Minnesotans Are Hosts to a First Lady : Diplomacy: She peppers the people she meets with questions during impromptu stops in Minneapolis.

MINNEAPOLIS —  Taking a page from her husband’s book, Raisa Gorbachev brought her motorcade to an impromptu halt Sunday as she departed from her official schedule to browse through the shelves of a neighborhood drugstore and question customers in a Mexican deli about the American way of life.

Everywhere the Soviet First Lady went, she peppered the people she met with questions about how they live, how much they earn and whether or not they like their jobs. She also found out what a Snickers bar was, but it apparently was not to her liking. She returned it to the counter and bought two Nintendo gum dispensers, a gift for her grandchildren, instead.

Skipping a meeting her husband was attending with executives from the Control Data Corp., Raisa Gorbachev also spent a full hour--three times as long as expected--in the south Minneapolis home of Karen and Steve Watson, the couple chosen to meet with her after she asked to see how an American middle-class family lives.

“She was fantastic,” Karen Watson said afterward to the reporters crowded onto the front lawn of her green-and-white three-story stucco home. “She was so honest, so interested. I felt very connected. She was so warm.”

Cheers and chants of “Gor-ba-chev, Gor-ba-chev” erupted in the crowd of more than 5,000 onlookers waiting around the Watson home as the First Lady arrived to a warm but visibly nervous greeting by the Watsons’ 13-year-old daughter Lisa, who stood on the front lawn fidgeting with a bouquet of flowers. Lisa, a member of a children’s theater troupe that performed in the Soviet Union last year, greeted the First Lady in Russian while her parents and three younger siblings looked on admiringly.

Once inside the Watson home, the meeting turned into a small-scale summit between the two women, as Mrs. Gorbachev, ordering the press to stand aside, questioned Karen Watson at length about her part-time nursing job, her home life and the family’s financial situation.

“I thought I’d show her the kitchen, but she wasn’t so interested in that. Instead she went to the back door, looked at our yard and asked if all that was really ours,” Watson said.

Over tea and cookies--most of which were consumed by the Watsons’ fidgety boys, Thomas, 7, and William, 6--Raisa Gorbachev asked detailed questions about the family’s lifestyle and whether Karen works because she wants to or because she has to in order to help make ends meet.

“Is this house yours?” she asked.

“We’re five years into a 30-year mortgage,” husband Steve, an elementary school art teacher, replied.

“Do your parents help with the money?” the visitor pressed.

“Sometimes,” said Steve. “We don’t ask, but sometimes the heart opens up.”

Before leaving the two sides exchanged gifts. Raisa Gorbachev gave the four children a box of candy and Russian picture books translated into English. For their parents she brought a blue-and-white ceramic vase. In return, she was presented with a family photo album, two dolls from Lisa and a pair of his and hers T-shirts for herself and her husband.

Surrounded by a phalanx of U.S. and Soviet security agents, the First Lady arrived at the Watsons 30 minutes behind schedule--a delay caused by her impromptu stop at Pepito’s Mexican deli, followed by a stroll around the corner to Snyder’s Drug Store, where she checked out the cosmetics counter but settled on a purchase of macadamia nuts and candy.

Outside the Watson home, onlookers who had braved the unseasonably cold and overcast weather erupted into wild applause when Mrs. Gorbachev, emerging from her bulletproof Zil limousine, strode into the crowd and said, “Thank you for coming, and for myself and my husband, thank you for your support.”

The cheering grew even louder when the First Lady emerged from the Watson house, hand in hand with a beaming Lisa.

“Look at that coat! I’ll bet she bought it in Paris,” a woman in the crowd said of the gray, stylishly pleated coat.

“The Watsons ought to sell that house. It’ll be worth a lot more now after Raisa’s been here,” a man said to his wife. “Well then, they better sell it fast, before her husband loses his job,” the man’s wife replied, referring to Gorbachev’s domestic problems.

“Rai-sa, Rai-sa” and “Gor-ba-chev, Gor-ba-chev,” the crowd chanted, waving red streamers and “Gorba-chief” handkerchiefs.

But little Jimmy Patterson, age 5, stood quietly in the middle of it all, staring intently at his neighbor Lisa arm in arm with the prominent visitor. Asked what he would have said had he been in Lisa’s place, he frowned in concentration and finally said: “I’d ask her how she likes living in the White House.”