goodbye farrah

farrah fawcett is dead. she was 62 years old.

the only farrah i know aside from my dad’s cousin is farrah fawcett. i never saw any of the charlie’s angels episode because we never had tv at home when i was growing up. heck, we didn’t even have regular electricity until i was already away in college.

it was actually funny, before there were electric lines, my townmates would only rely on the electrical power generated by my aunt’s huge generator and it would only power on for 3 hours every evening beginning at 6. when we were kids, 6 pm sharp would be angelus time (my mom – all moms, practically -- would start calling out our names when it starts getting dark – we would usually be just a couple of houses away playing with neighborhood kids and she would come out our second floor balcony and start calling our names). we would all go running home or we risk getting spanked or worse, lead the evening’s rosary. dinner would be immediately after angelus.

i have two other siblings and when we were kids we took turns washing the dishes. the youngest would usually do breakfast, the middle lunch, and i would do dinner. so when i am done with dinner, i would usually make a fuss and start telling everyone to hurry up and finish with their meal. lights out is at 9 and i don’t wanna be left in the kitchen alone in the dark with only the faint glow from the gas lamp providing me company. when that happens, i usually just make many excuses and leave the dishes for the next morning. my mom, most of the time gives me reprieve but it means i have to wake up early to do it, argh.

on special days, we get to skip the rosary if there is a very good movie showing at my aunt’s “betamax-powered” mini-cinema. my first introduction to tv was through our aunt’s tv set. they were the first to own a set in our town. when they had it, they brought along from manila a taped copy of the ms. universe pageant and the whole town saw that year’s ms. philippines friida limpin???, i think, lose to someone. the whole town was in uproar and our aunt found a profitable business. (it’s still on until today!)

anyway, so we never had our own generator and relied on the 3-hour days lights-only (stereos are not allowed – no wall sockets to plug any appliances were allowed) power.

here’s comes the funny thing. when napocor finally installed power lines, the whole town started buying tvs, stereos and the town was transformed into a huge loudspeaker. houses would blare away full volume sounds of the latest air supply cassettes and taped “that’s entertainment” shows (no tv signal nor cable reached our town until 15 years ago).

of course, when it’s the government running things you cannot always rely on its efficiency. yes, there were power lines, indeed, but everytime a slight typhoon comes along, the whole town would lack power for weeks or months even. when this started happening, my townmates finally thought of buying their own generators or how else could they use their expensive karaoke machines? lol.

the humming sound coming from the hundreds of generators added to the now irritating noise from the karaoke machines, radios, tvs, etc. the once quiet town turned into a cacophony (finally got to use that word!) of music, talk radio, generators, actors yelling profanities on betamax… it was amazing!

what was i talking about? oh yeah. farrah fawcett died today after a long battle with many forms of cancer. God bless her soul.

i may have never seen any episodes of her hit tv series but it’s her iconic hair do that, like many others, really made me get to know her. a recent special on tv about her ordeal showed how bravely she fought the disease.