Shopping Trip on His Mean Streets Dismays Mayor

--Nashville Mayor Bill Boner said he felt as if he had come “face to face” with the enemy after he went under cover to see how easy it is to buy illegal drugs in his city. Boner, wearing a fake beard and dark glasses, was accompanied on the trip by a police informant and the informant’s girlfriend, who were described as drug addicts. He drove an old pickup truck and was under the eye of Nashville vice officers. Boner wound up buying more than $90 worth of cocaine and Dilaudid, a prescription narcotic sold illicitly as a heroin substitute, on streets he found inhabited by “willing buyers” and “anxious sellers.” Boner’s account of last week’s undercover operation was detailed in a story written by him and published in Tuesday’s Nashville Banner. Boner learned firsthand of the homeless problem in a similar foray four years ago while he was a congressman. After describing the drug purchases, Boner wrote: “I was mentally, emotionally and physically drained.” He said that stopping drugs in Nashville “will be an uphill fight.”

--A collection of the personal scrapbooks, tape recordings and published and unpublished sheet music of Edward Kennedy (Duke) Ellington was presented to the Smithsonian Institution by the son of the late composer-orchestra leader. “Personally, it gives me the satisfaction of knowing we have located Ellington in a place of posterity,” Mercer Ellington said. Martin Williams, cultural historian of the Smithsonian Institution Press, said the collection offers “Ellingtonologists” the opportunity to examine the original sheet music of such classics as “Satin Doll,” “Mood Indigo” and “Caravan.” All other sheet music of Ellington’s works had been transcribed from old recordings and tapes, he said.

--Celebrities were on hand to help Elaine’s mark a quarter-century as what proprietress Elaine Kaufman calls a “nice, neighborhood restaurant” in New York. For the party, the tables were removed, the ceiling was filled with balloons and spotlights were set up outside. A crowd of onlookers watched as celebrities such as George Segal, Sidney Lumet, Pat Kennedy Lawford, Peter Maas, Eli Wallach, Iman, Connie Chung, Raquel Welch, Billy Dee Williams, Cheryl Tiegs, Halston, Terry Southern and Jerzy Kosinski filed by. “This place is a living People magazine,” said bartender Brian McDonald. But Kaufman said celebrity-watchers make too big a deal out of the place. “I think a lot of people just come in to have dinner,” she said. “And you have a good time. A good bottle of wine, a nice plate of pasta--I mean, that’s life.”