Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
What's in the public domain in 2026, freeing for public use intellectual property from 1930? I'm most excited about the first Nancy Drew mystery, The Secret of the Old Clock! But this is actually for the original version written by Mildred Wirt Benson [yes, "Carolyn Keene" is a pseudonym used by a collective of writers]. The 1959 revised yellow-cased version, published by Grosset and Dunlap and which most of everyone knows better [this is the version I first read] remains under copyright until 2055. There are key differences! Nancy's age is 16 in 1930 vs. 18 in 1959. There are no Bess, George, and Ned in the original text either. And the original run had some racist language as well, and slang that has not survived. I found this out the hard way when I happened to check out the original versions from the Dumaguete Public Library when I was in Grade 5, and I was shocked by the differences in tone and characters. That's when I first suspected that Nancy Drew was not what she seemed. So I wrote a letter to Carolyn Keene c/o Grosset and Dunlap [I used to write to my favorite authors back in the day], and got a nice package in return, including a history of the writing and publication of Nancy Drew, which revealed that Carolyn Keene [and Franklin W. Dixon of Hardy Boys!] did not, in fact, exist. I think this bombshell was one of my formative discoveries as a budding writer.
This was not our first death in the family. My father died in 1997, when I was in college. Assorted relatives have passed on in the intervening years, including our beloved sister-in-law Efeb, who died in 2024. But Alvin was the first among us brothers to go, and that realization amounted to something tectonic—like a massive shift in our considerations of mortality, like death knocking too intimately at our family’s door.
On the day my brother died, Kuya Moe [Moses Atega] posted on Facebook—as he is wont to do with most alumni of Silliman University—that “the handsomest Casocot brother had passed away.” My Manong Alvin was certainly very handsome, but my brother Rey would probably disagree vehemently.
But let me break it down for you:
Rocky, our eldest, is truly the handsomest.
Edwin is the most ambitious.
Dennis is the most responsible one, and the architect of everything we do as a family. He is the one we turn to the most when we want to get things done.
Rey is the most fabulous and chaotic—and he will, I’m sure, also insist on being the handsomest.
I am, ehem, the most talented.
But Alvin, considering everything, was really the kindest and the sweetest among us six.
Truth to tell, if a gun were pointed at my head and I am forced to answer the question over who my favorite brother is, I’d most probably say, “Alvin.” But I only truly knew him when I was very young. I was in high school when he left for Switzerland in what turned out to be a brief sojourn, and which paved the way for him to eventually enter the United States as a tourist—and where, alas, he decided to turn TNT.
But when I was growing up—and straight on until I was entering my adolescence—Manong Alvin embodied being the “best kuya.” He was very kind, sometimes to a fault. He was compassionate. He was patient. Of all my brothers, he was the one who was most demonstrative of fraternal love—which is an anomaly, because the Casocots as a family is not exactly known for outward displays of affection. [Not that we are cold, either.]
I remember playing crazy rounds of ping pong with him. I remember that he was, among all of us, the best cook. I remember that he was also the most romantic—and always seemed to fall for the same type of woman. Perhaps the Tagalog word “maamo” describes him best—he was mild-mannered, domesticated, affable, possessing a gentle nature. When I ask his high school classmates their memories of him, they recall him as a quiet boy, also someone kind. But because he was very handsome and quiet, girls loved him.
He belonged to SUHS Class 1979, which includes, among many others, Alex Rey Pal, Mark Macias, Emma Ray Panaguiton, Jessica Lupisan, Burton Estolloso, Jun Datu, Vivian Ceniza, and my cousin Gil Moncal Jr. Pastor Jun Datu remembers once calling Alvin, “Tocosac,” a reversal of our family name—to which Alvin amiably retaliated by calling him “Utad”—which actually stuck as a nickname. He also remembers spending many afternoons with my brother in high school playing basketball. “He was not a tall guy,” Pastor Jun remembers. “But he made up for it by being very quick. He was like a cat.” Afterwards, resting from their games, they would troop to buy 25-centavo banana-q at the merkado. “In college, we still played basketball,” he remembers. “But we switched from banana-q to Coke. And also cigarettes. Because we were always hanging out at the house of Burton Estolloso, which had a store.”
I do remember my brother’s favorite cigarette—“Hope Short”—because I was always the one sent on errands to buy this for him when I was growing up.
Another one of his high school friends, Adidas Cañete, remembers him to be quite the ladies’ man—but also one who was quick to share, not just the delicacy of baye-baye my brother would bring to Dumaguete from home in Bayawan, but also answers to exam questions. In college, they were also part of a clique they called Addax—a reworking of the word “barkada” which was apparently bestowed on them by former Dumaguete City Mayor Ipe Remollo. “Alvin was mostly the serious type but he got along well with the rowdy group,” Adidas remembers.
At his memorial last Thursday night, which was sponsored by his high school classmates, I couldn’t help but think about some of the “What If’s” of my brother’s life. Earlier that day, I had spent the morning choosing the best photo of him to print out and put in a frame, to grace the glass top of his casket. I chose the one where he looked the most promising—a choice cut from a family photo taken at a popular studio [Image Bank!] in Dumaguete, circa 1990. He was very handsome in this photo, and he must have been 27 years old. I think he had just gotten back to Dumaguete after spending a year or two in Manila, where he was hopping from one job to the next, never finding one that stuck. He had graduated from Silliman University with a degree in Civil Engineering in 1985, a year or two later than his original cohort; afterwards, he had failed the board exam—which surprised my family, because he was smart, and he was very good with numbers. He never bothered taking the board again.
A year or two after this photo was taken, he embarked on an OFW life in Switzerland—which, alas, did not pan out as planned. That’s when we found out he had gone to the U.S., ostensibly to visit—but had made the decision to stay on illegally. We would eventually find out he had married a Filipino immigrant, and had two children with her. [He also adopted her eldest boy.] We lost touch, only to find out again that they had divorced but that their sons were living with him and his mother-in-law, in difficult circumstances. The correspondences were not consistent, until we learned that he had gotten sick. In 2019, we had to bring him back home to the Philippines.
I asked myself: What if he did not study civil engineering? I don’t really think it was the path he wanted to take—only the path he was expected to take. What if he had become a chef? He was very good at cooking, and I remember him being passionate about it. But in the 1980s, I’m not sure that was even a consideration—certainly an “impractical” one. So he ended taking up civil engineering—which, alas, he did not come to practice anyway.
I asked myself: What if he did not go to Switzerland, and eventually to the United States? I knew he really wanted to stay in the Philippines—but there was pressure on him to leave, “to help the family,” especially in the direst of our financial worries—and truth to tell, there was also pressure to get him away from a girlfriend my family did not approve of. [So much drama!] His life never gained traction in America, especially considering his circumstances. But he did have family, and having his sons Bryan, Christian, and Darrell in our lives—albeit so far away in Los Angeles—is a blessing that could not have happened, if he had not gone to the U.S.
I asked these difficult questions because I love my brother, even when he became the paragon of potential thwarted. Because most of his life, he was always searching for himself and what he could be in this world. I think the life I have chosen to live is mostly a response to my older brother’s chosen pathway. For me, my Manong Alvin taught me—although indirectly—to follow my own dreams, and to carve out a path that would be the making and fulfilment of my potentials.
I do wish though that I was a better brother when he finally came back to the Philippines in 2019, more than twenty years since I last saw him. His body was already ravaged by Lubag, a type of Parkinson’s that comes from Panay. He could no longer communicate well, and I admit that made me uncomfortable, because the Alvin in my memory was someone active, someone articulate, someone who embraced me with so much affection. My heart broke for the man I saw in a wheelchair, and who could not speak.
In the early hours of September 10, in his bedroom at our house in Bantayan, his caregiver heard him mumble incoherently, a sound, she later told me, that sent chills down her spine. When she checked on him again by 5 AM, he was no longer breathing. A homecare nurse finally came by at 8 AM to officially pronounce him dead. To us and to many of his friends, it was a much-needed rest to what had been a physical torment. Knowing even that, it is never easy to grapple with a death in the family. There’s a hole now in each of us.
I still want to remember him the way he was in my younger years. In the summation of our lives, we are measured by the fond memories of those who love of us, who remember us in our best moments, in our fullest potential. My Manong Alvin deserves that.
It is harder to feel Christmas when you’re older. The holidays harden into a mercenary plot that defies whatever magical understanding we used to have of it when we were children, when even the slightest Christmassy thing had the sheen of absolute joy and we were still given to believing that Santa Claus existed. Now, I am nearing 50 years old, alive for almost half a century already, and even I know—from what scraps of memory science I have read—to cast doubts whether the Christmases I remember when I was young were truly as joyful as I remember them to be. Or is this just nostalgia talking? I have learned since then that the memories we have are actually palimpsests of other memories of the same thing—and never the thing itself; in other words: ghosts upon ghosts piling together to create an image of the past that might not have been. I have not believed in Santa since I was ten; at near-fifty, I no longer believe in memories either.
Even then, an optimistic part of me still behold these memories as a kind of sacred ghost. How can I not? The ones that I have the sharpest recall of are taken from the years in my family’s life when we were poorest: for most of the 1980s we rented a ramshackle downstairs “apartment” of an old house somewhere in the bowels of Tubod, complete with an outhouse for a toilet—really what you would call a pit latrine; and “ramshackle” this apartment might have been, but somehow my mother and older brothers made into livable quarters through sheer ingenuity. [I say ingenuity because I’ve visited this apartment again only a couple of years ago for a documentary—and it is ghastly, and made me think: how were we able to live in this godforsaken place for quite a number of years?] And yet, this place is where most of my cherished Christmas memories are located.
