Birthday Wishes: Pope John Paul II remembered...

Birthday Wishes: Pope John Paul II remembered Mother Teresa on her 80th birthday Monday, saying: “Giving prayer thanks to God for . . . your lifelong dedication and service to the poorest of the poor, I wish to assure you of my warmest best wishes.” The birthday telegram was released in Vatican City.

Looking for Kicks: Kitty Dukakis says she drank anything with a kick--hair spray, nail-polish remover, after-shave lotion--during her battles with depression. “The last thing I swallowed was hair spray,” Dukakis says in her book, “Now You Know,” released this week. “I just pulled off the spray top and gulped the ingredients.” The wife of Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis was recently in an Alabama recovery clinic, where she found “ease through understanding . . . good things are happening.”

Rita Remembers: Rita Jenrette says she once tried to get tour guides to take groups by the spot on the Capitol steps where she and her former husband, ex-Rep. John Jenrette of South Carolina, made love one late night. Jenrette said: “It was a cold night. I had on a long fur coat.” But, she concluded: “It was a romantic interlude. . . . It was really a nostalgic moment.”

Prediction Comes True: A professor of Middle East studies at St. John Fisher’s College in Rochester, N.Y., said she had predicted Iraq might annex Kuwait, but she struck the sentences from the final draft of her book. Tamara Sonn’s “Between Qur’an and Crown” went to press just before Iraq invaded Kuwait Aug. 2. “I took (the prediction) out . . . because I didn’t want to be too inflammatory,” she said.