Becoming her own woman

Didn’t Ruffa Gutierrez just notch another year two weeks ago?

How come the years don’t seem to be catching up with her? Where’s the fairness in the world?

The past decade had been good to her — in terms of looks and career. Personal life — marriage and the subsequent love life — unfortunately wasn’t all that stable.

But why does she still look so good? In fact, she had never looked lovelier. I guess it’s in the genes, her Belo treatments (multi-polar, Obagi oxygen facial and power peel) and attitude (I have to ask her about her emotional coping mechanism).

Since my older sister married into her family (her uncle, Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama, is my brother-in-law), we had always treated each other as relatives by affinity.

Oh, I knew Ruffa as a pre-teen balikbayan in 1986. The lovely features were already in place (like most of her siblings, she inherited all the good traits of parents Eddie Gutierrez and Annabelle Rama), but the awkwardness was still there.

But by 1988, she began to blossom into a beauty and I know that we keep in our family albums this photo of hers where she poses with my niece Micheline and nephew Mikel, both still in pre-school then. They were just at home and Ruffa didn’t have a tinge of makeup and was sporting a simple pair of jeans. She was already starting to make a name for herself as a juvenile female lead and was considered one of the loveliest young faces in her generation. Little did I know that she was going to be even more beautiful much, much later.

In 1993, we found ourselves both working out at the now-defunct Excellance gym owned and operated by Telly Garcia, Lorna Tolentino’s best friend.

She was joining Binibining Pilipinas that time and one instructor told me that she still had baby fat at the back. Then, work around that! It was like a barking order and the instructor couldn’t understand why I was so concerned with Ruffa — fully unaware of our family ties.

Looking back, Ruffa’s physique wasn’t really a hundred percent perfect when she went to Miss World. I didn’t get to watch that pageant where she was named Second Princess since it was beamed live via satellite to Manila in the morning. But ask any objective Filipino beauty watcher and they will all tell you that Ruffa that time was far, far more beautiful than the first-runner-up — and even the one who won the title.

Ruffa was on top of the world that time, except that this very world collapsed for her less than a year after that — no thanks to yet another controversy that happened during her birthday. Yes, all the bad things happened to her around this period — for some strange reason.

I remember her grand debut party at the Coconut Palace in 1992. I went to the event not as a member of media, but as family and we all came in one car — little children and all that. As soon as we got to the venue, we noticed a commotion. A man who had nothing to do with the affair had been shot outside. Nobody remembers the details anymore since the incident had nothing to do with Ruffa. It just happened — and had to happen on her birthday, right outside the venue.

But through the years, the string of bad luck that occurs during her birthday had mercifully stopped — knock on wood.

Ruffa had since focused more on hosting and she’s wonderful at it. I knew she had it from the beginning — having worked with her during the opening night of the Miss Universe pageant in Manila in 1994 (she was the anchor and I did a segment in the middle of the program). There were also two weeks when she pinched-hit for Cristy Fermin (she figured in a vehicular accident and had to be hospitalized) in the same year during those Showbiz Lingo days. Now, together they host Paparazzi with Dolly Ann Carvajal and Mo Twister.

Oh, but Ruffa had improved with her hosting skills even more since the time she did Ruffa and Ai (nothing like a daily grind to hone your talent).

What I marvel more about Ruffa is how she becomes even more ravishingly beautiful as she grows older — despite the unhappy ending of her marriage (but she’s blessed with Lorin and Venice).

Maybe it’s her attitude toward problems that helps buoy her up. In the process she learns from life’s little challenges and has helped her mature — turning her into a woman of substance. No wonder she had become even more beautiful not only on the outside and in the inside (in her heart), but also up there in her head.

She had finally become her own woman.

And oh what a beautiful woman.