’twas butch perez who warned me that peque was going, and soon gone.  and for a while i couldn’t get enough of the facebook posts and photos of the time when our paths first crossed, around 1980.  i had just started writing for print, mostly tv reviews, and reading birthcharts on the side.  he was back in manila after a spell in bacolod, and he heard about me from mitch valdes whom i had just given a reading.  he wanted one, too, re his production team-up with bacolod boys ronnie lazaro and kokoy jimenez — would it work?

i don’t remember how that went exactly, except that i got to meet ronnie and kokoy :)) but peque knew his astrology and i have no doubt that he knew there would be bumps in the road.  he also knew to ask for yearly readings for himself, updates based on his natal moon’s progression.  one day, out of the blue, he offered me a tarot reading, and he was crazy good at it, prognosticated that i would continue to write.  before then, he said, he had thought that i was meant to play priestess, reading horoscopes and talking sun and moon and stars, but no.  my cards, mostly major arcanas, were crystal clear, the task the mission was is to write.

in the beginning he was very self-conscious about how it must look: this tall strapping pa-showbiz tisoy blowing back into manila with bacolod boys in tow. he called me out once, in front of mario taguiwalo yet, about what he thought was derogatory talk re his “cult” following, or so uro [de la cruz] reported, lol.  i said i never used the word “cult”, though i did use the word “alalay”, no offense meant.  i thought it was a great way of introducing the guys to manila in the time of marcos-imelda-ver.  the alalayan went both ways, never mind how it looked.  a week or so later he phoned to say sorry, uro had misunderstood.  i think i teased uro about it when i saw him next, haha.

it was also back then, in the very early ’80s, when he said no to the film project  Ang Babaeng Hulk (inspired by the comicbook Incredible Hulk superhero) that nonoy marcelo was writing with mitch in mind.  the episode is part pala of peque’s narrative of those days.  check out jessica zafra’s tribute on her blog and click on the second part of a 2003 interview for Flip magazine.

PEQUE. I remember really violent discussions with Butch [Perez], Jorge Arago, Nonoy Marcelo and Pepito Bosch about filming Ang Babaeng Hulk with Mitch Valdes, whch was about Phlippine pop art and the splintering caused by western influences. The ideas were tremendous and over the top but I was sure that no production outfit would pick it up. Everybody felt betrayed by me, because I didn’t want to waste time developing an idea that just wouldn’t reach first base from the very start. Not at the time. From what I know now, thirty years later, about Philippine show business, I was right. You wouldn’t be able to do what we wanted to do in Ang Babaeng Hulk even now as an industry picture.

mitch and i were at that meeting too, if memory serves — i was going to be “script girl” kung natuloy.  it was indeed a stormy affair, passions ran high, with peque outnumbered but not outgunned.  i’m not sure now why, but the project hinged on him saying yes, but to what, to directing it? designing it? or mitch doing it?  i thought he said no because he didn’t think it was the right vehicle for mitch.  not that he was managing mitch’s career then — that was only in the late sixties til he split for bacolod sometime in the late seventies.  and then, again, maybe the project needed both mitch AND peque?  some time after, over beer, peque said that he was thoroughly outclassed, and quite impressed, by jorge’s grasp of, and take on, pinoy comics, superheroes, and pop culture.  jorge had obviously prepared for the meeting, i said, a measure na rin of regard for him.  consuelo de bobo, he muttered, sabay cheers.

it was peque who got me started writing for television.  in ’81 when mario, june keithley’s scriptwriter for her tv talkshow, was off to greener pastures, peque the director suggested me as replacement, and that was fun, even if he got too busy towards the end, and vivian recio and i scrambled to “direct” and edit a show of ketly on location in mt. banahaw.  in ’82 when he was casting for Oro, Plata, Mata he asked me to play the housemaid in a bed scene with the unico hijo.  of course i said no thanks, i wasn’t THAT liberated, haha.  in ’83 he was thrilled for me when i was asked to headwrite the scripts for the pinoy Sesame Street, an imelda project, where i got to work with kokoy and roy lachica, among others of the bacolod tribe.  seven months later when i quit after ninoy’s assassination but not before putting together a guidebook for the writers, nakarating sa kanya ang balita, and he phoned just to say he loved my taray, way to go.

he astounded with Oro, scandalized with Scorpio Nights, scared the wits off me with Tiyanak. but i dared criticize a certain sequence and he got super upset, and rightly so, now that i look back.  we lost touch after that, and it was some 23 films, over some 20 years, later that katrina wrote a rave review of Agaton and Mindy (2009) that he emailed to everyone on his mailing list, and we had a reunion of sorts.

Hi guys, please check out this review of Agaton & Mindy. it’s probably one of the best reviews I’ve ever received. Not because she liked it (she obviously did) but she actually was reading my mind. Just click on the link.
http://radikalchick.com/agaton-and-mindy-love-in-the-time-of-indie/  

i wasn’t surprised; it felt like katrina and he were meant to get together at that point in time.  “i’m not surprised either,” he said, “we’ve always had an affinity for each other… and that includes Cholo” whom he had known since uncola times, and joel who at 10 played one of the kids in a chistmas drama he directed for tv, and who he later said should audition for a chuck norris film that was looking to cast a streetsmart pinoy kid (but it would have meant taking the kid out of school, and that’s another story, haha).

in 2012 i had sent him a copy of Revolutionary Routes (2011), a four-generation family memoir, and he phoned soon after reading it.  “parang thornton wilder novel!” sabi niya, awed at the lousy deal my lolos and lolas kept getting from colonialists all through spanish to american to japanese to neocolonial times.  later that year, we actually got to hug and virgo-talk again at a soiree hosted by laida lim, where i also got to meet wanggo.

the following year i sent him a pdf of my third EDSA book after taking in madie’s diary of their Radyo Bandido days that she had emailed me soon after peque read Himagsikan sa EDSA–Walang Himala! (2000) and noted how little it had on what went on (behind the ketly scenes) with the gang that lyca benitez-brown and he had secretly recruited to run the bandit radio station.  natuwa naman sila, as in, “it rocks!”  so i dared ask peque for the blurb that now graces the backcover of EDSA Uno (2013) along with randy david’s and rene saguisag’s.

“An exciting, comprehensive and totally cinematic way of narrating the EDSA experience with the use of different Point-Of-Views both personal and geographical, camera angles, cut-to-cuts, and the presentation of a palpable mise en scene. Both history and literature are well served.”

thanks again, peque, el pogi, nelson bakunawa!  i’d love to write you a book, or a blurb, on your body of work, if only to say that both pinoy cinema and pop culture, from negros to manila, were exceedingly well served!