I remember the night my brother Rocky came home from Cebu, and asked us kids to catch the shower of gold coins he flung to the air from a couple of bank pouches. We scrambled like mad, and with such joy, to collect what we could. [Those “gold” coins were newly-minted 25 centavo pieces, which at the time were just released as legal tender, dating this memory to 1983.]
I remember all the noche buenas we’ve had in that apartment, which was always swarming with friends and visitors. Those noche buenas must have been very simple—but for a kid not used to a regular feast, a Tupperware full of spaghetti [or chicken salad, which was my brother Rey’s specialty], a ham gifted by some friend, and plentiful rice must have been the very vision of wealth.
I remember my brother Edwin buying us our first Christmas tree. This was already in a time, perhaps around 1988, when we could finally breathe a little easy finances-wise, but that trek with my mother and my brother to Nijosa, and choosing just the one perfect plastic Christmas fir tree for the family to enjoy, and choosing the tinsels and decorations and lights to go with it—finally signaled to my boyhood consciousness that perhaps our fortunes have changed, and perhaps we did not have to go hungry anymore. After all, we just bought a Christmas tree!
I’m sure these memories are real. My remembrances of them may be palimpsests—but I am also aware that these memories are what makes me a human uniquely myself. Largely jaded I may have become, but these memories serve a purpose of reminding me I was once a boy full of Christmas brightness [that kid catching those gold coins], and fulfillment [that kid sated with simple noche buena], and hope [that kid happy with his new Christmas tree]. After all these years, these memories are still the kindling that sparks some joy in me come Christmas time, although the sparks have been muted by time and the joy blunted by the very adult reality of the withering world around us.
Christmas is really for children, no?
Christmas for adults is dancing unwillingly in a program for an office party.
Christmas for adults is all the utang paid after getting your 13th-month pay.
Christmas for adults is fretting over all kinds of holiday anxieties—the gifts to give, the parties to attend, the cards to send out.
In adulthood, I know I’ve tried my best to hang on to the magic of Christmas. I would attend the family Christmas dinners on the eve of the celebrations—although of late they have become obligations rather than a source of joy; I would listen to a personal playlist of Christmas songs that constituted mostly the Christmas albums released by The Carpenters—although admittedly I would play these songs mostly in July [don’t ask why]; I would foment new Christmas rituals, like watching annually a bunch of movies that made me feel Christmas joy—among them, Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, A Charlie Brown Christmas, When Harry Met Sally..., and It’s a Wonderful Life, but I have not actually done this since the pandemic. One time, to make the family Christmas dinner more personal, I attempted to make curated and handmade gifts for everyone—which was something completely out of the blue because my family never give each other Christmas gifts. The effect I was going for did not come to fruition, so I never did it again. I think it was that one Christmas that I finally grew up and told myself to stop trying too hard.
That realization of not trying too hard has been a gift. Because these days, I find Christmas joy in the accidental things. Like, one time, I was in Manila in early December and just happened to wander into a park somewhere in Makati—and right at that moment, a cascade of brilliant lights suddenly covered everything. It felt truly magical, because unexpected.
Or that time we were navigating holiday traffic from Cebu to Dumaguete, and we were trapped waiting for the next ferry to take us from Bato to Tampi, and while we waited in the light of stars of early evening, a bunch of folk singers sang daygon—or traditional Christmas songs in Binisaya—to us. That felt like a blessing.
Or this year, when all thoughts of celebrating Christmas was erased by the specter of a semester ending in December. While other people thought of parties and gifts, my only focus was on completing students’ requirements and grading—a backbreaking effort that nullified any kind of holiday cheer. But I hastily accepted some intimate Christmas dinners—and they have been lovely. A soothing balm for a harried soul, a reminder that we are still human despite our anxieties and expectations.
Once this very same December, on a particularly fretful day, Renz took me to dinner at Meltin’ Pot, at their new branch along Hibbard Avenue. He wanted to eat ramen, and I wanted sushi. Out of the blue, while we were waiting for our food to arrive, a youth group came in, asked permission to serenade all of us in the premises with Christmas songs [for a “donation,” of course], and proceeded to give us a number of songs of high octane holiday cheer. That made me smile.
This is me wishing everyone—cheerful child or jaded adult—the best of Christmas cheer, accidental or not.
Dinner with the Antonios, hosted by Jacqueline Veloso-Antonio and Myrish Cadapan-Antonio.
Dinner with the Sincos [Stephen, Mira, and Luis] and Arlene Delloso, with Renz Torres
1:05 PM |
I Remember the Ugliness of the Old Dumaguete Presidencia
Sometimes I cannot believe the Dumaguete Presidencia used to look like this, and just only a few years ago, before it was finally restored beginning in 2018. The original 1937 design by the great architect Juan Arellano totally disappeared over the ensuing decades with ugly additions and renovations. And what is the plaza now used to be a parking lot, often with dump trucks right in the middle of everything. Growing up in Dumaguete, I used to bewail how ugly our City Hall was, and I had no idea that beneath all that ugliness was an old gem waiting to be restored. Today, it is the National Museum of the Philippines Dumaguete. [Photo from DumagueteInfo Net Service]
9:00 AM |
Reminiscences of a Former Ms. Silliman Inside Man
The current online storm that has broken over the handling of Ms. Silliman 2024—which, as of this writing, has yet to get to coronation night—might puzzle some Dumagueteños, especially the newly arrived to our quaint shores, who might think this is just some small campus beauty pageant that is as negligible as other similar pageants—so why the incessant buzz about it, even from supposedly sophisticated individuals who should know better? This column is a chance to understand why there is a hullabaloo.
Our new friends aside, all the rest of Dumaguete would know why for many Ms. Silliman stands just outside that usual category of “beauty pageant,” and why no one compares it to similar enterprises like Miss Dumaguete or Miss Negros Oriental [or your dozens of town or barangay pageants sprinkled all over the island]. For many Ms. Silliman is uniquely its own thing, an erstwhile celebration of “campus beauty” that is also the epitome of “school spirit”—and “smarts.” There is a reason why it is fondly referred to as a “quiz bowl disguised as a beauty pageant,” which is often said in jest whenever uttered in protest when a more beautiful candidate once again ends up first runner-up to the one who sparkled the most in the Q & A and who bags the crown. It also has a unique history, and a magnificent list of winners—including Palanca Hall-of-Famer Elsa Martinez Coscolluela!—that has made it one of the central events that define the Silliman University Founders Day celebration every August. [Now, it also takes being a Dumagueteño to know how ultimately central Founders Day is to the life of the small city; it is so significantly Dumaguete, it’s even bigger than all the rest of the usual local festivals and holidays. ] Ms. Silliman’s reputation as a unique signifier of Silliman excellence is so entrenched in the Dumaguete cultural mindset that its crowning every year becomes something everyone looks out for.
Truth to tell, I had been so happily out-of-touch with what has been going on with Ms. Silliman this year. I’d been sick for most of mid-August, and had no real strength to navigate the exasperations of people on social media. But as soon as I recuperated and faced the current shenanigans of Facebook, I could not help but feel immediately overwhelmed with all the gossips and pushbacks centering on the current organization handling the annual show. A lot of allegations have been thrown and the landscape has become a total mudbath—all of which I have no real desire for recounting, although I did laugh when the Ms. Silliman pubmats came out and made the case for what not to do if you don’t want your event to look tacky.
But the one thing that caught my eye though was their first poster for coronation night, and I couldn’t believe it. Whoever approved that poster has a complete misunderstanding of what Ms. Silliman is all about. The taste level was already suspect to begin with, but to pose these Silliman women like girls in a harem was also something else.
Also the theme emblazoned on the poster: “A reminiscence of bravery and pioneering advocacies to shape the future.” What in tarnation does that mean? It is a tagline so contradictory and convoluted, it is virtually empty of meaning. For those alumni who used to be proud of “Silliman English,” this is the epitaph.
As a Sillimanian, I felt violated. Because if you are a Sillimanian, there are many enduring traditions that do help define your memories of campus life—dorm life, cultural immersion, a love or hate relationship with cafeteria food, classroom shenanigans, intramural madness, campus publication glory, Founders Day fever—but there is only one that ever feels gilded for many: the Ms. Silliman Pageant.
I’ve served in various capacities in Ms. Silliman pageants of yore, both as a student organizer and then as a faculty adviser. Today, I may no longer believe in pageants as a cultural institution and have actively turned my back on all forms of participation [including judging], but there is one thing about the Ms. Silliman Pageant that gives me pause: the fact that it has served as an earnest laboratory for creativity and event-organizing for a large swathe of the student population—student leaders and creatives who work tirelessly for barely any recompense to hone their skills in whatever it is they’ve showed promise in. That they do this for one of the oldest pageants in the world—it is older than even the Miss Universe—is something still compelling for me. I no longer believe in pageants, yes—but I believe somehow still in Ms. Silliman.
Plus there’s the nostalgia. I was the head scriptwriter for the 50th Ms. Silliman Pageant in 1997, with Michael Ocampo as Chairman, which without doubt was the biggest gamechanger in the pageant’s history, and necessitated the move from the gymnasium to the Macias Sports Complex. The controversy of including a swimwear portion aside, the marketing for that pageant was mind-blowing, it actually galvanized not just the campus but the entire city; hence, there will always be two eras of Ms. Silliman: pre-1997 and post-1997.
I was also the one who later on advocated to separate the talent portion from the coronation night, and to add it to the pre-pageant instead. [I just had enough of coronation nights that lasted until 2 AM because the talent portions ran too long.]
In the 2000s, when I was adviser to the pageant, I wrote an entire history of the Ms. Silliman Pageant to preface the new guidelines we wrote, which we intended to be the pageant bible for future Ms. Silliman Committees to use.
