MEDIUM RARE Like most people, my mother was my first teacher. She was a real teacher, with a bachelor’s degree in elementary education. Yaya Andrea was a real public school teacher who helped me with my Tagalog and handicraft projects, plus her uncanny knowledge of the names of flowers, plants,...
MEDIUM RARE A prophesy has been made by the United Nations that the next pandemic will be a familiar condition called loneliness. In a one-act play, Lea Salonga and Dolly de Leon take turns playing an anonymous middle-aged character who their audiences assume is an overseas Filipino worker,...
MEDIUM RARE When a tree falls in the forest but no one hears it, did a tree fall in the forest? Can a musician make music without touching someone? What is the use, or usefulness, of music if there is no one to hear it? It may be a philosophical or rhetorical question, but how many...
MEDIUM RARE I don’t know much about architecture, I only know what I like, what I see when I step into a house for the first time. For such a house as old as Goldenberg Mansion, built in 1898 and one of the gems that form the President’s residential estate, it has got to be the prettiest of the...
MEDIUM RARE “Look at you all, such great potential!” That was Imelda R. Marcos speaking to a roomful of about 40 ladies and one or two gentlemen, here for the fourth in a series of first-Tuesday-of-the-month Merienda with Meldy in Malacañang’s Goldenberg Mansion. “You can do so much...
MEDIUM RARE On the same day that the alliance of PBBM’s 12 senatorial candidates was announced, this newspaper featured an article headlined on its opinion page: “Accompanying Him were the Twelve and some women” – the 12 meaning the first disciples of Jesus. Among the senatorial bets were...
Medium Rare With the rain making its own music – pitter-patter mixed with sibilance, a hiss intimating a whispered conversation – the tribute to piano legend Nena del Rosario-Villanueva was about to begin. Minutes before 2 p.m., the impromptu concert hall of Manila Pianos on Magallanes...
MEDIUM RARE How about starting a new religion? Christianity is 2,000 years old. Buddhism – not a religion but way of life – is older. Agnostics and atheists abound, then as now, or else nobody bothered to ask anybody what or who they believed in, or if they considered superstitions as a...
MEDIUM RARE A young man was playing his cello with such verve and emotion, as if he’s been doing it for ages, so I told him, “It’s like you’ve survived a whole lot of heartaches and heartbreaks. But you’re only 17.” He replied, “Yes, ma’m, but that was in the past.” Ah, so!...
MEDIUM RARE Just when you’re about to declare the start of a fruitarian diet, comes news that when you eat a sweet, ripe mango now, it will be like biting into gold. In the palengke – not supermarket, where prices are a few pesos higher – mangoes have goldened from P270 a kilo to P350,...
MEDIUM RARE It’s the night of the harvest moon, also known as the mid-autumn festival with its mooncakes, family gatherings, and poets and lovers having their share of moon-gazing – unless the rain spoils all such plans, as it seems to be in the habit of doing every year right around this week...
MEDIUM RARE Forget your K-drama. Forget the poverty porn of the last century. (I still remember how Lino Brocka said he had to “smuggle” a copy of his “Insiang” out of the country, for fear that then first lady Imelda Marcos would stop it from reaching the Cannes Film Festival for...
