The press had been tipped by a...

The press had been tipped by a wire service that a Beverly Hills woman had “set the American record for an IQ test” and she would be honored Tuesday at a City Council session attended by Guinness officials.

Unfortunately, only two reporters were smart enough to show up to see Dodie Bailey Marshall.

And a lot of what she said passed right over their heads.

For instance, there was the claim that her perfect 200 IQ score had been achieved on a test she administered to herself--and later had notarized “at the Supreme Court in Santa Monica.”

Neither Mayor Maxwell Salter nor the council remembered her contacting them beforehand. But he good-naturedly took dictation from her, scrawling on a card: “Congratulations Dr. Dodie Marshall World Records Highest IQ!!!”

Asked later why Salter gave her such recognition, city spokesman Fred Cunningham said: “I have no idea.”

Marshall, who appeared in two Elvis movies--you knew Elvis would be involved in this somehow--and now writes romance novels, wasn’t dismayed when Guinness officials failed to show. “I would never fraudulize them,” she said.

Dodie, allow us to congratulize you, nevertheless.

We mentioned here the other day that the Metro Rail folks sent out a press release revealing how a committee of designers, staff members, and management officials, assisted by by an outside firm, had come up with the wild and crazy Metro logo.

This piqued the interest of Fred Banuelos of North Hollywood, who sent us a copy of the Washington, D.C., rail system’s Metro logo, which is just as wild and crazy.

“I wonder if they used a committee, too,” he commented.

Meanwhile, in wacky Santa Monica. . . .

Mayor Dennis Zane kicked off a press conference for an environmental awareness campaign Tuesday by saying:

“We have many things to celebrate today, not the least of which is the venereal equinox.”

Psychologist Barbara De Angelis had her own sanity put to the test Tuesday.

She found herself gridlocked on the Santa Monica Freeway Tuesday with the KFI radio talk show that she hosts about to begin in a few minutes.

“I phoned the station from my car and they suggested we run a tape of an old show,” she said. “But I said, ‘This is the ‘90s. This is L.A. I’ll use my car phone.’ ”

And so she did, for the first 25 minutes of her show.

“I was afraid that the lines would get crossed and you’d hear someone saying, ‘I just bought a stereo at Adray,’ and someone else cursing, and so on. But the line was clear.”

De Angelis made herself useful in another way, too.

“I gave a traffic report,” she said.

From Our What-Does-It-All-Mean File:

The Times received an envelope that was sealed, postmarked--and empty--from the Reason Foundation.

What’s more, the Reason Foundation had addressed it to the Opinion section editor.