The original Ms. Congeniality

I SYMPATHIZE but have to agree with Sen. Joker Arroyo, who told a national daily that he wasn’t attending last Monday’s State of the Nation Address (Sona) because: first, no one called the roll; second, he would not be missed; and third, he would stay home and do what everyone else did, watch the beauties parade in what is now The Filipiniana Sona.

Let it not be said that Filipinos don’t appreciate beauty. They even marry them. The rest of us live vicariously through beauty pageants, vote by SMS and Facebook for favorites, and even name our children after slant-eyed embodiments of beauty’s universal, even inter-stellar, appeal.

Actually, I have no proof that Martians watch as avidly gown and swimsuit competitions. Our Pinoy obsession with “Ms.” titles has colonial roots.

In January 1908, when the First Assembly was just inaugurated, Governor-General James Smith needed a celebration to further melt local resistance. According to Alfred McCoy and Alfredo Roces in “Philippine Cartoons,” the first organizer, Captain Langhorne, asked for P50,000 to build a cockpit, exhibit half-naked Igorots, and hold amusements.

Horrified by the prospect of a freak show that would congeal hostility, Smith turned to his Secretary of Commerce, Cameron Forbes. The Boston financier asked only for P15,000 and raised another P15,000 through subscriptions to pursue a “ritual celebration of Philippine-American progress”.

Forbes proposed a carnival. Its highlight would be a beauty contest to select a Queen of the Occident and a Queen of the Orient.

The American community chose the sister of Customs Collector, G. R. Colton.
The Filipinos, though, initially recoiled. Elite Manileños felt it degrading to parade their women. When Smith asked Mariano Limjap to allow his daughter Leonarda to join, the business leader and founder of the Federalist Party said he “did not want to be talked about”.

Lipag Kalabaw and the Philippines Free Press denounced the Americans’ debasement of Filipinas. Lipag Kalabaw, which skirted stringent libel laws by having no masthead and using only pen names for artists and writers, ran a satirical cartoon, entitled “Paghanap ng Reina (Buscando Reina),” showing Americans bringing lanterns and conducting a search in the city’s brothels.

Yet beauty melts all hearts. Manileños voted with cash for their candidates. On February 1908, a maritime parade in Manila Bay climaxed in the meeting of the Queen of the Orient and the Queen of the Occident, complete with garlands of cadena de amor, flowers that creep among and cover tombs but was ironically used by the American colonials to show how fate “unites eternally the countries of East and West”.

The Queen of the Orient, Pura Villanueva of Molo, Iloilo, was smashing in a “stunning gown of flowing folds draped with strings of pearls”. While bands played and crowds cheered, the Queens “opened seven days of bread and circus”.

The Carnival became the two-week highlight of Manila’s social calendar. Daughters of the wealthiest families competed fiercely, in their demure, well-bred ways, for the title of Carnival Queen. Aside from sating vanity, the title guaranteed good marriages. The 1920 Carnival Queen, Trinidad de Leon, married Manuel A. Roxas, future president. After her 1922 reign, Queen Virginia Llanas married her escort, Carlos Romulo, future foreign minister.

Even the press lapped up the Carnival. Except for a brief salvo of anti-Americanism, the prickly Free Press and other papers got too busy printing ballot papers for the beauty competition. In 1926, the Carnival Committee replaced the Carnival Queen with a nationwide search for the first “Ms. Philippines”. Only World War II halted Manila’s annual Carnival.

Our love for beauty contests endures. Then and now, it is difficult to weed out the seeds planted in colonized hearts.


mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131


*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 29, 2012 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column

“Aspin” TLC

THEY fetch at least P500 now: melt-your-heart furballs yipping to be let out of their baskets under the skywalk at Fuente Osmeña.

When I was a child, the aspin (asong Pinoy) was the cheapest dog a child could ask for and be sure to get.

My father would have filled our house with aspin puppies someone was always giving away. Then and now, families got an aspin or two because they made excellent guards and cost little to feed. I gave up on counting the oscillations made by the tails of our wagging aspins whenever we filled recycled ice cream containers with the mash consisting of leftovers, the cheapest variety of corn meal and water. (Not included here are the hateful liver and greens that tumbled from my plate to my favorites under the table.)

My father was not unkind to animals. He loved them, specially dogs whose loyalty he rated more highly than that of humans. I used to think the reason my mother moved out of our house and we had rare visitors were the ownership rights the dogs took on all the seats in our sala. Even if you didn’t know Sheba from Beetle, you could smell that this was her couch. Any visitor with a cold could still not miss the baleful bug-eyed perusal Beetle (half-native, half-something) gave to ankles that got too close to her perch.

It was just part of aspin love to be cavalier about taking care of them. They were cheap because they were so healthy. Nothing except overspeeding drivers or drunkards threatened their existence. Whenever a dog had a rash from eating chicken or seafood leftovers, my father simply rubbed some used grease from his Beetle (the Germany-made one). In no time, a new tuft of fur bristled under my hand.

In exchange for fierce and unconditional aspin love, we gave up a few comforts, like pristine floors and walls. Brushing with soap only spreads car grease complicated with dog hair. I was fond, though, of the blots I made squelching lice made plump with dog blood.

