An Affair We Remember

Your Uncle Alvin and I have just watched the movie “Hugo”, Martin Scorsese’s paean to the magic of movies.  Elsewhere in my readings, I came across an account of the audience’s startled reaction to the image of an onrushing train during the early days of this art form.  Its depiction in the movie brought back pleasant memories about our family’s long-standing love affair with the movies.

Like most people of the post-war generation, your grandparents were avid moviegoers, a trait they passed-on to us, their children.  Watching movies was a part of their monthly sojourn to Naga City for “dry goods” – grocery items considered necessary to supplement our mother’s quotidian purchases at the Buhi public market on Tuesdays and Fridays as well as her weekend trips to nearby Iriga City for beef, seafood and Baguio vegetables.  The two-hour trip to Naga City was always a special treat to whoever was chosen to tag along, usually the two youngest in our brood of seven or as reward for good behavior.

Your grandfather was a creature of habit so our experience of these excursions was, more or less, similar.  Upon arrival in Naga City, we would invariably go to the now defunct Cosmos Restaurant where we would take our snacks of siopao or marcasotes, a cakelike item on the menu served in diamond-shaped servings, finished off with a bottle of soda.  Coming from a household where calamansi juice was the norm on account of your grandmother’s economy and insistence on our natural Vitamin C infusions, soda was a rare treat we only got to enjoy on these trips, during our town fiesta and from what was usually left of that served to guests at home.

Thereafter, our parents would part ways – our father would go about his business, usually a visit to the Napolcom, the provincial police headquarters.  With us, children, tagging along, our mother would methodically go through her checklist: canned goods at a grocery owned by Indian nationals, noodles from another place owned by a Chinese family, clothing materials from establishments of her choice, medical supplies from the South Star Drugstore and the occasional hardware items for home use.  Around lunch time, we would meet our father at the New England Restaurant fronting the Plaza Elias Angeles where, along with meat and vegetable items on the menu, they would invariably order the special pancit canton, a dish by which all others of the same kind in other places were judged and usually found wanting.

With the main reasons for the trip already accomplished, the afternoons were, without fail, spent at the movie theatres in the city – Emily, Bicharra, El Rey, El Vic, Jade and Albe – whichever featured the double program which suited our parents’ eclectic taste.  With our parents and your Uncle Junior, I remember watching Charlie Chaplin shorts, the James Bond movies in the Seventies, a good number of sand and sandal epics churned out by Cinecitta, Biblical extravaganzas, the instalments of the Tarzan franchise, various Disney features including the David Crockett and Blackbeard films, movie musicals like the Sound of Music and Mary Poppins, the Sinbad series, countless police/crime flicks and, in those pre-political correctness times, the occasional blaxploitation title.  At sundown, shortly before the commute home, a visit to the Quality Bakeshop for a bag of pan legaspi would complete the experience.

Our family lore is peppered with stories at the movies.  There’s your Aunt Marivic’s unfortunate first movie experience where, unable to get over her fright of Leo, the MGM lion, she spent the entire theatre time slung over our father’s shoulder.  Horrified by the animal stampede in one of the aforesaid Tarzan flicks, I was supposed to have ducked and reduced our maternal grandmother Petra to uncontrolled mirth when I disappeared under her tapis or ankle length skirt.  Not knowing what it was all about, your Aunt Miner cried herself to sleep when our parents refused to allow her to watch “Uhaw”, one of those local Bomba or flesh films that proliferated before the imposition of Martial Law.  To our mother’s consternation at our father, your Uncle Alvin was haunted for a very long time by the murder spree in an obscure massacre film called “The Town that Dreaded Sundown”. 

In a particularly suspenseful moment at the movies, on the other hand, your Aunt Tingting memorably popped open a Coke bottle, to the general amusement of the rest of the audience.  I remember your Uncle Junior growling and replicating Bruce Lee’s martial arts posturings for a whole week after viewing “Enter the Dragon”. Watching “Jesus Christ Superstar” as a High School student at St. Bridget’s School, your Aunt Eva and her classmates swooned over Ted Neely, a crush no doubt renewed everytime songs from the movie were sung at mass – usually during communion – back when miniskirts and bell bottoms were the order of the day.  In her teens, your Aunt Marivic never missed those Nora Aunor Films where dialogue was drowned-out by screaming Noranians of which she was a diehard member.

Rarely a creature of impulse, your grandmother once left her groceries with our Naga City-based Uncle Ayo and Aunt Sisa and, with me tagging along, went looking for the theatre showing “Gone With the Wind”, the ne plus ultra moviegoing experience of their generation.  I have since memorialized this incident with a framed movie poster of this legendary David O’Selznick production at my home in Fairview.  Coming home from Naga at another time, she decided to stay overnight with our Uncle Jorge and Auntie Salve in Iriga City just so she can take me and your Uncle Junior to watch “The Fall of the Roman Empire” at the nearby Allan Theater.  When the same moviehouse featured Cecil B. De Mille’s “The Ten Commandments”, your grandmother took all seven of us to the movies, along our two housemaids who lugged a big native basket of family-sized coke bottles and a whole batch of balisoso, a delicacy of ground rice, young coconut meat and sugar wrapped in banana leaf, laboriously prepared the day before.

Those years were certainly innocent and magical times.  With TV yet to attain a foothold in households, movie technology had the power to completely amaze.  As a boy, I thought real people fought behind the movie screens and mistook the audience illuminated by the red fire exit signs as bloodied actors resting in between the action.  I even remember getting quite frustrated trying and failing to run in slow motion.  As kids, we tried to make our own movies with cut-out figures illuminated by a kerosene lamp behind a white cloth, charging coconut shells as the price of admission.  For days, we would talk about movies we watched – from the free ones shown at the town plaza by manufacturers promoting new products to the features enjoyed in the dark of the theatre.