Lost in the airport at about 9 a.m., I followed a certain movie star named Ara Mina from the check-in counter to the VIP waiting area where couple Annabelle Rama and Eddie Gutierrez together with a whole pack of TV and movie celebrities, were patiently waiting for their 10 a.m. flight. After arriving at the Boracay Terraces Resort, the entire press group, along with Edd Fuentes, the organizer of the whole event, continued to Sun Village Resort for the first sunset press conference of the day led by Nivea’s Rica King.
Waking up the next day at noon, I found myself all alone in the resort. Since everybody else had probably gone to Blue Water and Fairways to practice their swing for the 18-hole golf tournament, I decided to stroll along the beachfront towards Sea Wind Resort for lunch. Inconspicuously eating my plate of chicken barbeque and buko pandan, a floral bikini-clad lady by the name of Ethel Booba a.k.a. BJ Fairy approached a couple who were quietly getting food at the buffet table.
Grasping her star-shaped wand which doubled as a microphone, she asked the guy, "Cesar, nakita mo ba ang bato?"
"Kay Sunshine mo na lang itanong," Cesar Montano replied, pointing at the tall and voluptuous female figure beside him.
Apparently, the question about the bato is part of the spiel in her segment in the showbiz talk show S-Files, where she is tasked with finding the said object in order to restore her fairy wings. Anyway, with the end of that spiel as well as my lunch ration, I crossed next door to Pearl of the Pacific for my scheduled 2 o’clock massage. With a perimeter of palm leaves and five large man-sized letters spelling the word Nivea, the normally quiet resort was the unmistakable base of operations for the event. During the massage, I was even able to make an overseas call to San Francisco to recount to my friend Bianca Monzon the strange events in the last 24 hours, including taking the massage slot of Lotlot de Leon, among other things.
Waking up again at noon the following day, I walked to Pearl to to kill time until the 4 p.m. Celebrity Volleyball Tournament.
"Hola people. Where’s lunch?" Maurice Arcache greeted, emerging from the hallway.
"White Team and Blue Team are up next," a voice announced a few hours later over the outdoor sound system. The White Team, of course, refers to our group with ABS-CBN’s Sports Unlimited’s Dyan Castillejo as the leader and with a line-up including Marc Nelson and Jake Roxas. We had surprisingly made it to the finals that day by barely surviving a Volleyball match with a certain Orange Team headed by a Richard Gomez the day before. With a bunch of rolling TV cameras on our side of the net, we painstakingly beat the Blue Team to make it to first place.
The awards ceremony which followed that night looked more like a tropical version of the Oscars, with piles of slippers on the sand and servings of lechon baboy on the tables. Nadia Montenegro and Chinggay Andrada stepped up the stage to host, calling on the winners of the golf and volleyball tournaments to give their stained glass trophies. However, on top of the photo-op with the other winning members of the White Team, I had no clue that I would be stepping on that well-lit platform for a second time.
"Who wants to jam with us?" asked Jinky Vidal of Freestyle band who was hired to entertain the crowd that Friday evening.
"Philip Cruz!" answered Mylene Dizon, who started tugging me towards the stage.
So, with a lot of coercion from those friends, I somehow found myself doing a certain duet called Bakit Ngayon Ka Lang over the microphone, in front the whole celebrity congregation. Although I had some fleeting delusions of taking that catchy number to Araneta Coliseum, those few strange minutes on-stage, clinched my night hook, line, and sinker.
Leaving the resort at 7:30 a.m., we packed our bags to catch the Ati-Atihan in Caticlan. After a boat transfer and a prolonged bus ride, we knew that we had reached the periphery of the Plaza Mayor due to the exponential swarms of people who packed the sidewalks to catch the spectacle. One by one, we descended from the air-conditioned bus to continue by foot.
"Anak ninyo ba iyan?" a bystander cried out, pushing against the crowd and pointing at the child in the arms of Gary Estrada who was flanked by his wife Bernadette Allyson. Following the said showbiz family unit and literally protected by a barricade of civil servants and policemen, my bus mates and I marched along the streets of a certain barangay in Kalibo, much like a showbiz Santa Cruzan in the odd month of January. Reaching the town hall at about 1 and eating the buffet specially prepared by Billie Calizo, the incumbent congresswoman, I went up to the third floor balcony to get a bird’s eye view of the on-going Ati-atihan festival. Strangely enough, in spite of the large production below which included a conga line of charcoal-skinned dancers, coordinated drummers, and the banana leaf floats, that simple structure where I stood seemed to be the de facto focal point of town fiesta. On the right side of the balcony, Richard Gutierrez would periodically jut out his face from the ledge, generating a wave of screams from the fans on the street. Meanwhile on the other side, Dominic Ochoa, by just pointing at a person and shouting the words ocho-ocho, could somehow make that man, woman, or child in the far distance break into the popular back-breaking pop dance.
Several hours later back in the bus and right before leaving for Kalibo airport, STAR’s Philip Cu-unjieng and I devised a social experiment to test the star struck level of the crowd outside.
"Open your window and wave, " instructs Philip.
Sliding the window barely halfway and showing perhaps only 20 percent of my face, I too was able to elicit some screams and hand-stretching from the people who planted themselves against the immobile bus. Retracting the curtains and looking deeper, I suppose that when you’re in a bus full of celebrities, some of that star factor may actually rub off on you. Then again, it could be that I was actually mistaken for a famous person. In either case, I didn’t mind at all.