After 11-Year Wait, It’s Champagne Instead of Vodka

--For Yuri Zieman, the waiting is over. Zieman, his wife, Tatyana, and their daughter, Vera, 12, touched down at Boston’s Logan International Airport Friday night, ending an 11-year struggle to emigrate from the Soviet Union. “We’ll drink champagne, and I’ll put them to bed; they didn’t sleep for two days,” said Zieman’s older daughter, Galina Khatutsky, who emigrated with her husband last year. The family arrived in Vienna last week before flying on to the United States. The man perhaps most responsible for getting the family out of the Soviet Union, President Reagan, phoned to express his happiness at the turn of events. Permission to emigrate was granted weeks after Reagan made an appeal on the family’s behalf to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev at the Moscow summit meeting.

--These days, 76-year-old Frank Collier of Centreville, Ala., is a driven man. Collier is the chap who last month lost his way driving to his dentist’s office, winding up in Muncie, Ind., 560 miles from home, before police came to his aid. Well, Collier, a retired mill worker, finally made it to Dr. Joe Sawyer’s clinic last week--albeit 30 minutes late--and was rewarded with a free set of dentures, with two gold teeth in front. The driver this time was Collier’s friend, 80-year-old Deacon Brisco Huff, who took two wrong turns and was forced to stop six times to ask directions to the clinic, 74 miles away in Pell City. “I got lost, too, but I was determined not to go as far as he went,” Huff said. Still, Huff was not taking any chances. He had brought along his wife, who sat in the front seat--with a map of Alabama on her lap.

--Who could possibly quibble over Pittsburgh, Pa., Mayor Sophie Masloff’s anti-litter campaign? After all, she vowed to buy new street-sweeping machines, put out more trash receptacles, pave 70 miles of city streets and clean all vacant lots by October. Unfortunately, Masloff’s cleanup drive was not a completely tidy affair. Her choice for a slogan has irritated a host of people. “Sophie’s Choice” is being called a poor choice because of William Styron’s novel of the same name. It’s the story of a woman in a World War II concentration camp who must choose which of her two children will be killed by the Nazis. “I love Sophie dearly. I wish she had chosen another slogan by virtue of the fact it can raise an issue,” said Richard Marcovitz, rabbi at Congregation B’nai Israel.