One.did.not.give.aspins.a.bath. They sometimes allowed me to comb their coat for obstinate lice. However, weekly attempts to bathe them ended up with my being soaked from 50 percent water from the hose and 50 percent from the water pellets the dog speed-shook off.

Living with aspins also meant a catless existence. A cat crazy enough to disregard the territorial doses of urine that our dozen or so aspins marked our home with was a dead one.

Later, my father brokered some peace by raising an aspin puppy and kitten. He believed a shared food bowl worked better for animals than peace declarations among humans. From the sequence of feline hissing, followed by canine yelping, that punctuated our domestic quiet, I think my father was fooled by a too dainty way of walking and too much rubbing and tail-twining around the legs.

“Aspin” for “asong Pinoy” was coined by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) to replace the derogatory “askal (asong kalye)” or street mut. Is there a term invented for cats, who, by nature, are always on the prowl. “Puspin”? The cat that’s a pushover has not yet been bio-engineered.

In this city where I am temporarily based, the most popular draws in malls are not only the ones on sale. These are the pet spas. It’s a cube encased in glass. On one side are the hoi polloi, the human fans who watch purebred pet s, on the other side of the glass, get a week’s worth of stress-busters: manicure, pedicure, earwax removal, haircut, shampoo, blow-dry, coat-brush, teeth-brush, flossing, a new tartan coat, puppy Pampers or pastel Skoonchy.

While I do spend some time reading and comparing labels for the shampoo (mint over citrus) of Udo (half-native, half-Lab), I think the human halves of aspins should, at the very least, nourish them properly and avail of free government services for anti-rabies injections, neutering and spaying.

Getting a puppy means also loving them long after they outgrow that butterball cuteness. Aspins are smart and can be taught to know which ex should be driven off the property pronto. We must keep our dogs off the streets where they risk being run over, turned into “sumsuman (drinking tidbit),” or napped to protect the public.

With tender loving care (TLC), you and your aspin will go a long way.



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com, mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 22, 2012 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column

Dolphy

I DON’T find Dolphy funny. My sons do.

When we watch reruns of Tagalog movies, Dolphy tickles my teenagers. He makes me wince.

I would much rather watch Redford White except that he made fewer movies than Dolphy. Since he was a Cebuano who got a break in the big pond of Manila, I wonder if what he did effortlessly well—play the country bumpkin who bumbles around but eventually humbles the big bad city—could be considered as acting.

Dolphy played a wider variety of roles. Viewed against accounts of the scores of women he was involved with, his portrayals of gays are intriguing. How did he know how they felt? Where did his characters come from?

The gays I know have rapier-sharp wit and cutting humor. If their wrists are limper than mine or if they sway and swing more than a biological female was engineered for, it’s not because they’re parodying themselves.

So I wonder where Dolphy’s flamboyant crossdressers or even the Facifica Falayfay and Fefita Fofonggay immortalized in his movies comes from. I miss and am still hoping there will be a reshowing of Lino Brocka’s “Ang Tatay kong Nanay”.

Except for his well-received portrayal of Dioscoro “Coring” Derecho in the only Dolphy-starred vehicle that Brocka directed, Dolphy’s gays make me and others come too uncomfortably close to saying aloud, “faggot”. When an actor reduces the complexity of a human being to a set of traits that are closer to biases than reality, it’s not acting. It’s branding.

And it becomes more disturbing when an actor stoops to caricatures to milk a few laughs.

The Dolphy character I am fond of is John Puruntong. He didn’t try hard to become funny. It seemed that he wasn’t even trying to be funny. His deadpan, spot-on portrayal of the quiet, long-suffering but essential head of the household—who only wanted to be left alone, spared the upheavals and dramas that rocked his domestic kingdom but incapable of turning his back on wife, children and neighbors, including the suspicions, machinations and signature sermon of his mother-in-law—had a core of authenticity, of honesty, even of pathos.

When John in “puruntong” (roomy shorts serving also as underwear) and old shirt would curl up on his spartan wooden bed, with a much dented colander for a pillow, he made me think of the countless fathers who deserve their rest at the end of another day of sacrificing for loved ones.

That Dolphy was confident about and secure in his craft could be gleaned from the way he shared the stage of primetime TV (specially powerful in the 1970s-80s, long before computers and the Internet) with other comedians like Dely Atay-Atayan, who played his wealthy mother-in-law, and Matutina, the sidekick who was always directed to sweep Donya Delilah’s house for bills to give to the penniless John, who never accepted.

The talents and on- and off-screen rapport of the “John en Marsha” team (Ading Fernando created and co-directed with Al Quinn) created the humor that was the hallmark of the best of the “John en Marsha” episodes.

Even while laughing at the Puruntongs, we realized how we, too, had to laugh at our own foibles: mistaking money for more than it is or treating differently the poor and the rich. “John en Marsha” was more stimulating and memorable than a sermon on responsible parenthood or treatise on social justice.

Should Dolphy be declared a National Artist?

We miss the point, with our propensity to force sentimentality to compensate for imagined lapses or even to let mobthink rule on matters that have a process for deliberation and decision-making.

The man made us laugh. Even harder, he made us not laugh even while we were laughing.

He touched lives. He is loved. He is remembered. He lives on.

What award can surpass these? Daghang salamat, Rodolfo Vera Quizon Sr.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 15, 2012 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column