While Jen relished the limelight, I had been very shy and shunned it. I used to be a reluctant participant to this game called life. Despite my reluctance, however, my family and friends managed to coax me into entering a few beauty pageants (that is, when I was younger). In the picture on the left I was the class representative to the annual school beauty pageant. I attended St. Francis of Assisi in Las Pinas the whole time that we lived in the Philippines.
Anyway, Djerizza (or Odette, as she goes by sometimes, who was my bestfriend during that period) had been elected muse (you know how you have mock elections for class president, secretary and stuff?) at the beginning of that school year. It was her role to represent our class at the pageant-- usually held during the first week of October, our school's foundation week. She was very adamant about her refusal to participate and would not budge, so that reponsibilty ended up falling upon me. Like I said I was really shy as a child-- I was too timid to even refuse.
Well, guess what. Strangely enough, I almost won. The judges narrowed it down to the three girls shown in the above photograph. It was me (leftmost/foreground), the first year high school (equivalent to seventh grade here in the States) representative (middle) and this fifth grader (rightmost/background). I didn't win. They let the girl in the middle win. She was pretty and most shapely among the three of us. I forget what she performed for the talent portion, probably a little dance number-- but whatever it was I didn't remember being impressed in the slightest. I'm not bitter, just stating a fact. I mean, I wasn't particularly happy that I had to participate in such a mockery (I hated the pageants that Mama Iyay and various relations were always dragging me into)
but I was thankful for the experience nonetheless. That was my final pseudo beauty contest, though. I think as I grew older the "cuteness" I possessed kind of dissipated cos I was no longer asked to join any pageants. I was a bit relieved, but then began to wonder..
Had I really grown uglier? Maybe. To the right is a picture of me taken when I was thirteen, several years after the previous picture. What do you think? I don't know. I guess I looked pretty plain, just your run-of-the-mill adolescent girl, and a shy one at that.
I did have a thing for dancing, though. That year, my first year of high school, I joined several different cliqués and formed friendships with a variety of people in search of my niche. However, a few girls and I would always end up performing at miscellaneous school functions and started hanging out quite a bit. During those days it was quite common to have names for your groups, so five of the girls that I was performing with were members of this group called STEAM. The rest of the girls began to have serious problems with one of the members (Genevieve, who I later became friends with also because she turned out to be pretty cool) who had been particularly bossy. One day they decided to air out their grievances and kick her out.
They decided to replace her with me and my bestfriend at the time (who is still my bestfriend to this very day, Sheryll) and we became known as the SMEAGHE. We did the usual teenage stuff. But then one year, our friend Diwata had to move to Malate (but we still saw her occasionally cos that's just in Manila). We were all very sad about the parting, but we all vowed that noone would get replaced.
A year later Pia moved to California.. And then a year after that I moved to Colorado. Yet we all managed to remain in touch.