TRUE HIPPIENESS… Squid doesn’t usually make corrections but last week’s column on a Marina scuffle warrants an exception. Squid described Public Works Commissioner Jan Shriner as “hippie-voiced,” but she is an actual hippie. Shriner came clean to former councilman/Marina Gazette publisher Gary Wilmot about leaking an e-mail exchange between him and Mayor Bruce Delgado. This led to even more e-mails, with Wilmot taking issue that Delgado took their private, err, technically public conversation and sent it to Shriner, who passed it onto the Weekly. “How does the mayor expect open and honest feedback from citizens, if what they say to him in private may end up in the press?” Wilmot wrote. Shriner’s response: “For me it just seems funny for you to worry about ending up in the press, last I checked, you are the Press.” Though the two disagreed on e-mail etiquette, Wilmot liked the debate and offered Shriner a chance to contribute to the Gazette. Squid thinks the two need to do some Tai Chi together before a truce is made between self-described “warm, fun, wild and crazy” Wilmot and a granola-eating Green like Shriner.

NAKED TRUTHS… Squid always likes to watch other people fight. It was with great delight, then, that Squid observed the recent brouhaha between the good folks at the Pacific Rep Theatre and the vast machinery at the Monterey County Herald. As theater patrons may already know, PacRep has been advertising its shows on the front page of the Herald for some time. At least until its recent production of David Hare’s The Blue Room when PacRep executive director Stephen Moorer noted, with some astonishment, that the Herald thought the photo in the ad – by none other than Edward Weston – was too racy for their tastes. Moorer said they didn’t like the copy, either, which called Hare’s play, based on Arthur Schnitzler’s turn of the century work, La Ronde: “A Meditation On Sex, Lust And Desire… ” deeming it unacceptable to readers’ delicate sensibilities. The astonished PacRep marketing and graphics director, Kathi Kammerdiener, promptly came up with a replacement ad tweaking the Herald for its puritanical decision. “A century ago, the Vienna police stopped the run of this play on the first night… Yesterday, the Monterey County Herald Newsroom stopped the run of this play’s first ad… .Makes you kind of wonder what the fuss is all about, doesn’t it?” The newspaper agreed to run this version with two major changes. The word “newsroom” was taken out, and for the first time in recent memory, the ads have been running inside the paper, not on the front page. Squid wonders why Blue Rooms bring out blue noses in local journals “of record.”