REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK : Cinderella Gorbachev? Wait Until Midnight

When a Soviet spokesman announced Monday that Prime Minister John Major will take President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to the opera Wednesday, he provoked a round of laughter.

The reason: the chosen work at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, is Rossini’s “La Cenerentola”--or Cinderella.

The temptation to associate Gorbachev with Cinderella was too much for wags to resist, conjuring up as it did images of the Soviet leader’s armored Zil limousine turning into a pumpkin at midnight or an impoverished president looking for handouts from a rich prince--German Chancellor Helmut Kohl or President Bush?

As the laughter died, the spokesman--Gorbachev’s press secretary, Vitaly N. Ignatenko--was quick to point out that “the choice was made by the host.”

British officials also noted that Gorbachev and Major will probably duck out after the first act--before Cinderella arrives at the ball--in order to get on with their talks and dinner.

During economic summit meetings, host countries usually take the opportunity to show off to delegates and the world media some of their favorite local products. The British are no exception.

Everything from cookies to pens for the signing of summit documents have been donated by British manufacturers. Their generosity is a boon to the government, which, with an ailing economy, hopes to keep costs well below the roughly $20 million spent on last year’s summit by authorities in Houston.

The government itself has provided Jaguar and Rover cars for the use of various guests, although President Bush sticks to his bulletproof limousine, flown in from the United States, and Gorbachev prefers his battleship-like Zil.

Even in the matter of summit handouts, however, the British class system prevails.

While senior delegates have been given silk ties adorned with the logo of a fashionable store, Michelsons of London, lesser delegates and journalists have received a 100% polyester version from the down-market Tie Rack.

“It’s the kind of tie John Major would have worn until his recent revamp,” a summit extravaganza veteran was heard to remark dismissively of the polyester edition.

The British have laid on a busy program for the wives of the world’s leaders, full of the typical cultural and hospital visits.

Shepherded by hostesses Norma Major, Judy Hurd and Rosemary Lamont--respectively, the wives of the prime minister, foreign minister and the chancellor of the exchequer, or finance minister--they will attend a revival of the Oscar Hammerstein musical “Carmen Jones” at the Old Vic Theater, sail up the Thames to the famed botanical gardens at Kew and see several hospitals.

The women will visit Stoke Mandeville Hospital, known for its spinal injuries unit, in Aylesbury, 35 miles northwest of London. Barbara Bush will also look in on an AIDS ward, and Raisa Gorbachev will go to the Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street, London.

The program is expected to keep the Soviet first lady too occupied to spend much time shopping. On her last visit two years ago, she was photographed mainly while touring London’s stores. That produced images that did not sit well in Moscow, where finding necessities in the near-empty stores is a major preoccupation.

British authorities have had to blow the whistle on Japanese reporters who were accused of arriving early and grabbing all the phone lines at the Queen Elizabeth II Center, which serves as headquarters for media covering the summit.

Twenty-four hours before the meeting began, the Japanese had snapped up a goodly share of the phone lines, leaving too few for media contingents from the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Canada.

This led a harassed British official to announce, “No more telephone lines can be allocated to Japanese journalists.”

Japanese reporters thus frozen out may be mollified by the center’s caterers, who have put on the menu an item strange to most European palates but familiar to the Japanese: seaweed.