I wrote about how it started as a student morale booster and popularity contest instigated by the campus paper in the post-World War II years, which is why the runners-up are called the Miss Cover Girl and the Miss Headline Girl.
I wrote about why the Pan Hellenic Society invented the pre-pageant, to set the pageant apart with its insistence on the intelligence, and articulation, of the candidates. [This is why many people refer to Ms. Silliman as a “quiz bee” disguised as a beauty pageant, and why speech always seem to trump beauty in the final consideration.]
I wrote about why it lost the word “beauty” from the complete title, and why it became “Ms.” instead of “Miss.” [This was Nursing Dean Ma. Teresita Sy-Sinda’s idea—to curb the inherent sexism that is couched in the suggestion of a “miss.” She was the Honorary Chair of the 50th iteration of the pageant, and insisted on this—hence that usage for many years, until this edict has somewhat been forgotten in recent iterations.]
And, finally, I wrote about why the advocacy angle had to be inculcated—because the new guidelines were made in a time when there was a huge push to relegate the pageant to the dustbin of history. It was because, with feminism resurgent everywhere, many people really began questioning the concept of a Ms. Silliman to be outdated—and to be honest, it really is.
The new guidelines we wrote followed a Ms. Silliman Pageant controversy that erupted over cheating allegations [the final question in the pre-pageant was leaked to a favored candidate and that candidate was so incensed by that act she told everyone], and another pageant where only three candidates vied for the crown, rendering all as title-holder and runners-up at once. [The College of Nursing’s Ma. Teresita Sy-Sinda, who had been the pageant’s honorary chair a few years back, reacted to what was happening by banning all her students from joining the pageant for many years, and some college deans followed her suit. We even briefly flirted with the idea of opening the competition to candidates fielded by campus organizations, because we could not get candidates from the colleges and units anymore. I remember being so desperate I begged the Graduate School, which never usually fielded candidates, to join—and I succeeded on that count! The pageant was really dying at that time, hence the need for the guidelines.
Moses Joshua Atega had an alternative ready should Ms. Silliman cease to exist: the Silliman University Campus Goodwill Ambassador, which pitted both men and women, and was designed to compete with similar winners from other schools. The whole enterprise lasted for one year, with Gabriel Enriquez winning in 2003, and begat one other competition from St. Paul University. [Plans to do a Campus Goodwill Ambassador pageant at the Negros Oriental State University, Foundation University, and other schools faltered—hence the final derby fielding all these campus winners did not materialize.]
In my strict version of the advocacy thing in the guidelines we wrote sometime in the mid-2000s, I even wanted the candidates to propose an entire calendar of activities for her chosen advocacy, para dili pang-pageant lang.
Whatever happened to that pageant bible? If it’s lost, is this why the new Ms. Silliman organizing committee seems to be lost on what to do?
“Sports is beautiful but it’s also brutal.”
~ E.J. OBIENA, pole vaulter, Paris Olympics 2024
In the light of Carlos Yulo’s Olympic wins in gymnastics in Paris [and in remembrance of Hidilyn Diaz’s watershed win in weightlifting in Tokyo in 2021], there was a burst of online chatter about the state of competitive sports in the Philippines. About the hardships our athletes have to go through to train and to participate in competitions, often with the most measly and most grudging of government support. About how ironic it is that our Olympic wins have come from sports not usually seen as “appropriate” for the gender of the athlete that won them. And about how support for these sports always seem to pale in comparison to certain other sports that enjoy not just widespread appeal but also consistent corporate largess.
And then people began side-eyeing basketball.
To quote improv comedian and comics artist Jay Ignacio: “Eh, kung i-modify natin ang gymnastics na kailangan ma-syut sila sa loob ng basketbol ring tuwing di-dismount, makakaakit kaya iyon ng mas maraming sponsorship?” And then from screenwriter and poet Jerry Gracio: “Pagkatapos nating manalo sa Olympics sa mga sports na hindi basketball, tiyak, magtatayo tayo ng maraming maraming basketball courts.” Mostly played for laughs, of course—but the undertone of many of these posts was serious. Other social media posts were more upfront: “Hindi lang [sana] puro basketball,” wrote historian Kristoffer Pasion, echoing many others who wrote the same sentiment in a variety of ways. Like the actress Agot Isidro, who posted: So pwede na ba natin bawasan ang sponsorship at funding ng basketball at idagdag na lang sa gymnastics, boxing, and weightlifting?”
Why single out basketball? I think there’s an unspoken reason why, and I proceeded to share my thoughts, and my story, on X [formerly Twitter] in a long thread. Within mere hours, the post blew up.
* * *
This is a slightly extended version of what I posted on August 5 on X:
For the longest time, basketball has really been symbolic of the Filipino macho, celebrated not just for the great sport that it is, but also for showcasing a performative masculinity that many Filipino men ascribe to.
As a child, I remember the grownup men around me drinking beer and thumping their chests [or their potbellies] as they cheered for their favorite basketball teams on TV, and arguing with each other over who was the best player—Robert Jaworski or Alvin Patrimonio? When I went to school, most of my male classmates were all the same. And I remember feeling left out, because basketball did not interest me at all, and I had no real interest to play it. So automatically that made me “queer.” Not wanting to play basketball was a silent mark people judged me by.
I actually remember, around the age of 11 or 12, making an effort to like basketball. I began watching the PBA on TV. I decided to have a “favorite” team: Ginebra San Miguel—because the men I knew were rabid fans. I studied the moves of the game, I studied the players. All in the effort to be accepted into this boisterous camaraderie of men I felt ostracized from... But I felt like an impostor. It just was not me. I pretended to be such a basketball “fan” for months and months, until I could not pretend anymore. I remember finally saying to myself, “Who cares if I’m not as manly as these men I know?” and gave up on liking basketball altogether.
There was also the fact that in high school, being forced to play basketball for P.E. classes was always a humiliating torture. I just could not dribble, I just could not shoot baskets. I felt so self-conscious whenever I had to play this darned game just for the grade. And then to hear your classmates tittering around the court about you because how was I a “man” in a basketball-crazy country and not know how to play basketball? Baling bayota uy, klaro kaayo, they’d laugh.
And this is why I hated basketball when I was a kid. I don’t hate it as much anymore as a grownup, but I do know that basketball as a social phenomenon in the Philippines has long been weaponized in a quiet gender warfare that marked so many boys and men as “unfit” or “unmanly,” just because basketball was not something we loved.
Which is why when I first saw the Brgy. Lo-oc gays the other year do “gay basketball,” playing a good game while donning tutus and other queer-affirming costumes, I felt so much joy. It felt like a corrective. It took away the thorn of machismo associated with the game, and for the first time in my life I actually enjoyed the sport.
End post.
* * *
I was soon bombarded with an avalanche of responses. As of August 6, that X thread has had 602K views, 8.7K likes, 1.9K reposts, and God knows how many responses. I hit a nerve. I knew my experience was not exactly unique, but I had no idea it would resonate so hard among many people. The responses were variations of these: “I feel seen!” or “This is my childhood!” or “Somebody finally said it!”
The number of responses of course are directly proportional to the acknowledged popularity of the sport—the feeling that in our culture, we are surrounded by this great and unquestioned worship of basketball (“It’s part of our Filipino culture!” some of the indignant responses went), that for me to write this post, I have articulated what so many people have felt but could not say—perhaps for fear of backlash, and perhaps for fear of confirming for others what they wanted hidden.
I will not deny the massive popularity of basketball, and why so many people love it. My TV screen—with its endless seasons of NBA or PBA games—confirms it. Going around any neighborhood and seeing basketball courts everywhere, built well or improvised, confirms it. The fact that I can utter a mononym—“Jaworski”—and be understood by many confirms it. The fact that Coke abandoned Coke-Go-for-Goal in its singular advocacy for nurturing football in the country in favor of forming the Coca-Cola/Powerade Tigers PBA team starting in 2002 confirms it.
Basketball is like an inevitability for life in this country—somehow, one way or another, you will be touched by it. There’s also this that can be taken as a reason for its popularity: it’s sheer accessibility. One response went: “Basketball is the sport that will always resonate to Filipinos. It is like a moth to a lamp. Basketball is so accessible: may 15x15 [feet] na open space ka, good to go ka na, isang bola, sampung katao agad ang mag-eenjoy. At the same time, [it’s] fast paced. It is one of the most social contact sports out there.” So true.
I am not a sports historian or a cultural anthropologist or a psychologist, but I can also understand why basketball became very popular for many Filipinos. The sport was introduced to us by the Americans, and made popular by them by spreading it via the public school system they set in place. That American imprimatur probably helped, and in a sense they thoroughly ingrained the sport in us. The things is, basketball as a game is truly a marvel to behold and beautiful to see when one begins to analyze its strategies and possibilities of execution—and many basketball fans would attest to this as the very reason for their abiding love for it. And then with the PBA becoming the only sports televised for widespread consumption in the Philippines for many decades, one can see why basketball has only grown in popularity over the years. That popularity could only beget more popularity, a bandwagon effect that is about conformity aside from also being about being sports-minded and being entertained.
Here is the turn: it has also been mostly basketball with male athletes we have seen popularized. And because these male athletes are on TV, they have become the equivalent of gods. We worship at the altar of the sport, and consequently we have also begun worshipping—and reflecting—the gods that play it. And then it happened: the sport somehow became closely connected, semiotically speaking, with an idea of Filipino manhood. To ascribe fandom to the game or to play the game itself—no matter our personal limitations—somehow became prerequisite for defining manhood for many Filipino boys. Not all, but many.
