Queen’s Day Includes a Hug and Baseball

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II rubbed elbows with residents of low-income housing and with Hollywood celebrities on Wednesday, the second day of her visit to the United States.

During a 20-minute morning stop, the queen received a hug from Alice Frazier, who lives in the housing project in one of the District of Columbia’s poorest, most drug-ridden areas.

“I put my arms around her . . . like that,” said the 67-year-old Frazier, demonstrating how she hugged the queen, who is rarely touched in public. “That’s the American way to me.”

Accompanied by First Lady Barbara Bush, Housing Secretary Jack Kemp and Mayor Sharon Pratt Dixon, the queen visited Frazier in her home, one of four built in Marshall Heights for low-income, first-time home buyers by a private-public partnership.

Frazier fixed potato salad and fried chicken wings in the queen’s honor, but the British monarch ate instead at a Library of Congress luncheon after attending a reception later at a downtown hotel.

The luncheon, honoring the city’s Festival of British Film and Television, was served to about 350 guests in the library’s ornately decorated Jefferson building.

The queen shook hands with several members of Congress who had walked across the street from the Capitol for the occasion.

From the Library of Congress, the queen was whisked off to a lawn party at the residence of British Ambassador Sir Antony Acland. She finished the day watching the Baltimore Orioles play the Oakland Athletics at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore.

The queen and her husband, Prince Philip, sat with President Bush and the First Lady in the mezzanine box of Orioles owner Eli Jacobs.