Maggie Wilson dishes on growing up in Saudi Arabia, beauty pageant backstage drama, and that infamous video

It is a bit intimidating seeing Maggie Wilson for the first time. For one, she’s taller than most girls, and her legs are almost impossible to beat. Once you get past that, however, you will discover that she is laid back and easy to talk to; her stories less guarded and more candid than others in the same industry.

At the time of this interview, she and new husband Victor Consunji had just made the headlines with the Internet leak of their steamy, for-friends-and-family-only pre-nuptial video, which shows the couple making out in various states of undress. “We had no intentions of that being leaked on the Internet,” Maggie says. “It was actually Xeng Zulueta’s wedding gift to us because we really, really wanted Jason Magbanua to shoot our wedding, but he wasn’t available. Xeng and Jason are really good friends so she figured why not shoot a pre-nuptial video, but not do the regular pa-cute or pa-sweet video. Victor suggested, ‘Let’s do something raunchier, different.’ So we decided to do a sexier take on pre-nuptial videos.”

While the video shocked many people (which begs the question: If they were going to be offended, why did they view it?), it also delighted others, and more importantly, resulted in many couples wanting to do the same. “I feel like it’s revolutionary, and I think we’ve started a new trend, which is awesome,” Maggie says. “Everyone is entitled to their opinion but at the end of the day, we love the video. Everybody I love—my friends and family—love the video. We all love the video and that’s all that matters. So haters, please.”

For Maggie being married is not much different from going steady. “We’ve been living together for a while now so when we got married, it was more a formality. It was fun and sweet. It was one big event. It feels the same. I have a new ring on my finger.”

Pop goes the question

“Actually, I didn’t like him in the beginning,” Maggie says of Victor. “He was not my type. I don’t like clean pretty boys. I don’t like businessmen, but he was so kulit that I finally gave in. Actually, on the third date, he told me he wanted to marry me, and we weren’t even together yet! Sabi ko: ‘You’re crazy. Don’t call me tomorrow,’ but he was super kulit. Eventually, I figured out that we have a lot in common. He is a lot like me, but a guy. I guess the more I got to know him the more there was no doubt. You don’t question.”

So when Victor popped the question after nine months of being together, Maggie automatically said yes. “Me being paranoid, I would ask myself every day if I was sure (because I’m just 2). The answer was yes,” she says.

There’s a 12-year age gap between Maggie and her husband, something that doesn’t distress her one bit. “All of my ex boyfriends were at least eight years older than I was. I feel that I’m more mature than a regular twenty-one-year-old,” she says. “I enjoy the age gap. I enjoy learning from him because he’s traveled more, he’s experienced more, and I like to see how he views the world. I’ve dated older than him. It wasn’t a big deal. It’s also nice because he treats me like a baby.”

“He’s very disciplined,” she says. “With work, with everything. He likes to keep himself looking good and healthy. I tend to slack off sometimes, but he’s there to push me and discipline me, and teach me how to stay on track.”

Home sweet home

Maggie’s taken some time off work to concentrate on being a wife. Before getting married she was hosting and playing the bad girl on the telenovela, Beauty Queen.

“We just got married so I don’t want to jump back into work. I want to take in marriage first a little bit: be home when my husband comes home and be the domesticated wife I’m supposed to be. Cook for him, be there for him, wake up and sleep next to him,” she says. Her husband wasn’t fond of the long hours acting entailed. “He wants me to be home, which is something that I need to get used to because I’ve lived independently since I was sixteen. I’m enjoying it. I started watching Nikita yesterday. I cook for my friends.”

If you’re lucky enough to dine on Maggie’s table, make sure she serves her mashed potatoes, one of her specialties. She can make peanut butter ice cream from scratch. “I’m a foodie, and that’s kind of how I got into cooking,” she says. “I started watching Hell’s Kitchen, Master Chef, Top Chef. I learned how to make ice cream, sorbets, hors d’oeuvres and regular food like pasta, steaks, and burgers.”

Although it seems like she’s doing the whole domesticated wife bit, Maggie is still very much her own woman. For one thing, she’s not one of those who will allow their significant other to dictate what they wear. She says as much to the hair stylist who has commented on the shorts and thin sleeveless blouse she wears. Although she likes staying put for now, Maggie isn’t one to make her life revolve around home, at least not yet. “I have a girly day maybe once or twice a month to see my girlfriends, but I don’t usually go out without Victor. It’s kind of like he won’t go out without me, and I won’t go out without him. It’s not a written rule; it’s just like that. We don’t want to be apart, I guess,” she says.