My father was a basketball coach for a school in Northern Mindanao where he taught as a young man, and the brood that he eventually raised with my mother was six boys total, and no girls. Sometimes family friends would jokingly point out that he perhaps purposely bred an entire basketball team for him to coach. I must admit that my relationship with my father—which was partly estranged for a time—had probably colored my view of the game. (He loved watching PBA endlessly.) But truth to tell, my father never forced me or my brothers to play (and a significant number of us are quite tall for the average Filipino male!). But because of what I’ve posted on X, I have been getting so many responses detailing intense parental or familial pressure—usually from elder male relatives—to play the game to prove their manhood, and eventually courting disappointment when they failed.
In my case, it was the men in all the neighborhoods I grew up in that somehow signaled to me that to participate in this fandom or to play the game was the only way I could get into their brotherhood. And like what I’d written, my schoolmates also did the same in varying degrees. It was not always overt. It can be very subtle. I somehow learned to read from social cues what was expected of me, and proving my “straight malehood” through basketball was certainly up there. (Given that I was a closeted boy who did not want to be found out added to the tension.)
And it’s not just the boys, it’s the girls, too. One response I got was from a woman who truly loved to play basketball, but when she was a student in a Catholic girls school, she and her schoolmates were forbidden by the nuns to play the game lest they turn into lesbians! Our culture has definitely coded sports in gendered ways for so long, and we don’t even question why.
Basketball as a code for “straight malehood” can be insidious in the way it expresses itself. You will get snickers and you will hear the whispers of people “confirming your sexuality” just by how you take to the game. One such response I got on X was from a man who told me this story: that as a boy he was aware he was being tested by friends regarding his sexuality when they asked him to name two of his favorite NBA teams. He replied: “Boston and Celtics!” Alas, he didn’t know that those two were one and the same team—and so he invariably outed himself because of that response.
Another person told me that a new male employee at the company he worked in casually asked him to describe himself in terms of positions in a basketball game—whether he was a point guard, or a shooting guard, or whatnot—and he knew that the question was loaded to test him whether he was “man enough” to know what basketball was. When he couldn’t answer, he heard the co-worker later whisper to others: “Bakla nga!”
The same trajectory happened to another man who responded: “I was a senior in high school, there was a party, and my friends wanted to play basketball after dinner, but kulang ng isang player yung isang team. Kinukulit ako ng buong tropa so I had to pretend like I was f*cking asleep just to get them off my back. I heard one whisper: ‘Bakla nga.’”
Another one told of a time he and other gay boys in his high school class were grouped together as one basketball team by their P.E. teacher—and the fact that they actually played a good game did not matter, because they were really teamed together to be the butt of jokes running through the game. The hoots and jeers and laughs they had to contend with at their display of flamboyance and effeminacy while running around a basketball court were humiliating—but they endured. That P.E. teacher was being cruel—but I doubt anyone had the temerity to call him out. He was just being a man of the culture.
Others still remember being told that “sayang yung height mo,” just because they did not want to play. Another respondent recalled that a P.E. teacher coerced him into joining the basketball team because of his height, and then proudly announcing to his mother that he had consequently “saved the boy” from being seen as “gay” by other people.
Others have had opportunities denied them simply because of the basketball they were required to play in school. The journalist Ryan Edward Chua [who is now out] recalled: “I hated basketball so much and the shame and humiliation that came with not being able to play it. Once in grade school P.E., we had to play basketball for our final exam. I refused to join and chose to get a failing mark.”
Why this common disdain by many gay men for the sport? It is not the fear of “balls hitting them,” although many people have suggested that to be the case. In high school, I may have hated basketball but I loved soccer and volleyball. I wasn’t scared of balls coming my way and hitting me. So many other gay men attest to this, so it really is something else about basketball that bothers them—and the only answer I can muster is how coded it is with toxic and performative masculinity. It is that machismo that we reject, not really the game itself. The same machismo that has largely been violent to men like me who could not pass the ephemeral standards of manhood, like the mere liking of basketball.
So yes, basketball is coded as a “masculine” and “heterosexual” sport in our culture. And so is boxing. Volleyball and gymnastics, on the other, are somehow considered feminine sports. So if you were male, and you played these last two sports, you were definitely rendered sexually suspicious. (Remember all that old gossip about Carlos Yulo being gay?) The ridiculousness of these assumptions are titanic.
* * *
Like so many others, when Carlos Yulo won his first gold medal in gymnastics, I felt so much of me moved by an intensity of feelings. I cried when he cried on the sidelines when the final scores were tallied and announced. I could feel the weight of the mountain of expectations set on his shoulders—and the mountain of his personal frustrations as well—somehow melt in his utter disbelief at his win, but also in his eyes somehow a glimmer of vindication of what he could do and set out to do despite all the setbacks. In a sense, at that moment, I projected my own life and frustrations and hopes to his spectacular win, and it felt good to know that somehow we are always capable of overcoming the most monstrous of our challenges when we face it.
Later, when I had time to think more about the impact of Caloy’s win, I found it sufficiently validating that the gold medals we have won so far at the Olympics were won by athletes who defied the stupid gendered preoccupations of sports. Hidilyn Diaz, a woman, won a gold medal in weightlifting—which is taken as a male sport by most of us. And Carlos Yulo, a man, won two gold medals in artistic gymnastics—which is considered a female sport by most of us as well. I love the irony, and it’s a very telling rebuke to our outdated sexual politics. But will Filipinos learn from this realization? I can only hope so.
But the power of seeing Caloy clutching his gold medals is tremendous, and I hope it will have good repercussions in the way we view sports. The power of a winning image cannot be discounted. Many Filipinos saw on television and on the Internet Carlos Yulo powering through those gymnastics moves, and win, and I hope that that is enough for many to change their mindset about what kind of sports is good for them or for their kids, regardless of the gendered way we think about it. (It helps that Caloy is being celebrated now, especially financially. Sometimes that helps. I remember a time when careers were heavily gendered—for example, being a nurse for many decades before in the Philippines was considered only as a career for women. That changed eventually in the 1980s and 1990s when widespread economic difficulties forced many Filipinos to seek greener pastures abroad, and one sure way to do that was to be a nurse. Suddenly we had a flood of men suddenly taking up nursing. And now we don’t even blink twice anymore when we encounter a male nurse. It has become commonplace.)
So Caloy’s win can be a watershed moment in how Filipinos view gender in sports. Children, especially at a certain innocent age, are not usually mindful of the politics of sexuality and gender in everything; they just do what they want to do—although eventually, when they grow older, they do get socially conditioned to think of things in a certain way, with all the biases from adults and from the culture eventually absorbed and ingrained. So if these children will want to pursue certain sports that’s not part of their gender expectations, I hope their parents have become enlightened enough—because of Caloy and Hidilyn—to let them pursue these. And I hope their localities will have the sufficient facilities to meet their athletic needs. The children with dreams will always be there. Let’s hope their parents and their communities can be there for them as well. And let’s hope we will have moved on from gendering sports unnecessarily, and from having more ligas shoved down our throats.
I think there’s an unspoken reason why so many people are side-eyeing basketball these days in the light of Carlos Yulo’s Olympic wins in gymnastics. For the longest time, basketball has really been symbolic of the Filipino macho, celebrated not just for the great sports that it is, but also for showcasing a performative masculinity that many Filipino men ascribe to.
As a child, I remember the grownup men around me drinking beer and thumping their chests [or their potbellies] as they cheered for their favorite basketball teams on TV, and arguing with each other over who was the best player—Robert Jaworski or Alvin Patrimonio? When I went to school, most of my male classmates were all the same. And I remember feeling left out, because basketball did not interest me at all, and I had no interest to play it. So automatically that made me “queer.” Not wanting to play basketball was a silent mark people judged me by.
I actually remember, around the age of 11 or 12, making an effort to like basketball. I began watching the PBA on TV. I decided to have a “favorite” team: Ginebra San Miguel—because the men I knew were rabid fans. I studied the moves of the game, I studied the players. All in the effort to be accepted into this boisterous camaraderie of men I felt ostracized from... But I felt like an impostor. It just was not me. I pretended to be such a basketball “fan” for months and months, until I could not pretend anymore. I remember finally saying to myself, “Who cares if I’m not as manly as these men I know?”
There was also the fact that in high school, being forced to play basketball for P.E. classes was always a humiliating torture. I just could not dribble, I just could not shoot baskets. I felt so self-conscious whenever I had to play this darned game just for the grade. And then to hear your classmates tittering around the court about you because how was I a “man” in a basketball-crazy country and not know how to play basketball? Baling bayota uy, klaro kaayo, they’d laugh.
And this is why I hated basketball when I was a kid. I don’t hate it as much anymore as a grownup, but I do know that basketball as a social phenomenon in the Philippines has long been weaponized in a quiet gender warfare that marked so many boys and men as “unfit” or “unmanly,” just because basketball was not something we loved.
Which is why when I first saw the Brgy. Lo-oc gays the other year do “gay basketball,” playing a good game while donning tutus and other queer-affirming costumes, I felt so much joy. It felt like a corrective. It took away the thorn of machismo associated with the game, and for the first time in my life I actually enjoyed the sport.
9:48 PM |
'Ladlad': 30 Years of Unfurling the Cape and Paving the Way
Finally, it’s out! My essay on the 30-year legacy of Ladlad, the pathbreaking anthology of Philippine gay writing by J. Neil C. Garcia and Danton Remoto, now out on Spot.ph. An excerpt:
In 1994, I was nineteen, a twink lost in the world the way only someone who came of age in the 1990s could be. I had no idea I was a twink—that was queer nomenclature I would only come to know in my worldly thirties and the world had evolved enough to have specific names for what used to be an identity no one talked about in polite circles. I had no idea either what to make of the surging tempests I had inside of me as I braved the hormones of adolescence and took in, without a map, the hazy landscape of desire you could not deny a young man at the beginning of his prime.
