A sort of women’s month wrap-up

The poet Marra PL. Lanot called in early March to tell of the women’s film festival at the UP Film Center, which for its premiere night screened the movie Frida, based on the life of Frida Kahlo, the artist wife of the painter Diego Rivera. The actress Salma Hayek was nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of one of the more prominent women of her native Mexico.

Earlier, Virginia Moreno, doyenne of the film center and sometimes referred to as the last bohemian, had likewise spread the word about Frida, certainly a kindred spirit of feminists the world over. La Moreno, an original La Tondeña, spoke during a tribute launch of an anthology of her late friend Francisco Arcellana, and she regaled the audience with stories about the generation of Villa. She was later seen clutching the coffee-table book on Kahlo while Mexican food was served at the post-launch at Powerbooks, Makati. It must have been serendipity, and if one looked hard enough maybe even Salma Hayek was around. Then sometime right smack in the middle of March, which coincidentally is also fire prevention month, came another call this time from Ghi of Feminine Force, informing of the force’s fourth anniversary concert at Mayric’s, featuring the ever reliable Imago, Fatal Posporos, among other women or lady-led bands forever changing the landscape of the Pinoy music scene.

Ghi promised Colt beer plus dinner, but she couldn’t assure parking ("Bakit, Mercedes ba ang dala mo?"), and said it might be the last concert sponsored by the force in a long while. We remember a similar albeit Christmas season concert a couple or so years ago in Malate that also featured Imago, whose frontwoman Aia de Leon has my vote for outstanding St. Scholastican of her generation.

Sad to say we were unable to make it to Mayric’s that night, not because we were driving any Mercedes straight out of Janis Joplin’s song, but because our vehicle of a lesser god was promptly detoured to a nearby venue, Quirino Grandstand, to watch our very own Manny Pacquiao and an invading Kazakh what’s-his-name bash each other’s brains and related gray matter out. Of course there was the usual tribute to womanhood between rounds, with the scantily clad specimens of pulchritude parading the cardboard signs indicating the forthcoming round number, behind which would be the mandatory advertisement of, say, rubbing alcohol: Hindi lang pang-pamilya, pang isports pa!

Soon enough another call came ringing in (oh yes, the wonder of landlines) and who could it be but our former boss at the Spanish news agency Agencia EFE, Señor Pepe Rodriguez wondering posthaste when our review of a photocopy of the coffee-table book Philippine First Ladies Portraits would be coming out, and to please inform his wife Lulu Coching, the portraitist, when it comes out since he will be leaving for Spain and won’t come back till April.

Published by the Rustia-Tantoco Foundation, the book does seem like a handsome compendium of short essays and portraits detailing, as the saying goes, the power behind the throne through more than a hundred years of our approaching industrial strength republic.

Rodriguez’s short essays are rudimentary sketches of the subject, biographs that tease at going more than skin deep, but which function is amply filled by the oil portraits of the venerable first ladies.

Nowhere else is the dictum "a picture paints more than a thousand words" more applicable than here, and Coching quite obviously has the genes of her father, the late great illustrator Francisco Coching.

But the subject of first ladies is rather novel, and as Señor Rodriguez puts it, the book hopes to fill a gaping need in present Filipiniana. It should also come as a great equalizer that the chapter on Imelda Marcos, the great Imeldific who redefined and reshaped the role of first spouse through more than 20 years at Malacañang, is just as long (or short) as the others.

That Rustan’s bankrolled the project should speak volumes of this version of history as public relations. It also serves journalism well particularly in the interviews with second-generation politicians President Arroyo and Sen. Ramon Magsaysay on their respective family matriarchs. And, too, the vintage photos of indescribable nostalgia hark back to an age when streets were named differently (what are Colorado and Florida called now?), and which in the long run give off a musty odor of old aparadors and mothballs.

There are however some factual slips, like the year of the dictator Marcos’ death (1989, not 1988) and the senatorial count when Mrs. Garcia lost in 1971 (not 12-1 but more like 7-1 or 6-2), but these are minor.

The book is informative enough to tell of a teenage first lady, Victoria Syquia Quirino, daughter of her widower father. Now that’s what movies are made of.