Movies before their time

Pardon another piece that features my niece Keona. Obviously, I’m a proud auntie and I’m continuously amazed, as most mothers are (ha-ha), at her development into her own little person with traces of her real mom, me, and my own mom. I didn’t use to believe that you could pass down your personality to a little person; I thought personality was a matter of nurture versus nature. But now, looking at her being as shy as I was around people and yet being confident while performing in front of them as my sister was when she memorized “The Three Little Kittens” at five, I’m not so sure.

Over the weekend, three-year-old Keona proudly sang “If We Hold On Together” by Diana Ross, the theme song of the Steven Spielberg and George Lucas animated feature The Land Before Time. She sang the complete song, too, humming at the long-ish instrumental part that is its beginning. She should be more familiar with that part, as it’s often played in the movie, while the entire song is only played during the credits.

Once, I tried to sing as the song was playing and Keona shushed me. I thought she just didn’t like my singing, but it turns out, she was studying the song so she could sing it to us. Imagine my sister’s surprise when Keona just sang the song one day, telling her, at intervals, “Clap for me, okay?”

What’s lovely here is that the CD Keona watched was an old gift I gave to my sister, to remember the time we watched The Land Before Time as children and memorized many of the movie’s lines. I think it struck us both emotionally because our father was always working away, and we were always dependent on the care of our mother. In the film, the dinosaur Littlefoot loses his mother as they make their way to the Great Valley and has to fend for himself. Truth be told, that was one of my childhood fears. It probably was one of my sister’s too.

Of course, the song “If We Hold On Together” offered us comfort in a way we probably couldn’t have been able to name as children. There were four of us siblings, often fighting, but always together. That’s probably why even in our late 20s and 30s, we still live in the same village—at least on weekends. I’m sure Keona, like most children, also feels the need to have a protector or caregiver—in this case, her parents—and also finds the same song comforting.

I heard that she first didn’t want to watch a dinosaur movie, fighting to get her fill of Dora or Little Einsteins as my sister played the old CD of The Land Before Time. As the movie progressed, however, Keona sat in rapt attention, falling in love with the same dinosaur characters my sister fell in love with and still love to this day.

Now she probably has a hundred dinosaur toys. And she can say pterodactyl, tyrannosaurus rex, and triceratops. Did I say she’s only three?

And did I say I’m a proud auntie?

Speaking of being a proud auntie, there’s another niece I spend a lot of time with, Jasmine. She’s four years old and Keona’s favorite cousin. She obviously takes after her mother, my cousin Joanne, the one I always watch Shake, Rattle and Roll with, because every night, when I come home to their place, she begs me for scary stories. I’ve told her about the kapre, tikbalang, tiyanak, aswang, manananggal, engkanto, duwende and tik-tik. I’ve told her all the ghost stories I’ve heard—real and invented. To most of them, she asks, “And then what?” as if nothing was frightening about what I just said.

A few nights ago, I had this brilliant idea to show her some old Shake, Rattle and Roll clips on YouTube. I happened upon a clip featuring Irma Alegre as a manananggal and Herbert Bautista as the country boy in love with her. In the clip, Irma’s turning into a manananggal as she intensely rubs oil on her body and Herbert is watching, waiting with a bag of salt to destroy her. Irma’s body severs from its lower half, and off she flies as an animated monster, with the full moon as her backdrop. Then Herbert douses her bubbling intestines with salt.

“Are you scared?” I asked Jasmine.

“She’s not scary,” she whined, “she’s just being sexy!”

Kids. Nothing scares them anymore these days.

Her grandfather has shown her films like The Exorcist and the newer The Exorcism of Emily Rose. I wasn’t there, so I don’t know how she reacted. But as kids, The Exorcist scared the hell out of Joanne and me. Now, I’m looking for the original The Ring to see if it’ll scare her. Seriously.

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