This was three years before Ellen DeGeneres famously came out on American television via her eponymous sitcom and unleashed a cultural touchstone for what Oscar Wilde used to describe, a hundred years before, as “the love that [dared] not speak its name.” [Actually, it was his lover Lord Alfred Douglas who penned this line in a poem, but the phrase was used in Wilde’s gross indecency trial which would decisively blanket in silence all manner of things gay, until cracks appeared in 1969 because of the Stonewall Riot.] This was four years before Will & Grace would grace our television screens and pave the way for mainstream acceptance of characters who just happened not to be heterosexual. In the Philippines, the show was carried by Studio 23, a UHF channel that largely escaped conservative notice simply because it was a smaller station and catered to a niche audience.
In the Philippines, at least in popular culture, to be gay was defined largely by the movies—and for about 50 years since Nemesio E. Caravana toyed ever so lightly with the notion of queer attraction in Kaaway ng Babae (1948), to be gay for the Filipino was to live out a phase awaiting eventual heterosexual conversion, such as in Tony Cayado’s Kaming Mga Talyada (1962). Or to wallow in guilt and ennui (and camp), such as in Danny Zialcita’s suite of queerness in Si Malakas, Si Maganda, at Si Mahinhin (1980), Mahinhin vs. Mahinhin (1981), T-Bird at Ako (1982), and Lalakwe (1985). Or to identify with Dolphy’s definitive caricature of the sissy in Jack and Jill (1954), which would generate decades-long copycats in many movies starring Roderick Paulate, Joey de Leon, and Herbert Bautista. In 1994, Paulate famously played twins separated at birth in Maryo J. de los Reyes’ Bala at Lipstick, where one twin is a tough guy and the other an enterprising shrill running a beauty parlor.
The year also saw Mel Chionglo release Midnight Dancers, a spiritual sequel to Lino Brocka’s Macho Dancer (1988), which also largely defined the Filipino gay experience as one that is seen largely through the eyes of (an often straight) male stripper. The early 1990s were not a good time to find complex gay representation in Filipino pop culture.
I was a budding cineaste then and definitely heard of Chionglo’s film—which came to me in bootleg VHS through God knows what source. (Perhaps a neighborhood video store?) I must have played that movie a hundred times on the family VCR, always discreetly and in the dark cloak of night—hoping my Born Again mother would not rouse from her sleep and catch me.
It was with the same delicious trepidation that I would come across a copy of the first Ladlad, which described itself in its subtitle, and in such an arrestingly forward manner, as an “anthology of Philippine gay writing.” There was no mistaking it for anything other than what it declared itself to be. The simplicity of that admission would create such an upheaval that thirty years later it would be difficult to ignore the fact that for many gay people in the Philippines, the publication of this book could very well be our own version of the brick thrown at Stonewall Inn.
Done! Submitted to the editor! I had so much fun writing this, on the 30th anniversary of Ladlad: An Anthology of Philippine Gay Writing. Will post the link when it happens. Happy Pride to all, especially Danton Remoto and J. Neil C. Garcia!
And with that, high school reunion season comes to a close. We had our farewell dinner at The Vineyard, and capped a reunion that included three wildly different dinners [last night at Hayahay was apparently dedicated to old-time debauchery], a community outreach program, and a parade. I missed our 25th year reunion, but resolved to join our 30th because it was such a milestone. It turned out to be pretty much an emotional one for everyone as well, and I’ve noticed that everyone was so ready to be vulnerable, to tell everyone we love them and miss them, to express gratefulness, to give endless hugs. Tonight, near the end of the dinner, the host made us do an impromptu communal singing of “That’s What Friends Are For,” and after initially giggling because it was so corny, everyone nevertheless gravitated towards forming a large circle, and — holding hands and swaying to the melody — we sang the song out loud with what I sincerely believe to be heartfelt gusto. When will I ever see these people again? Who knows? That’s the beauty of life’s flows and impermanence: they make nights like this meaningful and beautiful.
First, before you go to the reunion—especially if it’s for your thirtieth year—take time to scan your old yearbook. Take a look at the faces of former classmates, and most of all, take a look at the names. Study them. Because you’re past your mid-forties now, and memory has lately been playing tricks on you. You will not remember everyone’s names, and the faces have definitely changed. Consider the yearbook quick-scan a preparation for the barrage of faces greeting you.
“Do you remember me?” a beautiful, familiar-looking woman greeted me when I entered Brooke’s Place, which was hosting my high school reunion welcome party.
“Of course I do,” I said. Because I really did.
“Then what’s my name?”
Ladies and gentlemen, I forgot Lovely Villaflores’ name—although we were pretty chummy in high school. [In my defense, I have the memory of a gold fish: names of people I haven’t seen in six months I cannot at all recall, and not because I’m a terrible person. It’s just the way my brain is.]
Second, don’t be conscious about having gained weight. Strut your stuff, and project the utmost of looking good—because everyone has gained weight anyway, but they are all still looking lovely. The good thing is, no one in a reunion really does the Filipino hello of “Nanambok lagi ka.” Which is a surprising thing. At the reunion, only one person ever commented on my weight by patting my belly—and I replied by squeezing his equally generous belly back.
Third, don’t be afraid to load up at the open bar. Cocktails loosen your nerves and make you sociable. It helps cut down on the uncertainty of having to bridge social relationships with people you haven’t seen in ages—and often the only thing you have in common is a shared school both of you graduated from together. But the alcohol makes you giddy; the alcohol makes you love everyone, and your hugs become generous; the alcohol loosens the memories of all the shenanigans you used to do together when you were young and largely an agent of chaos in the world.
Fourth, soak up on class lore before you get to the reunion—and that way, you will win all the prizes for the trivia questions that are bound to be part of the program. What was the name of the school secretary? Who stole the cassette tape of one group before an inter-class dance competition? How did you terrorize that poor substitute teacher? Alas, none of these became trivia questions, but this one did:
What is the title of your graduation song?
No one remembered the title of our graduation song. Daunted by everyone’s amnesia, the host who was grilling us with all the questions, gave us clues:
“It’s composed of two words.”
“‘I Believe‘?” we replied.
“No. The first word is ‘My.’”
“‘My Way‘?”
“Dear God, who would use ‘My Way‘ as a graduation song? ‘And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain…’ Whaaat? The second word has two syllables!”
We had no idea.
It turned out, it was something called My Tribute. And everyone was like, “Huh?”
You will not remember your graduation song thirty years later.
Fifth, take it all easy. It’s your thirtieth year after high school graduation, and you are surrounded by old friends who know your secrets and who knew you when you were a sweaty little brat prone to mischief. That recall of your old selves is such a divine social leveler. In a high school reunion, no one “cares” [and I mean this in a positive sense] if you’re an award-winning writer or a very rich businessman or a mayor or a successful scientist or an important banker or a respected physician—you’re still that kid from high school everyone teases. And it is such a delight to find out that the Class Goat who made class history for flunking classes left and right is now a food maven in Vegas. Talk about having an arc! So be free on reunion night. Take all the grace in and enjoy yourself. Dance. Dance like no one’s watching. Dance the lambada, like you used to do in your JS Prom. Sway to Roxette’s “It Must Have Been Love.” Do the country line dance to Billie Ray Cyrus’ “Achy Breaky Heart.” Sing your heart out to Madonna.
And lastly, be grateful. Be grateful to the organizers who have done a great job at an often thankless task of gathering old classmates for a reunion. Be grateful that you’re still around after all these years, and that you have all these people around you who are still your friends by the default of youth and memory and shared camaraderie.
You think of old classmates that have gone—the late Jacqueline Piñero-Torres, our valedictorian, most of all—and you realize you being in this reunion is a tribute to her and the others. You are saying, “You are missed.” You are saying, “I’m here to celebrate you.” You are saying, “Thank you for all the memories.”
My mother turned 90 today. We share the same birthday. This is a biographical shorthand of her life so far, a few things one might want to know about her…
Mother was a child of the bamboo. She was a very young child when she lost her mother, Bebang, to childbirth [but which was spun off later on as being “gi-engkanto” by some spirit residing in a mango tree]. She had to live with her older sister Epefania with an assortment of aunts and her maternal grandparents in Bayawan, which was then called New Tolong. Mother’s father, a langyaw from Bohol, apparently disappeared after his wife’s death and had not been heard from since. In later years, when Mother would ask what happened to her parents, her aunts would tell her: “Gikan ka sa liki sa kawayan.” She would believe this story for many years. I have written an essay about this.
Mother is really Ceferina, not Fennie. Her birth name was Ceferina Malazarte Rosales, although for the longest time she thought Malazarte was her family name. Her sister was named Epefania. When they were younger women, however, my aunt made them change their names so that they would have “a better future,” because apparently, nothing of significance happened to young women named "Ceferina" or "Epefania." So my aunt renamed themselves "Fennie" and "Fannie." I’m not sure they did this legally though, and their usage of both names old and new has been erratic over the years. When you go over our birth certificates, some of us have a mother named Ceferina, and some of us have a mother named Fennie. Essentially, my brothers and I were born, according to official records, to two different women. I have written a story about this.
