JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

You can watch the recorded reading and talk at Mt Cloud’s Facebook page.

Every year Gabe Mercado and Lissa Romero-de Guia do a dramatic reading of Nick Joaquin’s story May Day Eve on May Day Eve (April 30) at Mt Cloud Bookshop in Baguio. As we are all indoors this year, they will do the performance online and Fifi of Mt Cloud has asked me to provide commentary. I am happy to play Waldorf and Statler of The Muppet Show, and to provide trivia (Traditionally April 30 is Walpurgisnacht, when witches supposedly walk the earth, and War Pigs by Black Sabbath was originally titled Walpurgisnacht, so there’s your Black Sabbath-Quijano de Manila connection. Also I don’t know of a film version of May Day Eve, but there is a very bad one of Joaquin’s Summer Solstice).

Before the broadcast I read May Day Eve for the first time since high school. To my relief I have learned something since then, because I finally get the story. I admire the ease with which Joaquin moves through time, encompassing three different periods without breaking a sweat. It is almost science-fiction-like, the way the mirror becomes a portal to three eras: first young love with its brash illusions, then middle-aged bitterness and recrimination, then old age with the wisdom of hindsight and regret. I thought the most moving passage was in the final section, where Don Badoy realizes how unhappy his wife had been, how he’d taken her for granted as their fairy tale soured. Nick Joaquin stands alone, of course, but it calls to mind the ending of The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, where the protagonist who gave up the love of his life realizes that his wife had known of his sacrifice all along, understood, and pitied him.

In current events, a wing of a mall/residential building (SM Jazz) collapsed this morning. One of the media outlets (ABS-CBN) to break the news (that a wing of SM Jazz had collapsed) reported it (the collapse of a wing of SM Jazz) without identifying the building (SM Jazz) by name (SM Jazz), although the logo (SM Jazz) could be seen in photos of the event (the collapse of a wing of SM Jazz). This omission (of the name SM Jazz) in the news report was criticized in the social media (the term “netizens” gives me the heebie-jeebies, though “heebie-jeebies” does not) as an example of the way media puts the interests of its advertisers ahead of its duty as a public trust, hence the public distrust.

Meanwhile a well-known businessman and presidential adviser for entrepreneurship noted that poor people are more “immune” to novel coronavirus than “sheltered” people. He theorized that it was because the poor are “used to” so much exposure, unlike “us”—presumably the people who eat at least three meals a day and whose main problems in lockdown are boredom and their canceled trips abroad. Later he pointed to “the priests” as the sources of his research, and added that his comments may have been “taken out of context”. They were “only discussing,” he said.

I would be very careful about my word choices, because with influencers sidelined and no one to tell the credulous what they should aspire to, Covid-19 might become the new status symbol. Only the rich seem to get it; certainly only the very rich can afford two or more weeks in the ICU. Covid-19 tests are so rare and expensive, you have to be an elected official to get one, and if you get the virus you’ll need your own private isolation hideaway with all the accoutrements. If Covid-19 is pang-mayaman (for the rich), then everyone will want it, and there’s your dreaded second wave of infections.