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We give writing workshops at the Ayala Museum. The workshops consist of three two-hour sessions of lectures, exercises, and group discussions held over three weeks. Our participants are mostly working people, so the sessions are held in the evenings, after office hours, with coffee and refreshments. We focus on the practical aspects of writing, like How to stop planning to write something and actually do it, and Good luck waiting for that thunderbolt of inspiration, say Hi to Thor when it happens.

The most recent workshop, on The Personal Essay, concluded last week. The next one, Writing Boot Camp, will start on 3 September 2015. For more information or to make a reservation, email Marj Villaflores, villaflores.md@ayalafoundation.org.

This month we will feature, with their permission, essays by the participants. The last batch was half-standup comedy, half-trauma ward. Some of the authors preferred to use aliases. Everyone actually wrote something.

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Photo from www.felicitypage.com

Chasing Ben
by Pilar Rica D. Tabora

I was there for Ben. Benjamin Covington, the tall, green-eyed, curly-haired jerk of a boyfriend whom Felicity Porter blindly chased for four seasons of the TV show, Felicity. He wasn’t a real person (I knew that), but I wanted to revel in the essence of Ben Covington so badly, I dove into the germ-infested, sweat-laden, heat wave-stinking maze of the New York City subway to find him.

It was the summer of 2003, just a year after Felicity ended. J.J. Abrams received a lot of flak for inserting a ridiculous time travel storyline in the last season, but I didn’t care. Ben was a jerk, but he had a heart of gold. I was going to name my future son after him.

I was in Providence, Rhode Island for a summer study intensive on graphic design. Like Felicity (Keri Russell), I had usurped my future and disappointed my parents. Felicity dropped Stanford med school for the University of New York’s art program—her move was instigated by her high school crush Ben (Scott Speedman), whom she barely knew. I, on the other hand, had realized in the middle of my college thesis on the rehabilitation of the Marikina Riverbanks that architecture and city planning was not for me. I could not imagine myself computing for bags of sand, negotiating with misogynist engineers and corrupt government officials, or waiting years for a project to end.

Instead, I wanted to channel my design-based education into something less intimidating, more two-dimensional. My parents believed that graphic design was something of an invented “job” (emphasis on quotation marks). But because I am the youngest and only girl in the family, who had no means of studying abroad except through them, they threw me a deal. Do my six-month study, come home and take the board exam (and pass it), then do whatever I want. Fair enough.

Photo from tvatemywardrobe.com

A year after graduation, I found myself in a tiny university town on the east coast, just a three-hour Amtrak ride away from New York City. All those years watching Felicity back in school had paid off—I was truly vibing her life. On weekends, I would take the train to New York to visit my best friend (who was there on call center training) and my intimidating older cousin whom I never spoke to (the only reason I visited her was that she gave me a place to stay).

My roommates at design school made a fuss about how much time I spent commuting to New York, but I didn’t care to explain my weekend trips. It made me feel grown up, telling my fellow Felicity fan friends back home about my jaunts, and emailing Mark, this guy with a girlfriend, whom I had a disgusting crush on for the entirety of college. He was frequently in New York too, and would be moving in two months to the Bay Area to start his master’s degree at Berkeley. As “serendipity” would have it, that was the exact time I would be moving to San Francisco too—to continue art school on the West Coast in the fall. (Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.)

Fictional Ben and Felicity both worked at Dean & Deluca in SoHo, a part of the city where real life subway lines become notoriously tangled and confused. I didn’t realize then that just because I heard the names of streets like Prince and Canal on the show, it didn’t mean that Dean & Deluca would magically come up as soon as I climbed out of a subway stop in that vicinity. Back when there were no Google Maps or Waze, I had to rely on paper maps which, apparently, my brain could not handle.