Mother escaped Bayawan by making tira-tira. This was after high school, and she was jealous of her more affluent friends who went to study college in Dumaguete and elsewhere. She wanted to leave the stifling life of small town Bayawan, and study in Cebu. But her aunts told her that only the worst things could happen to young women living alone in the big city. So she secretly made tira-tira to sell and earn money, and when she had enough saved, she bought a one-way ticket to Cebu to study to become a nurse, because a distant relative promised to fund her college education. When that promise was broken, she found herself making a living becoming a beautician in Cebu City. I have written an essay about this.
Mother fled Cebu to escape heartbreak, and found her way to Mindanao, in Nasipit, near Butuan, where she met my father, who was her landlord. She rented the space for her beauty parlor from him. He was a dusky bachelor with a penchant for dreams and beautiful women—and soon enough, she found herself married to him. They would stay in Agusan del Norte for many years. I have written an essay about this.
Mother returned to Bayawan in the late 1960s to help my father’s dream to become a sugar planter. They enjoyed a decade of success as hacienderos—but soon lost everything because of the sugar shenanigans of the Martial Law. We became very, very poor. I have written an essay about this, which became viral only a few months ago when it was published on Rappler.
When my father left for Davao to seek another fortune that never came, Mother virtually became a single mother. After selling what she could, she moved the family to Dumaguete in 1980, and for the next decade we moved nine times to seek cheap rent. She sold peanut butter and baye-baye to feed us, while at the same time plied her trade as a beautician without a parlor. She had one goal in mind: to put all her six sons through college at Silliman University—even though it was an expensive dream she could not really meet given her financial circumstances. She persevered. I have written stories about this period in our lives.
What point am I trying to make? That a lot of what I have written—my stories and my essays—have been inspired by my mother’s life. In a sense, she has always been my muse. When I write about her, I think I also write invariably about my own life and where I come from—and from her I take inspiration. My mother’s life has always been a source of encouragement. She defied all odds when she was younger to build a life for herself beyond the constraints of a small town existence. When she met challenges, she overcame them with determination and hard work, even when it took all of her. When the going became even tougher, she relied on her faith, but also on her will to survive. She was all guts and gusto. And through all that, she remained a beautiful person.
Ninety is a milestone, and a gift. Here’s to wishing my mother the best of all times, and the best of all worlds.
[This is Part 1 of my birthday essay, a memory piece to celebrate my upcoming 47th birthday. I’m trying to remember who I was and what made me by trying to recall four specific ages—7, 17, 27, and 37.]
When I was seven, I did not know the vagaries of time. [No child does.] The past did not exist when we were seven, or at least we were not aware of its growing but inchoate shadows; the future did not matter. There was only now, the waking moment, both in the short morning hours and the long afternoon march to evening—punctuated midway by the martial calls by Mother to take naps, to get out of her hair while she went about doing chores.
We resisted the naps, of course, and stewed with vehemence when we could not get out of the daily obligation. We’d ultimately succumb to sleep but in the defiant prologue before slumber, we anguished to spend those siesta hours furiously looking for play instead. Or looking for isolated space to spend solitary joys, away from the admonishing rejoinders of older, other people.
It was probably more the latter, when I was seven. Although I had yet to discover books at that age, I could already recognize the pleasures of the solo idyll, adventures without playmates: on my own, I imagined battlefields and lurking monsters in the vast backyard of the house we rented in front of Silliman Village; I imagined the wooden walls of our house hiding nooks and crannies that hid entire villages of tiny people; I imagined entire worlds sprung from my hand with my arsenal of paper and pen.
“Ian draws very well,” a friend of my Mother remarked. “He should be an engineer.”
I did not know what an engineer was.
When I was seven, I learned to read, so to speak, from a sticker posted on our front door, which contained the following phrase: “Jesus is Love.” I learned on my own that each letter was a sound, and that when I put all the sounds together, they formed a word I could understand. My portal to words was gnomic theology.
When I was seven, my world smelled of peanut butter and baye-baye and the acrid smell of chemical treatments to curl hair—the things with which Mother made a living.
When I was seven, I refused to go to school. Mother had enrolled me in first grade at North City Elementary School—although everyone called it “Piapi,” like the barangay it existed in—and I had gone along with what was expected of me those first few months of the school year of 1982-1983. I had a teacher named Mrs. Limpiado, and I liked her. She is fixed in my memory as a gentle, kind, and patient soul with white hair and spectacles. One morning, I arrived at school to find out that she had gone “on leave,” apparently to visit family in America—and we were going to be under a new teacher.
I did not like the new teacher at all.
She was not as nice as Mrs. Limpiado, not to my estimation.
She made me feel nervous—and one day, my nervousness probably got the better of me and I peed in my pants during class. Somebody noticed the uncharacteristic puddle on the wooden floor, and the telltale wetness on my khaki shorts. The new teacher was flustered, and my classmates laughed. I don’t remember the humiliation, but I remember thoroughly the resolve:
The next day, I refused to go back to school.
[This is the first time I have ever demonstrated a fierce refusal to endure something I could not bear, and how I could never be moved come hell or high water. I would do similar things later in life.]
Mother begged and cajoled me to go back. “You have to go to school!” she said. “You’re seven years old!” She promised me ice cream and toys and assorted things I was certain she could not afford. I refused.
I never did go back to school that year. [Which is the story of why I’m older than most of my classmates in later years.] The June before I turned eight, my family moved from that house in Bantayan in front of Silliman Village to a house inside a poblacion block along Silliman Avenue. I remember vividly the morning Mother took me to the corner of Alfonso Trese Street [now Perdices Street] and Calle San Juan, and said:
“If we go there”—pointing to the eastern side of the stretch—“we will find Chung Hua High School. Your brother Rey goes to school there. If we go there”—pointing to the opposite stretch—“we will find West City Elementary School. I have a lot of friends who are teachers there. Where would you like to go to school? Chung Hua? Or West?”
It must have made me feel like I had agency—a choice between two schools to restart my elementary school journey. For reasons clear to me that moment in that crossroad, all of me decided to go to West. I quarreled too much with my brother Rey.
When I was finally under the tutelage of the delightful Mrs. Valencia—who later became Mother’s regular hairdressing customer, and in whose house I first encountered Sinbad and James Bond on Betamax—I was not at all surprised to find out that the new principal in my new school was Mrs. Limpiado.
Last night, June 24, we were invited by our PETALS Dumaguete colleague Hanover Lenor to watch a gay basketball game in Lo-oc, which was part of the festivities the baranggay was holding for its fiesta. Who would have thought I would enjoy a basketball game this much? Certainly not me. I have always been loathe to playing the otherwise nationally popular game for certain reasons, and I consider all the times I had to play it just to pass P.E. in high school and college some of the worst memories I've had of growing up. I’ve had no trouble swimming or playing soccer and volleyball, but the mere suggestion of having to play basketball in my youth filled me with so much dread. It was a source of anxiety I could still vividly remember even now.
Still there was a time in my life when I recognized that loving basketball contained a certain social cache that could not be denied, and made you a member of a community you desperately longed to be part of. This meant following the games of the NBA or the PBA with a passion, and rooting for a team of your choosing [usually informed by an uncle or two]. This also meant hanging out with friends and playing hoops in a neighborhood court. I tried. I must have been about 10 or 11. I couldn’t hack it. I knew I was playing pretend. Eventually I stopped.
In high school, I played one or two games just to be able to pass P.E., and fumbled around the court like a mess who didn’t know how to dribble [and subsequently endured the jeers and laughter of lookers-on]. In college, I opted to write a paper about the game instead of playing it.
In hindsight, I know the game itself is not bad — it is in fact a powerful game to behold once you get to know its strategic gameplay, and how certain players have somehow defied physics to make a beautiful dance out of it. It is a beautiful game.
The truth of the matter is, basketball for many Filipino gay men [although not all] has always been synonymous with conforming to societal standards of masculinity that we fell short of. Basketball can be such a minefield of toxic masculinity, which is why many of us stay away from it.
But something was different in the game I watched last night in Lo-oc. In the presence of players who strutted to the basketball court in various attempts at drag — one was wearing a grassskirt, another one was in a gown, another one was in a small black dress, another one was in a bikini entirely made up of packaging tape, another one was in a dress that recalled the mascot from Julie's Bakeshoppe [the commentator, in fact, referred to her as “Julie’s Bakeshoppe” all throughout the game], and several others were in cheerleading costumes — I knew the game was in the service of undermining all the toxic masculinity I used to associate it with.
True, it was not thoroughly a technically-clean game. Early on, there was a tacit agreement to allow the players a pass for “travelling.” According to one judge, “Pasagdi ra na sila, wala na sila kabalo unsa’y travelling.” [This elicited good-natured laughter from the crowd.] And true, there were many missed chances by the players at scoring. But those things did not really matter. What mattered was the camaraderie among these gay players, who took to the game with a fantastic combination of fierceness and fairness. What mattered was the appreciative response of the Lo-oc crowd, who might have been lured initially to watching it by the circus-like promise of “mga bayot gadula og basketball” but ended up cheering for every shot made, and laughing with and not at the queens when they made some hilarious fumbles [and resorted to shenanigans]. What mattered was subverting the deeply masculine makeup of the game in our culture, and giving it a very nice gay vibe.
It was a game between young gay men from Sibulan and Dumaguete, by the way. Sibulan won. Con-drag-ulations, Lo-oc!
Currently watching Lou Salvador Sr.’s Barkada [1958] on Mike de Leon’s Casa Grande Vimeo page. A gritty precursor to Maryo J. de los Reyes’ Bagets [1984], it’s clearly a take-off from Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause [1955] with a dash of film noir and Dickens and a slew of Pinoy melodrama. I’ve been trying to define what attracts me to these old Filipino films on this site, besides being a cinephile and in spite of their bad fidelity. And then it struck me: it’s nostalgic throwback to my childhood in a Silliman Avenue neighborhood where I spent many afternoons watching RPN 9 classic Filipino cinema outside the window of my friend Ted-Ted’s mother’s house. We had no TV, so that was I got my entertainment as a very young boy in the late 80s.
