Keeping Grounded in the Philippines' Tinseltown

When you are a superstar in Philippine Cinema, would you go the path of keeping your big-screen gloss and porcelain perfection, or would you, when you get home, kick off your shoes, put your feet up on your expensive coffee table, and read your favorite girly or macho magazine?

I am amazed at how Juday had self-effacingly joked that “nag-iipon siya ng libag,” (she was collecting dirt and dead skin cells), in discussing how she stays grounded in the crazy, shimmery, world of showbusiness.

If you are not familiar with the way things are in the Philippines’ local tinseltown, then you hadn’t seen stardom in one of its most exalted. The Philippines’ version of Hollywood is a place where stars may well lose themselves in the pomp and splendor of their own glory. A star hasn’t reach his/her acme if he/she does not have a billboard hanging high on EDSA, the main highway of our country. An actor is merely a “starlet” if he/she does not have groupies following him/her around, a designer who creates clothes specifically for him/her, and if he/she could go around in the local malls without security people and assistants and even wet nurses (mga yaya). Amidst all this fawning, this pampering, who would not lose him/herself?

Good that Juday had not allowed all the trappings of showbiz to steal her very identity. Through touching base with true friends like Ploning’s director Dante Nico Garcia, she has remained true to herself: a down-to-earth homebody who likes cooking and soaking up her home’s airconditioning and even not bathing.

It touches my heart to have read producer Guia Gonzales’ repost of PEP’s coverage of the dramatic way in how Direk Dante Garcia had finally been able to break it to Juday that she’s starring in his first movie.

With the real-life lines:

Juday: Anong pelikula ito?

Direk Dante Garcia: Yung pelikulang kinukuwento ko sa ‘yo seven years ago.

Juday: Bakit ako ang huling nakaalam?
Direk Dante Garcia: Gusto ko kasi tanggapin mo yung pelikula dahil maganda—hindi dahil kaibigan mo ako.

Though Direk Dante’s plea was for Juday to accept the project for its excellence and not for the mere fact of friendship, through this conversation, I now fully understand how Juday was able to stay grounded in this too-shiny-it’s-deceptive world of showbiz: gems of friends like him.

Everyone needs a friend. But if you can have friends who will stay with you through success and even through failure, then surely, like Juday, even when success catches up with you and takes you high up into the air, you will be able to stay humble and grounded.

Whatever realm you are in, relationships and love will be the only things that would ground you. I pray Juday would never stop walking in humility, and I pray that friends like Direk Dante will be hers forever. In a world such as hers, where smoke and mirrors abound, it pays to have oases of reality, like true friendships, to keep your heart pumping human blood.