Once a hospitality girl?
It’s May, it’s May, the lusty month of May, that lovely month when everyone goes blissfully astray… It’s here, it’s here, that shocking time of year when tons of wicked little thoughts merrily appear,” sang the young Vanessa Redgrave in Camelot. How we loved that movie when we were in our 30s. I had it on Betamax and three good friends — Mameng, Linda and I, who also worked together loved to watch it.
It’s May again and I am in my 70s. Here we are not so merrily cooped up in our homes by quarantine, watching movies on TV until our eyes drop out, recalling the wonder of going blissfully astray 40 years ago.
Mameng died sometime in the early ’90s. Her whole family burned in a fire. She was a beloved friend. Her daughter was my godchild. I had a difficult time accepting that they had died the way they did.
Where is Linda, another dear friend who seemed to have evaporated into thin air? Last I heard she was in Las Vegas. I haven’t seen her in so many decades. What has happened to her? I used to hear about her from Tessie, another good friend, another lady who worked with us and who seemed to have kept in touch with Linda. But now even Tessie seems to have disappeared as well. Someone told me her British husband had decided to retire back home and she went with him. Will we see each other again? I have a daughter married to an Englishman. I wonder if one day they will bump into each other. Will they recognize each other? She knew my daughters when they were in their teens. Now they are in their 50s.
These are the memories that strike me now. I sort of keep house for my husband who sits and watches TV in the living room while I either putter around in my workroom or watch TV in the bedroom. We have our times together and our times on our own. It’s when I’m on my own that I wonder about all my old friends, the people I used to work with, the good times we had together.
I remember the times we used to travel around the country putting on shows in the plazas to introduce new Coca-Cola packages to grab market share for our brand. We would pile into a Coaster dressed in shorts and T-shirts and carrying a pillow each. Was the pillow for us to sleep on? No, it was to cover our heads with when we were driving at night in case the driver had to brake suddenly (he had to do that quite often) to protect our heads from falling lights, or posters or whatever heavy things traveled with us.
We had our small bags packed with alcohol, insect repellants, mosquito coils, because we never knew where we would be spending the night. Sometimes we would sleep in motels, many of us in a room because there was a festival in town and our clients occupied the best hotel rooms while we — well, we were just people from the agency; we wouldn’t object to the only available accommodations.
Those were the best of times for us. We worked hard together and became genuine friends who spent most of our lives together. I wonder what we would have done then if there had been quarantine. Would our clients have allowed us to work from home? To not be in the office at important meetings that would end at 10 p.m.?
I remember once we were in Angeles, I think, and after we put on a show and it was successful, our clients took us all to a disco. I was then 35. You remember how you looked when you were 35? You were lookin’ good. We would dance with our clients, a few of whom were white. We danced like you dance in a disco, separate from your partner. There was a thin, short man who kept dancing up to me and telling me something that I did not understand. In the beginning I thought he wasn’t talking to me. But then he kept coming up to me and saying something.
Finally I asked, “Are you talking to me?”
He said, “Ikaw kasi puti ang kasayaw mo hindi ka na marunong kumilala. Doon kung saan ka unang nagtrabaho customer mo ako (Just because you’re dancing with a white guy you pretend not to recognize me. Where you used to work before, I was one of your customers).”
“He thinks I used to work at one of the clubs here,” I laughed as I led my American client away from the dance floor. “He’s mistaken me for a hospitality girl!”
Now I wonder — is that man still alive? I want to thank him for mistaking me for a hospitality girl. It’s very flattering to remember that when you’re 75.
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