Early years

Maggie was working on Beauty Queen and planning her wedding at the same time. “I was really, really stressed out from September until the wedding day, but it was good stress,” she says.

Maggie is best remembered as an MTV VJ, a job that she enjoyed and misses, but admits that she wouldn’t want to go through again. “I miss going to concerts, hosting concerts, and meeting new people. I miss the people I worked with like Kat [Alano] and Sib [Sibulo]. It was fun while it lasted, but I don’t think I would do it again,” she says. “I feel that I’m more at peace with myself now. Sometimes, when you meet these international artists, they can be douches, sleazebags, whatever. (I’m not going to mention names.) And, you have to deal with them. How am I going to go to work and deal with that, and then come home and like ‘Hi honey! So and so is a douche, and I had to deal with him today.’”

She wants to do more hosting in the future though, especially since she doesn’t think she’ll be doing soaps for a very long time, if ever at all. Given a choice, it’s what she prefers over acting, anyway. “The hours are shorter. You get paid to talk and ask questions. You don’t really have to act. You can be yourself. You get paid more, and you get to meet a lot of people which is great,” she adds.

If you were to go back in time to 10 years ago, and tell a younger Maggie Wilson, the daughter of a Scotsman and a Filipina based in Saudi Arabia that she was going to be a Filipino celebrity, she would have laughed at you. “I thought I was going to be either a tennis player or an interior designer. I was playing tennis since I was five, all they way until I left Saudi Arabia. I was pretty good at it, and I thought maybe one day I could play in the U.S. Open or Wimbledon, and then I moved here. I didn’t know anybody so I stopped completely because I didn’t know where to go. I had no friends when I moved here,” she says. “I try to get my husband to play, but he holds a racket like a baseball bat. I haven’t played in a while, but I’d love to.”

She says that she hasn’t visited Saudi Arabia in eight years (though her parents come to the Philippines at least once a year), but plans to visit the country soon with her husband. “I want to show him where I grew up, how I lived. I want to take him riding with me. I used to ride. I used to show jump as well. I lived on a ranch for three years, and that’s where I really got into tennis and riding.”

Living in the Philippines wasn’t a big shock however, as she used to travel a lot with her parents, going to the UK and the Philippines, which both her parents prefer because of the weather.

Although she goes into a slight trance when she talks about Arabian food, Maggie says that she doesn’t really miss living in Saudi. We don’t ask why, but we quiz her on what it’s like to be a woman in a country famous for its strict gender rules. “It’s a very strict society. Women have no power in Saudi Arabia. Women are not allowed to drive. We have to wear the black robe, which is called an abaya, and occasionally the scarf, which is called the tarha. Not many women are allowed to work. If a woman wants to work, you’re only allowed to be a nurse, domestic helper, doctor, or a waitress,” she says.

Yeah, It’s Over Now

As I write the closing year’s editor’s note, my right arm is wrapped in a fiberglass cast because I inadvertently injured my right wrist. In a skateboarding accident.

Yes, skateboarding.

Oh, don’t be so ageist. Just because I have come into an age group that can be generally rounded to forty. Just because the hair on my scalp does not regenerate as fast as I would like it too and just because I can watch pornographic material without seeking my parents’ approval, it doesn’t mean I’m old. It just means I’m regressing.

And for your information, I was skateboarding as part of a segment on my show (warning: shameless plug ahead), GMA News TV’s Best Men.  I have done more shameless things on the show–like witnessing a manunuli take his instrument to a grown man’s foreskin and ballroom dancing in a body hugging sequined shirt that exposed my cleavage all the way down to my bellybutton–but this was the only segment to have caused me long-term physical harm.

Due to my condition, I will not be able to generate brand new drivel for you this month. So I hope you don’t mind if I peddle some regurgitated drivel by talking about a certain body part–damaged, fractured, abused, or otherwise–from my new book It Only Hurts When I Pee: RJ Ledesma’s Imaginary Guide to Bodily Gases, Hair Loss and Pink Parts.

Warning: A lot of pink parts will be flashed in this issue.

