Dear Tetchie

By Sylvia L. Mayuga
INQ7.net
First Posted 10:58:00 05/29/2006

Filed Under: Arts, Culture & Entertainment

(Editor?s note: Tetchie Agbayani remains a blast of a human being. This article about her, published as a column 24 years ago, has
just been echoed and confirmed by her most recent portrait in Newsbreak)
Once in a while someone like you comes up to magnetize the public eye and, like litmus paper, shows up the acidity or alkalinity in
us all. You?d think someone, anyone, might say, ?Thank you.?
What for? You and the activist Polly Cayetano, your main interlocutor, might ask. Well, for a gem of a lesson in Pinoy sociology for
one. For streaking through both local and foreign media in all your glorious 20-year old naivet, for another, in the process
illuminating the options offered to and the fate suffered by a human being like yourself in this time and place.
?That Playboy thing is just like the primera if you?re driving a car,? you declared to the writer Al Mendoza early in the April month of
your crucifixion by publicity. ?They have not seen everything of me. They don?t know what?s in my brain, my body, my soul.?
Good point. Very good point. Especially if these were your own true sentiments and not words put in your pretty mouth by some
seasoned calculating brain.
But let us begin from the relative beginning.
You have publicly confessed that at 16, you fell in love with a second cousin. Tetchie, that was taboo number one in our Filipino
Catholic book of love and marriage.
Of course it was a classic fight with your mother next, and then the hanging around, the dropping out of school, the mix of grandiose
dreams and cliff-hanging survival that make the life script of girls who break the laws of convention. Havent you heard that Filipinas
are not supposed to get away with that?
So you were ripe for that promoter of stars Franklin Cabaluna when he came along. Did he promise you fame? Independence?
Adventure? Did he listen with soothing understanding to your problems with your mother, gradually convincing you that that Maria
Clara thing she was holding you to was indeed deader than a drowned dodo?
That the future was yours because you had the passport, numbered 36-24-36, and more important, the bold spirit of our permissive
times to match?
Did you find it easy to believe him? Did he not make everything sound so simple and right? Wasnt it easier to give the bigger
questions over to someone with more experience?
Well, ? Popsy, as you call him, has delivered you to the movies and that famous German Playboy team. Now youre a star with your
own salagubang-colored station wagon.
The offers keep coming and so do the interviews, intimately peeking into hidden corners of your life through the eyes of perfect
strangers with the power to write your story large in public memory.
To your absolute credit, none of this has yet eroded your breathless candor. You seem not have noticed even the subtly turned-
down corners of the mouth of that elegant socialite/talk show hostess whose questions you answered in a tiger-skin bikini, on a
simulated Playboy photo shoot under blinding studio lights.
What a vulnerable little sister you seemed then, stumbling on your tenses half-naked, as you urgently expressed your eagerness to
learn good theater.
And so, welcome, dear Tetchie, to the world of confusion and complexity, schizophrenia and hypocrisy that either loves or hates the
dusky flesh you bared for its acceptance.
Your own mother declares to the world that she hates you but would take you back anyway if she had to. The Catholic Womens
League and the Knights of Columbus, the Macho Lawyers, that Kapisanan ng Tagapagtanggol ng Kababaihang
Kayumanggi,Cardinal Sin himself , all human beings like yourself , have fallen to the left and right of your nudity with points of view
to defend for and against you.
Between the hot and the cold, welcome then to the uneasy fate of a symbol of our times and its chaos of changing values. You
asked for it, kid.
Thanks to a press both lascivious and sympathetic, you are at least not only seen but heard. Everyone knows by now that even you
can appraise that tiger-skin bikini photo in Playboy as crossing past the border of acceptable nudity? (a 20th century concept, if
there ever was one) into the gray area of malaswa - prurient.
Keep making these distinctions, Tetchie, as you continue dreaming of acting school in America. That sounds sensible, if only as a
vacation from crossfire. And know that for as many people as condemn you, there are also those who wish you luck, while you, like
all of us, pick through the many issues that visit our unease for the ones really worth fighting for.
Your sister in flesh and spirit,
Sylvia


Hiii Ynel!! Pagnabasa mo na to, tell me what you think please!! Wala lang, ang
controversial and personal kasi niya for me. Okay mwa byeee -Auie