Safety First: The Duchess of York, wife...

Safety First: The Duchess of York, wife of Prince Andrew, destroyed her husband’s letters, gave up keeping a diary and takes a shredder wherever she goes to protect herself from prying tabloids. “You suddenly pick up the newspaper and see that they know what time you got up,” the former Sarah Ferguson said in London. “When (Andrew) goes to sea for six months he writes me letters--but I haven’t kept them. I did for a bit in a bank, and then I thought the bank would be robbed.”

Yielding to Temptation: The congregation of the upscale All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City was reeling Monday after its minister, the Rev. F. Forrester Church--son of the late Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho)--apologized in his Sunday sermon for having an affair with one of the flock. But that was not good enough for a former church board member, who gave parishioners an open letter demanding Church’s resignation: “Rather than self-sacrifice, he sacrificed his wife . . . his children, his friends and his congregation.”

Pizza Dreams: Alexandra Ripley can’t wait for the publicity whirlwind around her sequel to “Gone With the Wind” to blow over. “I’m going to go home and scrape all the paint off my face . . . put on blue jeans and scratch the head of my cat and see if she remembers me . . . and then probably do something exotic like have a pizza. Double anchovies,” she said in Charleston, S.C. Brutal reviews did not deter readers from scooping up a half-million copies of “Scarlett.”

Listen, Y’all: Southerners willing to surrender in that other civil war, the one over their accents, can take a class at Greenville, S.C., Technical College called “How to Control Your Southern Accent.” Instructor David Pence battles students’ pronunciations of a, r, ing and o . But the greatest challenge is i, and Pence tells students to open their mouths wider and think of it as eye-eee. It doesn’t always work: After two weeks, student Betty Holcombe still has to catch herself: “Be kayhnd--I mean kind, “ she says.