Visa Stalled, She’s All Undressed With No Place to Go

A member of the Italian Parliament may be prevented from unveiling the bare facts of politics to a San Francisco audience. Officials at the U.S. Consulate in Rome have put the visa application of Ilona Staller, a stripper and pornographic film actress who is a member of the Radical Party, on hold. The lawmaker, whose stage name is Cicciolina, had been booked to perform at the Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theatre, a San Francisco strip club, from Dec. 5 to 12. “They would never delay a visa for Pavarotti,” Jim Mitchell told the San Francisco Examiner. “This is artistic discrimination at its rankest and denial of due process to her many fans in San Francisco.” A State Department spokesman said the visa application was delayed “pending submission of further information regarding the purposes of her trip.”

Now that he is through hunting for votes, Vice President-elect Dan Quayle is ready for other prey. Quayle is going quail hunting. A spokesman for the vice president-elect said that Quayle would spend the Thanksgiving holiday with the family of his brother-in-law, James Tucker, on a 150-acre spread in Indiana, where quail and pheasant are prevalent. The spokesman, Jeff Nesbit, said quail hunting is a favorite pastime of the Indiana senator.

The Columbia River has yielded a possible clue--part of a parachute--to the fate of D.B. Cooper, the hijacker who disappeared 17 years ago. “It’s as promising a clue as we’ve found . . . ,” said Richard Tosaw, a Ceres, Calif., lawyer who has spent Thanksgiving season for seven years seeking clues to Cooper and the $200,000 ransom paid to him. Cooper parachuted from a Northwest Airlines 727 with the money Nov. 24, 1971. Except for $5,800 of the ransom that washed up in 1980 a mile downstream from the latest discovery, no trace of Cooper has been found. Tosaw, author of “D.B. Cooper, Dead or Alive,” said he believes Cooper drowned, but he said there could be many explanations for the discovery. Divers found a pilot chute, used to deploy the main canopy of a parachute, about 5 miles west of Vancouver, Wash. They plan to have it examined by Earl Cossey, a Seattle sky diving instructor who packed Cooper’s parachute.