It was one of those meals that look funny in the movies. The family of four got a table in the U.N. Delegates' Dining Room--and here came the waitress, all snarls, and spilled soup. Crash! Down slammed the food. Zip! It was whisked away before anyone was finished. "And how was the meal, sir?" asked the manager. Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, 45, couldn't help blowing off steam, so much in fact that the waitress was summarily fired. And when her case came up for review, Freeman reluctantly confirmed his complaint. She was "very cross, curt and sullen," he wrote in a letter. "My wife, having worked as a waitress, is more than understanding and tolerant. In this case, however, the lady in question was clearly out of line." Last May President Kennedy named former Nautilus Skipper William Anderson, 42, to head the National Service Corps when it got going. Ever since, the man who took the nuclear sub under the North Pole in 1958 has been waiting for that great day to come. But though the domestic Peace Corps bill squeaked through the Senate in August, it has been gathering dust in the House.

Last week Bill Anderson finally got tired and sent his resignation to President Johnson. On the if-you-can't-lick-'em-join-'em theory, he plans to run as a Democrat for a Tennessee House seat next November.

"What does it take to get Ira to go back to work?" asked Director Billy Wilder four months ago. "To be asked by someone he likes," replied the wife of Ira Gershwin, 67. So Billy asked, and Lyricist Gershwin went back to work for the first time in nine years. Told he could team with anyone on Wilder's upcoming Kiss Me, Stupid, Ira replied that the music would be by his brother.

When George died in 1937, he left notebooks containing perhaps as many as 100 melodies, and Ira has finally decided to release some of them. Fourteen will go to Choreographer George Balanchine for possible use as the score of a ballet, and Ira has already put words to three others. The titles: All the Livelong Day, Sophia and I'm a Poached Egg.

"I am in the unusual position of a capitalist in love with a Communist country." That could be no one else but Cyrus Eaton, 80, and during his fourth Russian visit the Cleveland multimillionaire was happily pursuing his open-mouth policy. "It is difficult to be objective," he said. "But an old American saying says nothing succeeds like success. Everywhere in the Soviet Union I have seen this air of success and progress." And to go with American-style success, Eaton urged the Russians to take up that old American-style pastime: "Baseball. Honestly, I dream of seeing a World Series between Moscow and New York teams." Named the Reds and the Yankees, no doubt.

"Charging me with being soft on Communism makes as much sense as saying I'm an officer of the Planned Parenthood Federation," Brooklyn Democratic Congressman Hugh Carey, 44, once answered to a campaign charge. And saying that would make no sense at all because Carey is Capitol Hill's champion father. Last week his brood of twelve became a baker's dozen, but he still passes the test that often confounds fathers with only half a dozen. Says he: "Alexandra is 18, Christopher's 16, Susan's 15, Peter's 13, Hugh Jr. is 12, Michael's 10, Donald's 8, Marianne's 7, Nancy's 6, Helen's 4, Bryan's 3, and Paul is 16 months." The newest member of the constituency? He's already been named Alexander.

For Adrian Darby, 26, Home is surely where the heart is--even if Meriel Douglas-Home, 24, does pronounce her name Hume, as in fume. It started to get that way eight months ago, at a performance of Aida, when he first met the British Prime Minister's second daughter, and now the young Oxford economics don plans to make his name hers. The wedding date is March 30 at her family's Scottish estate, The Hirsel, in a ceremony to be attended only by relatives.

Midst laurels stood: ex-Astronaut John Glenn, 42, named winner of the $5,000 George Washington Award, highest honor of the Valley Forge Freedoms Foundation, "for inspiring all Americans to actively espouse resolute, responsible and reverent patriotism"; James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Hans Hofmann, Louis Kahn, Bernard Malamud and John Updike among the 14 architects, painters and writers named to The National Institute of Arts and Letters; former New York Republican Governor Thomas Dewey, 61, in whose honor the 559-mile New York State Thruway will now be known as Dewey Thruway.

Daddy, can I please go down and meet the Beatles at the railroad station and go over to see them at the British embassy and invite them here to the house. Can I, pretty please? But Daddy said no, and since Daddy is Commander in Chief of just about everything there is in the U.S. these days, Lucy Baines Johnson, 16, didn't get to see the Beatles at all. But L.BJ. did agree to allow his younger daughter to serve as queen of the Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival in April. Small recompense, but Lucy--or Luci, as she now likes to spell it--was thrilled. "I've never been anything," said she, "not even a duchess."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.