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Pisay (Philippine Science) the movie directed by Auraeus Solito, written by Henry Grajeda, and co-produced by PSHS Batch 86, won the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the Vesoul Festival of Asian Cinema in France last week. Pisay is opening soon in Metro Manila theatres. Alright, the movie had me at the establishing shot—That’s my old school!—and secured my affections shortly afterwards—That’s my Physics teacher! I need a drink—but you don’t have to be from Pisay to enjoy the movie. Think Regal movie of the 1980s, but with a high IQ. Not only will you be extremely entertained, but you’ll actually feel smarter afterwards.

This weekend Noel and I were talking about one Pisay ritual featured in the movie: the posting of the class rankings (from number 1 to 240 in freshman year) outside the Director’s Office. I think of it as Drabacs’ List. These typewritten pages tersely summed up your academic performance: if your name was in the last pages, your chance of survival was tenuous. After the first year I just stopped looking. I spent the second half of high school hiding in the office of the school paper. I was editor-in-chief of The Science Scholar for two years, basically because no one else wanted the position. My term was undistinguished, we may have been the most apolitical staff in the paper’s history, but it had more Scott Fitzgerald/J.D. Salinger references  in those two years than all the other years combined.

When I get around to writing a Pisay novel, it will start like this: The first thing I learned at my high school was to run indoors at the slightest hint of rain. In the 70s, four students had been caught in the rain on the football field and struck dead by lightning. The school’s head of security drummed this into our heads: Rain deadly. Flee! The second thing I learned was that if I stood inside a bus wearing my school uniform, people would hand me their change and wait for their tickets.