Politics Makes Couple Strange Bedfellows No More

The talk around Michael S. Dukakis’ campaign headquarters in Boston these days isn’t about sound bites, the “L-Word” or national polls. Rather, it’s about vacations and sending out resumes for jobs. Gone within 24 hours after the election was the rented furniture. And, last week, standing amid the boxes of souvenirs and papers, press aide Marilyn Yager said: “Today’s our last day for phones, (and the) computers they’re boxing now.” A few of the 250 staff members will continue working for several weeks, finishing up paper work and paying bills. “I’m trying to think,” Yager said, “can I get my resume done before they take the computers away?” Staffer Mark Gearan said: “There are some great vacation stories. One of our regional press coordinators for the Southern states . . . talked with a woman who was in the field. They’ve never met, except over the phone. And now they’re off to some island for a romantic vacation together.”

--Colonel Sanders probably wouldn’t have guessed it in a million years, but the Kentucky Fried Chicken 510-seat outlet in Beijing--a few hundred yards from Mao Tse-tung’s tomb and the largest in the Louisville, Ky.-based chain--has sold more chicken in a one-year period than any of the chain’s other 7,699 restaurants. According to Richard Mayer, chairman and chief executive of KFC, the Chinese restaurant had sales of about $3 million since it opened on Nov. 12, 1987. “Chinese consumers have embraced Kentucky Fried Chicken with tremendous enthusiasm,” Mayer said.

--Each year around this time, two Pennsylvania professors, Noel Potter of Dickinson College and John Benhart of Shippensburg University, get depressed. That’s because it’s the time of year when they give their first-year students a geography test. “The Midwest is a great, gray blob for about half of them,” said Potter, who asks his students to fill in a blank map of the United States. “It was absolutely incredible,” Benhart added. “Eighty percent missed 30 of 40 basic country locations in the world. Many of them couldn’t locate Canada, Mexico, Japan, China or Brazil. . . . Obviously, when the Japanese market a product, they know the culture of the country, its language and other things about the area. We don’t even know where the place is.”