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Manila Bulletin devider Opinion devider The empty chair

The empty chair

Published Jun 24, 2024 04:20 pm

MEDIUM RARE

Jullie Y. Daza

There we sat, around a round table that the Chinese call a lauriat table, “lau” and “diat” meaning a celebration. With Ray and Auntie Baby Arleen Fernandez presiding, we took our seats – Dr. Nemi Platon and her husband Johnny, who drove all the way from the family-owned maternity hospital in Batangas City; Nitz and Ed Toledo; myself and my companion. Two seats would’ve been for Hollywood-based fashion designer Oliver Tolentino and his partner Andrew, but Oliver was tied down in Bangkok, where he presented a 29-piece collection for a fashion show celebrating Philippine-Thai friendship.


So there we were, in Makati at New World Hotel’s Jasmine restaurant, where an empty chair, upholstered in a subdued red and standing to the right of Auntie Baby, was reserved for Princesse Fernandez, whom we lost five years ago. She was 51 (though she could’ve passed for 40), statuesque and beautiful. She could’ve been a movie star like some of Oliver’s Hollywood-based clients, but Princesse’s high IQ qualified her to be a Mensa scholar and a feng shui advocate, and this dinner was being celebrated in her memory. Combining the wisdom of the ages with contemporary knowledge, Princesse was the embodiment of beauty and brains, with feet firmly planted on terra firma; thus her suggestions to those seeking advice were entirely practical, nothing out-of-this-world fantastical, for example, “Get out of the house. Go out and socialize. Fortune awaits beyond your doors.”


At the end of the 10-course meal – duck, crab, lobster, fish – Auntie Baby distributed marble-size gems in a heavenly shade of blue to Princesse’s friends, the ones who miss her, surely and sorely. Called aqua aura quartz, it’s “the synergistic fusion of clear quartz and gold . . . that elevates consciousness, opening channels to divine guidance” while its ethereal light “fills your spirit and expands your heart to new possibilities.” For magic to work, you’ve got to believe in magic.


It would be magic if I could draw a map on my brain like a London taxi driver. This is by way of apologizing to my friend Charisse Chuidian, VP for marketing of City of Dreams, for giving the wrong directions to her hotel casino resort. The correct address for City of Dreams is Entertainment City in Parañaque.

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