This entry may shock you (or not)

I was already winging it to New York by the time my review of the first weekend of the New Orleans Jazz Fest ran in the Daily News last week, so I didn’t get a chance to see it until recently. And so I saw a bit of it had been cut out – nothing new, stories get edited all the time – but I was surprised at what did get excised, so I sent it to a friend, who agreed that it represented valuable local color, particularly for a New Orleans event.

So here’s the passage:

“People-watching frequently supplants onstage action. While sitting close to the main stage on Friday, I spent much of my time beholding the antics of an extended family that had assiduously studied and ticked off the to-do list from some manual for kooky free-spirits:

“Wacky headgear? Check (one member wore a crown with accessorized butterfly wings). Live iguana and its lunch, equally live crickets? Check. Arts and crafts projects? Check (they brought a giant mural and paints and tinkered together necklaces for one another). Interpretive dance during each set? Check. No underwear? Uh – ugh – check. Their flag, appropriately enough, read “pH < 7� (get it? Science buffs do: It stands for “acid�).�

I’m not saying that passage compares with the soaring rhetoric of Milton; it just seemed kind of funny to me and, not to bore you with newspaper mechanics, but a number of editors go through each story looking for errors or inappropriate material, and, naturally, some editors are more conservative than others. (Any cut-for-space argument works for the print edition, but it was also missing from the online edition.) Since this is a blog, I’m guessing anyone who visits here is made of sterner stuff and managed to read the above grafs without blanching (which is better than how I fared after beholding the whole no-underwear thing), but here’s a question: Keeping in mind who would actually be reading a story about the Jazz Fest, is there anything in the above that’s genuinely inappropriate for a family newspaper? Wouldn’t observations like those above make reading a newspaper more entertaining and worthwhile and memorable than kind of watering down everything?

Just asking.