I thought Spring Street sounded familiar so I went with my gut and took a chance on that stop. I was expecting to climb up and see the signature brick buildings of SoHo with flags on the awnings and droves of people walking by, but what greeted me was a quiet street peppered with pizzerias and gelaterias. Dean & Deluca sounded Italian enough, but there was no sign of Ben, Felicity, or even Javier their boss anywhere. I had landed myself in Little Italy, which is a charming place to get lost in— until you make a wrong turn and you end up in a strange, Disney World timewarp which brings you smack dab in the middle of China(town).

I knew where I was the second I smelled it—the pungent stink of Le Ching Tea House’s sticky floors and soy sauce mixed with the familiar stench of Farmer’s wet Market early in the morning. The alleys were damp, the sidewalks were uneven, and all around me were aggravated-looking grandmothers toting (what I could only imagine was) raw fish wrapped in bundles of newspaper. Hawkers were all around peddling who-knew-what. This was not the New York I was looking for.

Just the day before, I had gotten lost riding the express train all the way to Harlem at night. I had to call my scary cousin from the payphone, and her jolly British husband chuckled telling me, “It happens to everyone.” I really didn’t want to call them again, much less explain what I was doing in Chinatown. There was also no way I was about to ask someone for help. If the movies had taught me anything, it was not to talk to strangers in New York City—that only ends up with me getting mugged or murdered.

So with my toes blistering in my Pumas, the waistband of my jeans digging into my belly, and my skin going a few shades darker under the scorching summer sun, I walked some more. I had made the mistake of wearing my favorite shirt that day too—with “Joe” scrawled in the front and “Mama” spelled at the back, you can bet I got a ton of calls from strangers all across the board.

Dean & Deluca, according to my notes, was on Broadway St, which by my estimation went all the way up midtown. This meant I could well be walking 40 blocks in the wrong direction without a clue. My paper map with no street names on it also didn’t warn me that SoHo was home to both Broadway and West Broadway, which can be very confusing to someone from Manila where East and West don’t really mean anything. I had imagined myself quite sophisticated for knowing that SoHo meant South of Houston, but when you don’t even know where Houston is and you can’t even manage to find a freaking Dean & Deluca, none of it really matters.

Photo from tvatemywardrobe.com

After another hour or so of walking around unfamiliar territory, I found the brick buildings that I knew marked the area I wanted to find. And after rounding a corner I had finally found what I was looking for. The epicurean hotspot’s awnings had its name painted on it in white, but Dean & Deluca in person looked nothing like it did on TV—something I should have probably realized from the beginning, owing to the fact that a TV show is usually filmed on set.

I was happy to be there however, and as I stepped in, I realized that while there was a coffee bar to the left of the entrance, there were no little round tables the way the show had portrayed it. Instead, there was a huge space filled with industrial shelves stuffed to the brim with epicurean stuff—from pots and pans to fancy aprons and wooden spoons, those t-shirts that Ben and Felicity wore, and hefty cookbooks, also a huge roundabout where you could buy cheese or deli sandwiches or sushi or fresh strawberries. Every single food item was way above my student budget, but I looked at every single item for sale and felt incredibly satisfied that I had made it.

I lined up for a cup of coffee, which I sipped standing at a corner of the café. New York was full of touristy sites and less popular attractions, but this was what I wanted to see. For four years, my friends and I went to college alongside Felicity and felt all her feelings with her. The coffee wasn’t particularly good, but it was worth getting lost in Little Italy and Chinatown for.

There was no Ben Covington behind the counter—but I could feel myself in Felicity’s shoes. I only had a few weeks left on the east coast before moving to San Francisco to chase after my design school dreams (and someone who was moving to Berkeley). Wearing my Dean & Deluca t-shirt and listening to the show’s soundtrack on my click wheel first generation iPod, I would write home about being where Felicity was and feel like I had made it.

PS: Nothing happened between Berkeley guy and me. He proposed to his girlfriend who lived in Boston. Scott Speedman, however, was the new face of the Gap and his face was pasted all over San Francisco by the time I moved there.

PPS: Design school was incredible. I came home to take the board exam and pass it, and decided design clients were too much to handle so I became a writer focusing on architecture and design instead. My parents are happy with me now.