Burger Set Meets Caviar: A Table Manners Seminar

Judith Re is giving tactless children a nudge toward the social graces--but not with her elbow, of course. At a weekend manners seminar in Boston, Re, 30, repeatedly admonished 12 youngsters that elbows on the table are bad form, especially at a fine luncheon featuring shrimp cocktail and caviar, which the would-be ladies and gentlemen called “slimy fish eggs.” The director of the Judith Re Academie for Instruction in the Social Graces instructed them in how to hold everything from a fork to a conversation, and gave special hints such as what to do if food gets stuck in your braces (slip off to the bathroom without explanation after dinner is finished). The seven girls and five boys, ages 8 to 12, took the lessons with polish, knowing they should brush up on their etiquette. Liz Freedman, 9, said: “I have horrible manners. Like, I can’t cut steak and stuff. . . . What if when I’m a businesswoman in the big world and my boss sees me banging at my steak with a knife or he sees me with my elbows on the table, he’ll say, ‘I don’t know about this kid.’ ”

--Perhaps a “People Crossing” sign would help. Game officials say that a deer named Bonkers, a fixture in Shoreham, Vt., may be placed in a petting zoo because it repeatedly attacked a jogger. Ellen Malone of Whiting complained that the white-tailed doe knocked her down twice and butted her dog as they were running together last week. Bonkers hangs around town because she was kept as a pet until a game warden had her released into the woods. Rumors had spread that she would be shot as a nuisance, but after several townspeople pleaded for her life, state officials said they would place her in captivity instead.

--It seems that a longtime architectural feature in New England is becoming an endangered species of sorts. Weather vanes have been making their point for more than a century, but after 13 unsolved thefts in Rhode Island in five months--and hundreds of others across New England in recent years--officials are advising that valuable vanes be moved indoors. Roaming thieves apparently use everything from grappling hooks to helicopters to get them. In Barrington, R.I., Town Manager Robert Schiedler said six weather vanes stolen this year included an 1887 copper replica of the Mayflower, estimated to be worth between $50,000 and $100,000, taken from the roof of the Town Hall. In Bristol, one of three vanes stolen was a figure of an Indian that could be worth $75,000 to a collector, officials said.