Jingle Balls

According to fertility specialist Dr. Robert Winston, the size of a primate’s testicles can tell us a lot about a species’ sexual practices.

In the seventies, British biologist Roger Short noticed something peculiar about ape anatomy. He found that chimpanzees had extremely large four-ounce testicles that produced prodigious amounts of sperm (although I am trying not to imagine how he found out that chimps produce prodigious amounts of sperm). Mating among chimps is a fairly unregulated and casual affair especially since they are not being monitored by the MTRCB. In fact, there seems to be no awareness as to the paternity of any of their offspring.

On the other hand, silverback gorillas–the largest of the living primates that sport large canine teeth and have a growl fierce enough to make human testicles retract to the pit of their stomachs–have miniscule testicles. More miniscule than even those of some congressmen.

Unlike chimpanzees, silverback alpha males take possession of a harem of female gorillas. And silverbacks are secure in the knowledge the female gorillas will rarely sneak off for an illicit romp in the wilds (unless they encounter a very brave and randy male chimpanzee). Gorillas rarely have intercourse, because for males with a harem, sexual access is guaranteed. Therefore, Mr. “I Am King of the Apes” only needed a small amount of sperm and, consequently, a small payload. So, gorillas evolved testicles that were small but terrible.

Now, let us put things into perspective: gorillas weigh four times as much as chimps, but a chimp’s testicles weigh four times as much as a gorilla’s. What can we infer from this? Well, the biologist Roger Short appears to have stumbled, not on testicles, bur rather on anatomical clues about a species’ mating system: the bigger the balls, the more polygamous the females.

Human testicles tread the middle ground when it comes to primate testicles. Measured as a proportion of body weight, our human teabags are four times the size of a gorilla’s but less than a third of the size of a chimpanzee’s.

According to The Red Queen: Sex And The Evolution of Human Nature, ancestral man probably lived in a pseudo-harem system, but he was also prepared for occasional female promiscuity. Ancestral females copulated with more than one male in a month fairly often.  Given this, human males evolved testicles potent enough to combat a moderate amount of sperm competition from other males, but they certainly didn’t need to stockpile enough artillery as required by chimpanzee gonads. If Goldilocks were a scientist, she would say that our testicles were just right.

And now that that’s out of the way, allow me to give you a lowdown on what to check out in this special year-end issue of UNO.

Radio DJ Angelika Schmeing-Cruz, more popularly known as Angelicopter to her avid listeners, graces our cover for the very first time and we couldn’t be happier. If you’ve been living under a rock, you might not have known that she’s also a castaway and now a dropout in this year’s Survivor Philippines (along with teammate Jackie Forster), proving to everybody that just because you’ve lost the battle, doesn’t mean you’ve lost dibs on a magazine cover. Who are we to complain anyway?

We have also listed down the highlights of our year in our exclusive BARRAGE section, while respected male personalities Paolo Bediones, Basti Artadi, Luke Landrigan, and Dylan Ababou rule our BLASTER pages as they reveal their own lists of favorites in 2011 pop culture. Other men we idolize–rockstar Bamboo Manalac, actor Baron Geisler, and world-renowned animator Ronnie del Carmen–share their thoughts about life and career in our POINTBLANK, INTERVIEW, and SHOCKWAVE sections, respectively. And finally, music legend Jose Mari Chan teaches us how to write the perfect Christmas song in this month’s AFTERBURNER.

RJ Ledesma,

Editor-in-Chief

We all love Heart Evangelista, but she’s all set to break our collective hearts

Words by Philbert Dy / Photography by Juan Caguicla

There will come a time when Heart Evangelista won’t be on the public radar. At least that’s what she thinks. She will gladly confess to how much fun she’s having as a celebrity, or how she’s enjoying the perks of her fame. At the same time, she will mention how this life has kept her from pursuing other things, how it’s kept her from living a normal life.
“I really wanted to be a vet,” she says. “Now it feels like it’s too late. Maybe if I retire next year, I’ll become a vet. Otherwise…”
She leaves the thought hanging. In truth, it’s already a foregone conclusion. She has two years left on her contract, one that pretty much keeps her on the soap opera grind. Her latest, Dwarfina, has her spending 18-hour days in front of a green screen, running and jumping across an imaginary landscape where everything is just a little too big for her.
Not that she doesn’t enjoy it. “It’s lot of playing with imagination, since there’s really nothing there. I have to imagine the people I’m talking to, and all the things I’m seeing. It’s like I’m just a kid playing.” She works these days largely by herself, not even having the benefit of interacting with a co-actor. On this show, she is strangely isolated, working towards things that she can’t even see.

