Dear Madam:

The videotape shows Col. Vicente Tigas, Jr. squeezing "the Crying Lady" very tightly, so tightly that very few people believe the colonel's sworn testimony that he was comforting her, not threatening her.

There's a very simple solution to Colonel Tigas' credibility problem. All he has to do is stand up before the Sandiganbayan, tearfully confess that he is a compulsive masher, and admit that on that fateful day at the airport, he was so "carried away" by Rebecca Quijano's beauty that he "lost control."

The beauty of this explanation is that it accounts for the fact that Miss Quijano could see only malice in the good colonel's attempts to comfort her and why she identified him by blurting out, "Yon! Yon! Yon ang dumale sa akin!"*

DELANO DRILON
 

Ed:  * "there, there, that's him who accosted me"