Dentist Trip? He Forgot the Drill

--When a 74-year-old Alabama driver took a wrong turn and wandered through four states, his odyssey was good for one thing. At least it beat going to the dentist, where footloose Frank Collier had been heading before that fateful right when he should have gone left. Collier, after leaving his home in Centreville for Birmingham, somehow ended up on Interstate 65, which runs from Mobile to Chicago. Confused as to his whereabouts, he just kept driving--through Tennessee, Kentucky and into Indiana, where he finally stopped to ask directions in Indianapolis. No one knew where Centreville was, so he kept driving, on the wrong lane of a highway leading into Muncie. Police who stopped him were amazed at how far he had rambled. “It has been one of the strangest things I’ve ever been involved with,” said Delaware County police Officer Dan Hahn. “It’s a miracle he ever made it up here.” Collier, who had never been outside Alabama, seemed none the worse for wear after his 17-hour ride. “It’s the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me.”

--A film about the life of Ryan White, the teen-ager with AIDS whose fight to return to school bitterly divided an Indiana city, will star Ryan White, but not as himself. That role will go to Lukas Haas, the elfin star of the movie “Witness.” Instead, Ryan, 16, will play an older hemophiliac named Chad, who, like Ryan, contracted the deadly disease through his treatments. “We were looking at the script, and I asked him (Ryan) if he could read the scene,” co-executive producer Linda Otto told the Indianapolis Star. “He’ll be wonderful.” The CBS-TV movie will begin with Ryan’s contracting AIDS in 1984 and follow his attempts to return to school. Two-time Emmy winner Judith Light stars as White’s mother, Jeanne, a single mother of two. Academy Award winner George C. Scott has a guest appearance as the Whites’ attorney.

--For her 110th birthday, she was feted at New York’s Waldorf, and at 109 she took her first flight on the Concorde. But for her 111th birthday, Charlotte Hughes, the oldest person in Britain, just wanted to spend a quiet day at home in Cleveland, in the north of England, with family and friends. Hughes was born in a banner year: Britain’s Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India, Thomas Alva Edison invented the phonograph and the world’s first public telephones were used in the United States. This year’s plans for a birthday trip to meet Pope John Paul II in Rome were shelved when Hughes decided the journey would be too tiring.