My Ex-Morning Show Partner the Billboard God

Zach and I had some of the best times of our lives on radio. I've blogged about some of them here on my I-don't-know-what-to-do-with-this-blog blog and shared some of our airchecks here. I think our success was based on the fact that we were not only self-deprecating but that we could throw each other down and roast each other every morning.

We created a Verbal Reality (That's radio-speak for taking what an announcer says as true.) that had people in stitches every morning. For instance, I was gone for a week to get liposuction but the press release he created about me was that I went on a tour of India to visit various ashrams. In a week! And got married to a man named Oscar Bandot. In a week! And had three sons. In a week! I came back a week later, shocked to find some listeners actually believe the tales he wove.

(He got his payback of course when he disappeared and I announced he was getting certain parts of his... anatomy... altered. And on another day, that he was shooting a film in Hollywood. You get the picture.)

We created a playground right alongside tackling relevant issues of the day. As producer, my daily goals: inform, educate, entertain the listener, could only be realized with him holding his own against me bringing mine to the table. We would have been helpless though without our faithful assistant Glenn Sibal (more on him in another blog).

One of the jokes we used to throw out on occasion was that either of us had a billboard on EDSA - the major highway that connects the north and the south of Metro Manila - endorsing whatever product we currently favored. That has actually happened for one of us. The billboard part that is.


As for the briefs, Zach favored the aged kind with bacony garters. (We auctioned off our underwear one time... don't ask why. The winner actually came to claim their prize.)

You've come a long way, my friend. I terribly miss the fun we had. You were the best morning show partner any domineering, female co-host could ever ask for and I love you for it.

(P.S. Zach is the drummer of popular Philippine rock band Imago. He got his body from capoeira and working out like a former morning show host who probably now uses his mornings to get to the gym.)

The Difference Between Missing and Remembering

I have days wherein it doesn't take much to remind me of Manila and my life there. An Asian product here, a Tagalog sounding word there, and suddenly I'm back in my beloved, hot and humid country, sweating like a pig, hair frizzy and skin sticky.

Some days, I'll be in the middle of doing the most routine of tasks and I'll be reminded of someone. Or to be more exact, that someone doing the said task much better than me. I had one of those moments today. I was driving our twelve year old Chevy down Highway 50, listening to its many creaks and groans and moans when out of the blue I thought of one of the safest drivers I have ever been driven by, Angelo Barretto.

It was a rainy night past midnight in November 2000 and Angelo had just flown back to the Philippines after bagging the Gold medal from an endurance race in Europe. I was his unofficial publicist at the time. (We met when he guested on my morning show, Zach and Joey in the Morning, in 2000.) He had been racing - and winning - across Europe without any sponsorship deals back home and I wanted to help his cause by connecting him with all my (at the time, traditional) media friends.

He won, I helped people know, the press awarded him Driver of the Year 2000. He came home to a TV channel crew welcome, monsoon rains and a surprise welcome back party. We partied with his closest friends and supporters until finally calling it a night at 3AM. The Barretto family chauffeur was going to drive me back to my radio station where I had left my car.

But seeing how slippery the roads were and how low visibility was, Angelo took the wheel. Jetlagged and exhausted from traveling halfway around the world, he reasoned he felt he was the better driver for the conditions. Fresh from his victory on an endurance track where driving for 24 hours is the norm, none of us argued with him.

We flew steadily and safely down the main road called EDSA - his brother, his driver, and his publicist. I felt... secure. His steady hands and able maneuvering had us all dozing off that by the time we arrived at my building twenty-five minutes later, we hardly knew we had stopped.

I remembered this night today and as I thought of Angelo and wondered what he's up to these days, I caught myself in mid-missing and realized our friendship does not so much warrant a longing as it does a remembering.

Now that I have been back in the US for more than a year, I'm learning more and more how to distinguish between the two.

Slowly, the things I once thought I could not bear to be without are merely things I remember.

I guess this is what happens when a new life takes the place of an old.