Siftings
The May elections, for starters (Part III)
Since I’ve finished with my will-not-vote-for list and my-chosen-candidate-must-possess-these-qualities list, I will finish up with my Wish list. Here goes, starting from political tidbits to tidbits of another kind.
I wish:
That Manny Pacquiao would not continue his plans of being a congressman and concentrate on being a boxer. And he should stop trying (as in trying hard) to be an actor: he just ain’t got the looks, the voice, the acting talent, the charm, the It-factor, to be an actor! Star na siya, sa boxing ring, with the billions of pesos under his starried belt, like his tukayo (who’s spending billions on his campaign). He should concentrate on being a role model for athletes and the youth. But look at him. He has all this unsavory media exposure re his liaison with Krista, which will probably not affect his candidacy in GenSan but has adversely affected the box-office take of his movie. Or did it? It could be that people just did not relish watching a movie replete with Manny’s lack of good looks and acting, with a lousy, predictable plot a la action cum romance film. Mas gusto ng masa ang love stories megged by Cathy Garcia Molina with yummy-looking talents like Bea Alonzo, John Lloyd Cruz, Sam Milby, Anne Curtis and the like. Can’t blame them, esp. if you’re a housemaid or a street sweeper who has to pay good money to get into an air conditioned moviehouse to be able to get out of the dreary conditions of your job and/or place of abode. Certainly, they would go for the glossy romance of “Miss You Like Crazy” or some such, with the bankable tandem of Bea and Lloydie whose good looks would enable them to escape the realities of the poverty and dullness of their lives !
That Aling or Mommy Dionisia would stop (come to think of it, has the hype around her ceased?) being such a positively unpalatable example of a Senior Citizen gone wild (or would- be Sr. citizen?). Instead of being a respectable, respected and respectful mother of a celebrity, she has become a rather disillusioning sample of the nouveau riche’s lack of taste. Imagine flaunting all her money, jewelry, clothes, etc., splashed in print media with accompanying TV exposure. No wonder she has to have bodyguards around her. But she is no positive role model for mothers and grandmothers with her concentrated efforts to forget the poverty of her past: she is not depicted as a doting Filipino grandmother, not even as Filipino mother, except in a few clips from past boxing matches of Manny where she was shown praying for him with rosary in hand. I have never seen her going out of her way to do charity work by way of thanking God for the material things coming her way via her son’s triumph in the ring. But then, Dionisia is just – Dionisia. A poorly educated daughter of the masa, a struggling mother when she was bringing up her children alone, having been left by her husband; and now that her son is a billionaire, she is drunk, rendered punch-drunk almost, by all that money and accolades. And she is taking what’s due her, in terms of the perks and honors that seem endlessly pouring in. But now, after May, she will be the Mama of a Congressman. I hope by that time, she will have the sobriety to stop filling her clothes cabinets with cocktail dresses and dancing shoes and signature bags and start looking at where she had come from and maybe act the respectable dignified Ma and Grandma we Filipinos expect our Mas and Grandmas to be, never mind if the media keep knocking on her doors to interview her about her latest duet with some singer or her imagined liaison with her DIs or her dancing shoes so reminiscent of the frivololity of another woman’s shoes which contributed to the downfall of that other celebrity. Because, frankly, I am up to here in disgust with such antics. Tama na! Sobra na ang pagkakaroon ng fun at her expense! Fun for the media, fun for the masa. Pity our sensibilities and the poor misguided woman.
My last wish concerns last month’s celebration of Arts Month, that it should have reached more people other than the students at our campuses that participated in the events, like UP Visayas. There were film showings, exhibits, presentations. And one such which deserves kudos for a spectacular, sustained-energy performance, is the UP Varsity Pep Squad in concert. I was expecting a rather predictable one-and a-half hour performance of cheerleading acrobatics in terms of leaps, somersaults, spins and rolls, pyramid-building, etc, I was totally delighted by the Pep Squad’s concert repertoire of not just the academic cheerleading routines which were admittedly of championship caliber (they were Champions of UAAP Cheerdance competition for 2007 and 2008) but also of world-class numbers of modern ballet and jazz, which reminded me of the works of Jerome Robbins and Alvin Hailey in the 1970’s, when then First Lady Imelda Marcos’ Cultural Programs invited international artists to perform here. I was fortunate to watch them in those dark years of Martial Rule, because I was with UP Los Baños. At that time, both my husband and me were strong and young enough to tackle the rigors of driving to Manila to go to CCP or Folk Arts Center to watch world-class performances by the likes of Dance Margot Fonteyn, the Australian Ballet and others of like caliber, like pianist Van Cliburn. But the height of artistic experience was for me to watch the Bolshoi Ballet with its then reigning Prime Ballerina, the great Maya Plisetskaya who performed “The Dying Swan” to the music of Camille Saint-Saens and brought tears to every eye in the gallery where I sat. We were all so mesmerized that one could hear a pin drop. And when the great Plisetskaya’s dying swan twitched her last dying twitch and breathed her last dying breath to the dying pulse of the music, the audience, from its intense concentrated silence, erupted into such thunderous applause that we the audience seemed as one as we rose to our collective feet and gave her the homage she richly deserved! It was tremendous, magnificent, truly awesome. In all my years of experiencing performances, no other has come close to duplicating that one!
But back to the UP Pep Squad. As my friend Prof./Direk Fred Diaz of UPV High School in Iloilo/ UPV AC T enthused, they were very refreshing, indeed. And I added: “Daw sa nagligo ka lang sa busay!” Which is an experience we should all be undergoing in this very hot time of El Niño. (To be continued)
