harvard Square in a 1947 Lincoln Continental convertible. A standing-room-only group of 400 clapped in unison to the theme song of her long-running “I Love Lucy” TV series as she entered the theater for the award presentation. “Well, this doesn’t look too bad,” Ball said, accepting a bowl of gruel-like pudding. “You know ‘vita-meata-vegamins’ was real bad,” she said, a reference to an episode that the audience obviously remembered. She took a mouthful and launched into rubber-faced contortions as the audience roared with laughter.

--British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher came face to face with herself when a wax double, the fourth to be created by Madame Tussaud’s wax museum in London since 1975, was unveiled. The wax dummy shows Thatcher with a reassuring smile, standing in a relaxed manner with her hands lightly clasped. Artist Judith Craig used calipers, photographs and a one-hour portrait sitting to produce the likeness, but said Thatcher had decided on the model’s demeanor. Although Thatcher hasn’t changed too much since the last wax likeness of her was made in 1984, “she has put on weight--the calipers never lie,” Craig said.

--A Soviet cosmonaut who set an endurance record for living in space says the Mir space station is no place for a woman on a long-term basis. Cosmonaut Yuri V. Romanenko returned to Earth on Dec. 29 after spending 326 days in space. Romanenko recently responded to a list of questions submitted to him by the Houston Chronicle. “I think that the level of comforts even at our Mir station is not high enough to be acceptable for a prolonged stay of a woman in space,” Romanenko, 43, said. “In the future, when we further settle in space, we may even come to have married couples working up in orbit. But, as I see it, that is not even contemplated now.”