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My friend Ige—Guillermo Ramos-Connolly—is celebrating his birthday today. To mark the occasion (as well as the birthday of his Macbook) we had dinner at Lusso yesterday.

The catalyst of our friendship was cat food. Fifteen years ago I was writing a column in Today, and Ige sent me snail mail reporting a shortage of cat kibble in Manila supermarkets. He had two adopted strays, Bono and Isabel (Later Bono got pregnant and Isabel was the father). I had not yet been adopted by cats, but our publisher Ted had written some columns about his very fat cat Tommaso, who was so lazy he slept through the big earthquake in ’91. Ige asked me to ask Ted where he bought cat food; soon we were having dinner and conspiring to publish books. He designed some of the Twisted books, and we co-published Twisted 8. Ige and his partner Kevin are my advance travel party: they convinced me to go to Prague in 2001, and a couple of years ago they said I had to go to New Zealand.

I suggested we take our coffee outside so we could watch the people walking by and speculate on their private lives. Barely had we stepped out when a TV crew arrived, filling the narrow restaurant with boom mikes and cameras. They were shooting an episode of Survivor for Israeli TV. According to one of the crew the Survivor set is in a resort in Camarines Sur; the women having dinner had been voted out of the tribe.

“Can I ask them if they know the Zohan?” our waiter asked. We said we weren’t sure; they might be sensitive. I thought of trying a few words of Yiddish, but I know bupkes. I do know Israel is one of the countries that Pinoys can enter without a visa (Brazil and Morocco are two others).