Most mornings, I wake up before the city stirs. I breathe in the utter quiet and stillness of the early hours, lulling myself into believing that the moment is a womb, and there is no one else in the world.
This is usually around three o’clock. It is a waking hour that has become my life’s new surprising constant—and another evidence of how the pandemic has changed the DNA of our days. In the old life, in my night-owlish existence that had seemed set in stone, 3 AM would have been the time I would grudgingly start succumbing to sleep, fighting the drowsiness until my tired body lost the battle. But the hours and days since March have become floating and empty signifiers, and from that murk of timelessness, I have become a mutant: a morning person.
You know how it is to wake up in the earliest hours of morning? My question springs from the surprise of the ignorant. You see, I never knew until now that the early morning stillness had weight—a sweet embrace that feels like water in a pool—and I’ve since learned to take that in as an invitation to meditate. Or more often: as a repudiation of the craven, virus-filled world. For a few minutes, the silence has me believing nothing else existed beyond the cocoon of my bedroom, which is lit in the warmth of yellowish lamplight. It calms me. But it is a fantasy that does not last—the sound of early plying tricycles soon rips through the quiet, and the light of dawn creeps in through the windows. And then it is another day.
Most mornings, around five-thirty—every other day to be exact and when it does not happen to be drizzling—I’ve taken to another new surprising constant: walking. Who is this early morning waking, early morning walking person I have become? I don’t know. But I’m sure my suddenly useful white sneakers know. I reach for the pair in a ritual that now feels comfortable, and once properly clad—and with my facemask and ear buds on—I step out into the bluish hue of the outside world, and feel my body ease into the gravity of walking.
I have my preferred route for my morning walk, which is really encompassing the familiar and comforting geography of my childhood growing up in several houses along this very route. Was this by design? I’m not sure. From my apartment near Tubod, I go northward along Hibbad Avenue, then turn right on EJ Blanco Drive on the way to Piapi Beach, hopeful that I could catch the sunrise breaking from the horizon. Then I go northwards once more past Escaño and into the enclaves of Bantayan, turning left on Silliman Farm, on to Magbanua Road, turning left on Rovira Road, and then the tail-end of the walk homewards along Hibbard.
Sometimes I vary the route: sometimes I turn right on Rovira from Magbanua, and then take the road through Mango—and suddenly it is 1983 again, and I am a rail-thin first grader taking to this very road in the early morning to catch the flag ceremony at West City Elementary School. We lived for a while in a house a stone’s throw away from the Mormon church—a brief miserable period made happy only for the fact that we lived so close to Silliman Beach. The empty lots along Mango, which were fenceless and overgrown with flowering bushes where I used to chase butterflies or catch damang in matchboxes, are still empty lots today but are now fenced in—and there is the look of rot in their wild vegetation now, no longer paradise to butterfly-chasing children.
I very rarely take this route. It is potholed with vengeful ghosts.
Sometimes, when I feel impossibly adventurous, I go opposite my usual route. From my Hibbard Avenue turning point in Bantayan, I’ll find myself walking the entire southward direction of Flores Avenue, from Silliman Beach to Lo-oc, and then into the bricked walkway along the paseo of Rizal Boulevard, turning right into Burgos Street, and from Quezon Park walk all the way home to Tubod. I will have run out of my usual walking music from my Spotify playlist by the time I behold Rizal in his monument—and that’s when I tune in to the goddesses Sia, Robyn, Madonna, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Icona Pop, Sandra Bernhard, Janet Jackson, and Carly Rae Jepsen, in choice songs meant to add zest and wings to my last stretch home.
I have my preferred soundtrack for walking, of course. In my Spotify, it’s all cued up under a playlist titled “Meditative Zen”—consisting exactly an hour or so of mostly classical music that I love, which feels like the perfect complement to my morning routine. Walking past Harold’s Mansion in Tubod, the sound of Barber’s “Adagio for Strings, Op. 11” feels like a gentle nudge from dreaming to waking, the violin strings reaching out to some unformed hope. It is morning personified in sound.
Tubod—a sitio so named because there is a natural spring here where lavanderas of old used to wash the clothes of their clientele of Silliman students living in nearby dorms [now the spring has been paved over in concrete]—is old stomping ground for me. When I was in third grade until sixth, we lived in the basement of a wooden house somewhere in Tubod’s bowels, and when I close my eyes I can still recall the lavanderas chattering in the spring. Our mailing addresses insisted on calling the place “Springville” though; the sitio was aspirational that way.
By the time I turn right on EJ Blanco Drive in my morning walk, Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” kicks in, sometimes with the moon still hanging in the lightening blue of morning sky. And with Beethoven’s “Fur Elise,” I am watching the sunrise off Piapi Beach. On good days, the glint of bright sunlight swathes seaside Flores Avenue in golden hue, and the effect is striking. On very cloudy days, I see the shadow of rain pelting Siquijor, the sun peeking shy behind the mass of angry grey. But always—good day or not—in the low tide, and to the sound of Saint-Saëns’ “The Carnival of Animals,” the sight of distant figures poking in the shallows.
In the Escaño stretch going to Silliman Beach, I see the fishermen going about their boats and nets and fresh catch to the tune of Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” from Turandot. Some of them are shirtless, lazing about on the seawall with a mug of coffee in hand.
This is a long stretch of new road. Some people call this Cheesesticks Avenue. My music segues to Gounod’s “Ave Maria” as I change movement, my legs now going for an ambitious jog. I pass by what used to be the beachfront of old South Seas Resort, now paved over with concrete road. It is hard to believe that I was seven once, and my older brothers and I used to swim in the waters here, which is now a stretch of concrete road. Once we frolicked too long in the waters off South Seas and evening caught us, and as we swam to shore, we spied the hubbub of a party in the grounds of the old resort. I remember the bright lights and the sound of distant chatter and the big band music, and that inchoate wonder of stumbling upon a different world. I am now hearing the strains of Mozart’s “Requiem: Lacrimosa,” and my legs are aching from the effort of running.
When I turn left from the entrance to Silliman Beach, I hear the plaintive longing of Williams’ “Cavatina” from The Deer Hunter, and I suddenly break from the run and go back into brisk walking. My breathing is hard, and my shirt is clinging to my skin in alien sweat. Silliman Beach was my Bantayan childhood’s safe haven: I spent countless spirited days browning my skin here, playing in the surf with other kids whose names and faces I now no longer remember. And the tree-covered road along Silliman Farm—what is the name of this road? how do I not know the name of this road?—that leads to the beach will always be tinged in nostalgia for me. [The strains of Dvořák’s “Serenade for Strings in E Major Op.22.”] I love most of the split-level bungalows along this route of Silliman Park. Every morning, I see this middle-aged man going about the grounds of an immaculately kept house, walis tingting in hand, his zest for order and cleanliness gleaming like the house he lives in. Most mornings, I also see Colby Palm in a little veranda off his house, reading a book, sipping his coffee.
By the time I hear the strains of Massenet’s “Méditation” from Thaïs, I’m past the sad-looking houses in the next block of Silliman Park I see. I’m also past the entrance to Silliman Farm, gunning now for Magbanua Road, past the vast empty greens that mark the beginnings of Golden Rule. Why do we call this place “Golden Rule”? Do we still call this stretch of lonely road “Golden Rule”? I run past the sad shadow of what was once the glorious Hikaban, the late Elena Maquiso’s center for traditional arts. I run past the Mamicpic residence, but I never see Leo. [Once I caught Jasmine, his niece, walking the dog.]
Eastwards of Rovira and swerving right into Hibbard, Giacchino’s “Life and Death” from Lost begins. This stretch of place—where Piapi gives way to Bantayan—was my childhood neighborhood thrice, first when I was around six and we lived in a wooden house fronting Silliman Village, which is no longer there; and then from my high school years and we lived in an amakan house fronting ABC Learning Center, which is also no longer there. So many things are no longer there. [And so many of the old places I love have also been paved over with concrete.] After college, we finally moved into a house of our very own beside Silliman Village, where my mother now resides gracefully in her greying years. She is 86. But I don’t live with her, and this is not yet home. I still have a lot of ground to cover before I am home. I stop at the entrance to the little road that leads to the family house, and from my spot along the highway I see in the distance my mother’s bedroom window. I wish her good morning in the truest sense of “social distance.”
This is my last stretch of morning walk, and I take it easy. By the time I hear Saint-Saëns’ “Le Cygne,” I’ve gone past North City Elementary School [where I once spent a grand total of one month trying out first grade before stubbornly dropping out] and I stop by the curbside vendor selling puto maya and tsokolate at the corner of EJ Blanco and Hibbard. The stand is recessed into the ugly concrete embankment that had swallowed the beautiful willow tree garden of old Casa Flores, now gone. The puto maya is ten pesos per cone-pack of banana leaves. I buy twenty pesos worth for breakfast, and ten pesos worth of tsokolate. Tradition is comfort.
I turn when Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel”—which is eternally mournful and nostalgic—finally leads me the rest of the way home in Aldecoa Drive. It occurs to me there is more to my morning walk than just a token for fitness. It has become a map of memory, sometimes for the good, sometimes for the heartbreak.
But I also think it has become a quest for moments, and this is the lesson it has to teach me. What is beholding a moment, and remembering what is lost, except basking in the brief beauty of things? There’s the rising sun, and it is beautiful, and it presages another day—and it moves on. It’s effervescence we worship: the futility of stillness, the end of a cycle of music, the past paved over by concrete, and even when we store them in our memories, we know these too will erode, or sink into the cold comforts of forgetting. But we still love waking up early to see the sunrise anyway.
