Politically incorrect notes on watching Lea (with lots of digressions)

I've been in this country too long. Having raised a son who's now 19, I've been fed a daily dose of MTV, Billboard, Eminem and his ilk for the past ten years. (Thank god my son spared me Britney Spears.)

Watching Salonga was a shock to this jaded New Yorker. Sweet, lovely, sexy, down-to-earth and tender - how tender! - Salonga catapulted me back to my roots in a jarring second. This lovely, gentle creature, singing love songs with passionate feeling - no curse words, no wry, sardonic, cynical jokes - only generous banter - admiration for her peers, tribute to her benefactors, her relatives, her mother, the Catholic Church! (She said when she was younger, she was conservative and Catholic. Now she's still a Catholic.) Many of the songs were from musical theater (which I don't go to - my last musical was Les Miz and that was because my mother forced me to take her to it), so I couldn't enjoy the songs I wasn't familiar with. (There's something about songs that sound like Sondheim - if Sondheim didn't write it, it doesn't work - no reflection on Lea, but for some reason, I like my songs whose tunes are unforgettable. I know. I know. Musical theater has been sung to melodic death - but have you watched My Fair Lady? How is it every song in that musical is a classic?) The 2300-seated audience seemed to be - roughly 1/3 Filipino, 1/3 mainstream (read, white) and 1/3 white gay men; she carried all of us along with her, especially the last group who seemed to know all the songs (sorry for the stereotyping.)

But something other than all this struck me. A favorite Filipino actor friend of mine was sitting next to me and we both said the same thing: how feminine naman. We used to be feminine like that. That's why we left. We couldn't handle it. So we moved to New York and got brassy and aggressive and learned to say cool words and pretend to admire Mac Wellman and plays that said "f..k" a lot and lap up all the post-colonial deconstructionist crap and read porno, nihilist works written by neocons and neolibs and neohumans and American feminists like Elaine Showalter who deconstructed the word "feminine" and called it internalizing the prevailing modes of behavior imposed by the patriarchal dominant male.

And women from the global village cheered as American women promptly proceeded to grab corporate power as the rest of us took care of their children. But there was our own Lea, sweeping her audience to their feet, singing songs of love and lost loves and coming loves at Carnegie Hall, with her sterling credentials, the Tony and the Olivier, moving from American English to Filipino English to Taglish - layers of culture on her - the Malay, the Chinese, the Spanish, the American - in one word, the modern Filipina - sexy, but gifted with an indigenous charm that can come only from a sheltered innocence possible only in the Philippines and in show business, at that. If she's got an iron will and the ambition to get to where she is now, she didn't get there by doing like Christina Aguilera. Lea's married, pregnant, Catholic and sings like a winner and she did it all without the Western postmodernist's most lethal weapon - irony.

And my god, I miss it. And that was why at the end of her show, I felt only one thing. I felt homesick.