Chicken anyone?

I met a very engaging couple named Jonathan and Maria Madeira Vestil last February 20 at the Acqua Restaurant of Shangri-la's Mactan Resort and Spa where Chester Cokaliong hosted a private dinner for friends to celebrate his 49th birthday.

I was thrust into the company of the Vestil couple by the simple expediency of a vacant table in a room starting to fill up. Our trio was later joined by Bobby Nalzaro and shortly thereafter by Nimrod Quiñones.

With a Hawaiian quartet or rather four Filipinos in flowery shirts singing in the background, I did not quite get how Mrs. Vestil preferred to be called during the introductions made by Chester. But never mind. I will just call her Marie.

I do not have the same problem with Jonathan. Among males, it is perfectly all right to keep on calling each other "Bay" the whole night without anyone suspecting that maybe we failed to get each other's first names.

Anyway, this is not really about names. I just felt like taking a little break from political issues and happened to remember a very interesting bit of trivia that Marie offered in the course of our lively conversation.

I cannot recall now what exactly steered our conversation toward the topic of gays but I remember Marie suggesting that maybe the chicken we eat has something to do with the phenomenon of an exploding gay population.

She said she read somewhere that the female hormones that lace chicken feed may be finding their way into the chicken meat that people consume with ever increasing regularity and quantity. These hormones could be what are making many of the male species effeminate.

I quickly looked down at my plate and felt a great sense of relief that it contained no chicken. I glanced at the plate of Bobby Nalzaro -- it was full of chicken, ha ha. Really now, it was the first time Bobby, Nimrod and I heard of the info and we found it truly interesting.

In fact it was so interesting it interjected itself several times as the conversation moved on. Someone would just butt in and say "have a chicken" and we would all break into laughter and go back to the hormone-to-chicken-to-gay issue.

I myself have a theory about how gays came to such proliferation and it has something to do with the gradual shift in the playing habits of children --- from the rough-and-tumble games played in wide open spaces to the less stressful indoor forms of entertainment.

   The boys of my generation moved on to manhood bearing the scars of childhood wars. There was hardly a boy who did not get cut, bruised, bloodied and broken sometime during his growing up years. Take a look at the heads of subsequent generations and you can hardly find a "pahak."

Without meaning more than what I am saying, I think the boys of a generation or two ago had greater opportunities to be tested for their manhood, had access to an environment that, for all its natural beauty, truly was an arena for physical adventure and emotional development.

We do not see that now. There are almost no open fields for play. What fields there are have been expropriated for more serious endeavors such as the commerce of man. What natural challenges remain are either too expensive for everyone, or are under threat from the NPA.

So where do the young boys of today repair to? They go to the malls or stay in front of computers. There is hardly any Boy Scouts anymore, or PMT and ROTC. What we do have a lot of are fastfood outlets that never seem to run out of, well, chicken. So There.