I really would like to borrow my costume again from our production of Elsa Coscolluella’s In My Father’s House [2013, directed by Amiel Leonardia] and just strut around the city pretending it’s still 1940.
8:29 PM |
Remembering Mom Edith on Her 9th Death Anniversary
I took this photo of Edith Tiempo in May of 2000 when we were having a break from the workshop session on our second Wednesday, the summer I became a fellow for fiction in the oldest creative writing program of its kind in Asia that she co-founded. We were in a "resort" somewhere in Bacong, now abandoned, which was infamous then for having an entire airplane right inside the compound, where guests could enter and clamber around the interiors, useful for our imagining ourselves in flight for somewhere else. I used to do sepia portraits of every single fellow and panelist, from 2000-2005, and this was part of that project. I'd remember this photo session because Mom Edith just seemed so relaxed. "Just capture me how I am now," she said. I did. And since then I've seen this photo published in many books, modules, and websites, sometimes repurposed for other artworks -- sans credit, hehehe. I remember the day she died in 2011. We were just ramping up for the serious start of Silliman University's weeklong Founders Day festivities -- and I was in a cafe about to enjoy coffee when I got the text message, which sent me racing to the Silliman University Medical Center. By then it was too late, and then soon began the challenge of planning and executing the State Funeral of a National Artist, made more challenging because we were doing it outside of Manila. It was a week of steep learning all sorts of protocols; a lot of sleepless nights -- but I did it because ̛I truly loved her as a mentor. I remember how patient she was with me whenever I visited her, to listen to her stories, or to seek her advice. Much has been made over the fact that many call her "Mom," some of them unkind, but you'd know why this is so if you had the privilege of being mentored by her, of just being in her presence. She simply exuded a one-of-a-kind maternal warmth, but one that's also exacting of your art. We will forever miss her.
[98th of 100]. When Nora Ephron died in 2012, I had no idea I would be so devastated -- and still continue to be so until now. Her body of work [all those movies, all those books...] and her life [all that love for cooking, for reading in bed, and for friends...] were seriously aspirational for me, and even how she chose to lead the last years of her life knowing that she had leukemia [she wrote books and a play, she directed Julie & Julia, she kept her condition secret from friends] felt like the blueprint of an artist who knew what she was doing, and to remain creative till the end. Above all, she seemed to know just how exactly to live, and then to use how she lived to tell her stories. "Everything is copy," she believed. And how splendidly she demonstrated that philosophy, from her novel and subsequent screenplay of Heartburn [which dramatised her marriage to and divorce from journalist Carl Bernstein], to her play Love, Loss, and What I Wore [co-written with her sister Delia, which collected the stories of their female friends], to her various essay collections [which collected her journalism and her often amusing takes on everything, even the loose skin on her neck], and to the documentary on her life [which is titled, of course, Everything is Copy]. She mines her own travails at love [as well as that of director Rob Reiner's] in the screenplay of this wonderful 1989 film, which became her lasting contribution to the genre of romantic comedy, on top of those she later directed on her own, which would include the equally wonderful Sleepless in Seattle [1993] and You've Got Mail [1998]. It was this film that introduced me to her, although it would take me time to consider the tightly-structured screenplay to be part of the film's appeal for me. I still remember watching the movie in the theater because I was 14 when I saw it, and because I braved a typhoon to get there. I have no idea what possessed me to leave the house that day in October 1989 when Typhoon Saling was unleashing the edges of its fury on Dumaguete. I remember deciding to go downtown, I remember the tricyle ride, I remember the gusts of wind [and a flying tree branch], I remember the pelting rain and the flood -- and I remember finally getting to the safety of Ever Theater in the late afternoon, where I found myself immersed in this story of Harry [Billy Crystal] and Sally [Meg Ryan], who argue at the start whether men and women could truly become friends without sex [or the though of sex] getting in the way. I was perhaps too young for the movie's adult preoccupations on relationships but I remember being enchanted by it. Later on, when I learned more about film in general, and this one in particular, I'd chalk up that enchantment to the chemistry of the stars, the organic direction, the witty screenplay, the American standards soundtrack by Harry Connick Jr., and the lush cinematography capturing New York through the changing seasons [but mostly autumn]. Then there are the magical moments that have made the movie iconic, including Meg Ryan's orgasm scene in a deli, topped off by the line, "I'll have what she's having," from one of the extras surrounding them [actually Mr. Reiner's mother]. When I was studying in Tokyo in 1997, I came across the movie's published screenplay in my dorm, which I then proceeded to devour simply because it was so good -- and that was when I first came across Nora Ephron's name for real. Reading the screenplay, it struck me how ingeniously structured the film was, and this relayed to me for the first time the importance of writing for the visual medium: without a screenplay, there really can't be any film. I love how it's told in episodes from fractured moments of more than a decade of the characters meeting and going. I love its interlaced segments where older married couples narrate to the camera their stories of how they met. I love that it starts with our main couple detesting each other. I love how they're surrounded by truly remarkable supporting characters -- Carrie Fisher's Marie and Bruno Kirby's Jess above all. I love that it's about love, or at least the search for it, but renders the drama in an intelligent way, carefully balancing the gender perspectives in the process. When people disparage the genre of romantic comedy as something empty and saccharine, this is always my rebuttal -- and I always win. Thank God for Nora Ephron for writing this, and Rob Reiner staying true to her vision directing this. What's the film?
[92nd of 100]. There will always be resistance to films like this. Some of my favorite writers and critics dismissed it when it opened in 1965 and became a box office behemoth. For Vogue, Joan Didion wrote: “[It was] more embarrassing than most, if only because of its suggestion that history need not happen to people ... Just whistle a happy tune, and leave the Anschluss behind." Famously for McCall’s, Pauline Kael wrote: "Whom could it offend? Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated in this way and are aware of how self-indulgent and cheap and ready-made are the responses we are made to feel.” Even its male lead, Christopher Plummer, had more than just reservations for its popularity, calling it "The Sound of Mucus," and why? "Because it was so awful and sentimental and gooey," he said -- although in recent years, he has had a change of heart, accepting finally and unreservedly the place of this film in the hearts of many people across so many generations. I'm one of those people -- and I will note that my love for movies began because I fell in love with this film when I was ten years old. In 1985, the film was celebrating its 20th anniversary, and 20th Century Fox decided to rerelease it in theaters worldwide. I was in the third grade, I'd heard older people around me wax ecstatic about it. You must understand this: in those pre-Internet and pre-cable days, once a film left the theaters, it left for good, recollected only in the memories of those who were lucky enough to catch it. Home video in Betamax format was fairly new in the mid-1980s, and only families with means could afford a machine, and even if they had one, there were no video shops to rent from. Films in Betamax were sent in by family members who lived abroad, and so we got used to visiting with fair regularity rich neighbors with home video, and also got used to watching the same titles over and over again. And so, when the filmmed version of this Rodgers and Hammerstein musical was rereleased in 1985, it felt like an event for people in Dumaguete [and elsewhere] who wanted very much to see the film that so enchanted them twenty years before. Some enterprising teachers in my public school got into the act, booking one screening for a fundraiser, and sold tickets to all the students. I remember buying mine for the small fortune of ten pesos [regular tickets sold for five] and on the appointed screening time I trooped to the orchestra section of Park Theater, had to settle for an SRO crowd, and basked in the musical delights of Maria, Captain Von Trapp, and their seven children. It was the stuff of pure magic -- and one has to commend Rodgers and Hammerstein for creating a whole body of music that was intensely singable. For days, my classmates and I talked of nothing else except this movie. We acted scenes out, we sang the songs with butchered lyrics. Soon one of us brandished a cassette of the movie's entire score, and that girl was instantly everyone's best friend. We listened to the songs ad infinitum, and I believe every single bit of them is now part of my DNA. Much later, after the EDSA revolution of 1986, public television would come to Dumaguete in the form of PTV 10, and finally the static of those who owned TV would have broadcast images to go with their set -- and because PTV 10's local programming was scarce [only the local news, with the very young Alex Pal as anchor], the channel turned to broadcasting movies [I believe in bootlegged capacity] with tapes they happened to have around. It was a hodge podge of titles, some were good, most were bad, and then there was the heavy rotation of James Bond titles. [I remember this was how I first saw Stephen Frear's My Beautiful Laundrette. Imagine seeing that film on public television!] We watched these movies on PTV 10, which really became our pre-cable HBO, and as the months passed by you could feel everyone's collective wish: "When are they going to show that Julie Andrews musical?" When it finally did air, all of Dumaguete rejoiced! Some years ago, when I was already a working adult, my old barkada and I would find ourselves doing a day trip to Bais, and for some reason, all of us in the car just started singing "I Have Confidence," Maria's anthem of moving forward and having an adventure. We remembered every word, which surprised us, and by the end of that spirited and impromptu sing-along, we were laughing so hard. That would become one of my cherished memories with friends. When I was ten, this film introduced me to magic, which evolved into an enduring love for film -- perhaps a preoccupation to recapture the thrill of that initial encounter. I'm glad I was young when I first saw it, untouched by the jaded cares of adulthood -- and it does happen: in my turn, I've hated films other people have loved, like Life is Beautiful or Patch Adams, finding their emotionality dreadful. We do learn as we mature more to resist the happy and the sentimental, calling endeavors of the type as saccharine, over-indulgent, false in its undisturbed positivity. But I can never think of this 1965 musical that way. What's the film?
2:39 PM |
Nancy Drew in the Public Domain!
