Whatever happened to Bunny Paras?

Not a few will remember a sweet-looking young actress by the name of Bunny Paras in That’s Entertainment more than a decade ago. However, whatever emerging talents she might have had were quickly diluted by the more obvious acting capabilities of her older and prettier sister Sharmaine Arnaiz.

Bunny was almost always referred to in conjunction with Sharmaine. They were the pretty half-Indian sisters on That’s. and later, when her sister started gaining awards and public recognition, Bunny would get solo attention only when her affair with a rapper started to turn sour, and especially when he abandoned her and their love child Moira.

We would remember Bunny was always shy and rather withdrawn in public. Then she upped and left for the US and almost nothing was heard from her.

On a quick trip to California and Las Vegas to attend Anna Fegi’s US tour, we got to meet Bunny on two separate occasions. And we were astounded by the change in her.

This was certainly no timid shadow of a famous sister. Perhaps being away on her own made her bloom and grow. Perhaps the difficulties of life in the United States, mothering a child without household help taught her to be tough. Whatever it was, Bunny exuded the confidence of one successful in her job. And happy in her private life.

When Bunny left for California three and a half years ago, she simply wanted to have a vacation from the front desk job she held at Galleria Suites for four years. She liked what she saw, got a job with the Weekend Balita, securing automotive ads, and was promised sponsorship of her working papers. She decided to stay.

"Not that it wasn’t difficult at first," Bunny tells us over coffee at a mall with her voice teacher Jennie Kwan, and daughter Moira. She recalls constantly crying, missing home, friends, and Moira who was still back in the Philippines. But she was determined to bring up her daughter in the US, and give her the future she couldn’t provide in the Philippines with the pittance she was earning from her job.

After a couple of months, she fetched Moira, then under the care of sister Sharmaine (so much so that gossip columns started insinuating she was Sharmaine’s daughter by some lover linked to her), and took her back to LA.

Bunny says bringing up a child in the US is tough. Moira; six goes to school in the morning, as well as special kumon classes and Bunny has to schedule her work in between all the driving of her daughter to her different schools.

It is fortunate, she continues, that the Weekend Balita is a field job that allows her flexibility of time, apart from that fact that she was putting to good use the BS Management degree she had earned from UST.

The Bunny of today is definitely more confident, driving her own car, meeting clients, taking care of her daughter, and warding off unwanted suitors. She is definitely also much prettier than she ever was, albeit a bit heavier, a fact that didn’t seem to worry her at all.

To be sure, she still gets attention. People at the mall would stop to look at her. At the Anna Fegi concert with the South Border, the Filipino audience would gawk with admiring stares, especially when she started to dance to the music. Some who recognized her from years back would request to have their pictures taken with her.

Bunny has certainly moved away from the shadow of Sharmaine. She is very much today her own person, bent on improving and developing herself. She has taken short courses in various subjects, is taking up voice lessons to improve her singing.

"I do miss acting," she admits while saying that being away has helped her, that she feels she would be so much better at it if and when she decides to pick it up again. The fact that she and her daughter have already bagged a commercial makes that possibility far from remote.

At the moment, she is focused on pursuing the case of support she has filed against the father of her daughter (who has also migrated to the US, gotten married, and also lives on the West Coast.)

"He has not even visited Moira at all in the last five years," Bunny sights.