When I told my research team of millennials at the University of the Philippines that Tesa and I were going to watch a concert by James Taylor, I was met with blank stares and polite smiles that seemed to say, “James who?” So, I asked Janus Nolasco to accompany me on guitar while I sang...
Category: Featured Stories
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Solidarity is also served at Palestinian Filipino food line
After attending the Veneration of the Cross at the University of the Philippines Diliman’s Parish of the Holy Sacrifice on Good Friday, I went straight to Our Little Gaza Kitchen in Don Antonio Heights, Quezon City. The event was announced online a few days earlier and shared by over 100 within hours. It was pegged...
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When you hit the road and ‘feel the wonderful wind on your face’
“Let me tell you what I think of bicycling,” the American activist Susan B. Anthony once said. “I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a...
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Smelling good (without going into debt to buy French perfume)
I used to have a keen sense of smell. It’s probably a vestigial faculty from my ancestors who, as hunter-gatherers in the wild of Panay, needed all their five senses heightened. But my nose has been dulled by age, Metro Manila’s pollution, and my own careless olfactory experiments. Once, I almost killed myself by being...
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Easy like Sunday afternoon
The woman has apparently just risen from her wheelchair and her companions seem to be urging her to take a few steps forward. But ever so gently: You feel love pervading the tight little scene as you walk past it on this Sunday afternoon at the UP Oval late In January, when the sun’s rays...
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In the highlands with the grand old lady of ‘batok’
Carpe diem! What do Apo Whang-Od and I have in common? Let me (presumptuously) try to count the ways. Apo Whang-Od, the oldest living tattoo artist—mambabatok—has become Vogue’s oldest cover star, and I have branded myself as the oldest stariray with tattooed arms in my clan. And like her, I have a following, too! My...
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Memory machine
So Lyra up and did what she said she had long planned. One evening last week she came home laughing and gleeful from a jaunt with a friend, toting a shiny black box marked “Motorino” and daring her sister and me: “Guess what! Guess what!” But I was distracted and annoyed by breaking news on...
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(There’s) always something to remind me of Burt
First things first. I am not a huge fan of Burt Bacharach, who died last Feb. 8 in his 90s, triggering a global wave of mourning. But I do have fond memories associated with him. So this is a love letter (sort of) to a pop icon in a non-fangirling way. It was the turbulent...
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A Valentine for Lualhati
If there’s one person who’d probably be glad that award-winning writer Lualhati Bautista has crossed to the other side, it would be Nanay, my mother, arguably her No. 1 fan. I can imagine Nanay peering through the Pearly Gates to check if her idol had safely embraced the light, and getting ready to spring on...
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Poor youths play band music in key of a better life
PANDAN, Antique—Rising on his toes, Juanito Maglunob moved his arms upward as though he were hanging laundry on a clothesline to reach and capture that climactic moment in the musical score of “Beauty and the Beast.” Satisfied with the response, he resumed his normal stance and continued to conduct 14 musicians barely out of their...