It’s striking to hear how pragmatic she is about the entire business. While other actresses will talk for ages about dream roles or incessantly praise every single aspect of their lives, Heart seems to acknowledge that there’s a sort of falseness in this kind of life—that it might not be the most fulfilling path for a young person.

Part of it is simple cost-benefit analysis. Right now, as a major star, she enjoys plenty of perks. “It’s great to get all sorts of free stuff from people, and it’s easy money.” She pauses. “Well it’s not really easy, but it’s fun. It’s a fun way to make a living.” The only role she’s ever complained about is one that had her hidden under prosthetics. She gestures roughly around her nose and mouth area. “They had all of this covered, and I had to cry. It was all wet around that area all day—so uncomfortable.” It isn’t the discomfort that she’s actually unhappy with though. It’s the fact that the show wasn’t primetime, and that the audience wasn’t commensurate to the effort that she put in.
Though most would probably laugh at the idea of acting being hard work, it must be noted how much real effort goes into being a public figure. Being a major celebrity is really about limits. Endorsement deals and roles come with certain obligations. Heart is constantly on a strict diet. She carries around a carton of orange juice, which seems to serve as her primary source of everyday energy. She claims she’s still able to pig out, but judging from how much was left from the chicken fajitas she was sharing with her road manager, her definition of “pigging out” is very different from that of the average person. She always has to be mindful of how she looks in pictures; a stray bit of cleavage might cost her a lucrative endorsement deal. On screen, all manner of conditions crowd her acting process. It might be natural for one of her characters to swig beer straight from the bottle to deal with a painful breakup. But natural isn’t a priority for some of the companies that employ her as an image model. She might have put everything into a scene, come out with the most truthful performance ever, but if she drank from a bottle, she’d have to reshoot.

Heart just seems keenly aware of the business side of show business. As much as people like to talk about perfecting the craft or creating art that connects with people, success in the current show business environment is really about keeping an eye on the bottom line. Actuary-like calculations play a major role in production. Networks have an arcane set of mathematics that weighs the risk and reward of placing a star in a certain kind of project. Heart seems to know her role and the system, and she’s decided to play it as smartly as she can.
She is the only actress I’ve ever talked to that prefers doing soaps over movies. “Soaps have so much more power,” she says. She explains that soaps will expose you to more people; that it keeps you in the public eye for a much longer period of time. While she cops to the idea that a movie might be more satisfying on a craft level, in terms of pure business, soaps just makes more sense. She may end up doing a lot more work, but the prestige and the accompanying perks are simply greater.
She’s looking ahead to the day when these perks will fade, when she’ll be older in an industry that disproportionately values youth. She doesn’t want to still be putting in the hours that she does on set and not have the prestige that she enjoys now. The strangest thing about all this is how she says it without an ounce of cynicism. The same sentiments have been heard from faded stars, every word dripping with bitterness. But Heart talks business with the same brightness and positivity that she treats everything else. She might be a veteran of the business, and she might have one eye out the door, but there’s no sense that she hates any of it. She’s genuinely happy to be where she is. She’s just aiming for something more.
“Even if I could maintain a certain level of prestige, I’d probably only show up in two films a year.” She balks at any larger commitment. “I’ve been doing this for twelve, thirteen years now, and I feel like I’ve missed out on so much.”
“I really admire actresses like Bianca King or Iya Villania who study and work at the same time. I don’t know how they do it.” Heart looks genuinely puzzled. “I’m still an undergrad,” she says. “I’d like to go back to studying…probably something related to what I’ve been doing. Maybe fashion.” She also talks about someday playing a part in the family business. “I’d like to see a Barrio Fiesta in Greenbelt,” she says. She talks about modernizing the menu, tailoring it to fit the younger generation.
Heart talks about expanding her horizons. She wants to travel. “I think about all the girls my age. They’ve experienced so much more than me. They’ve been to more places.” Heart sees herself as sheltered, her life as a celebrity having kept her in a state of arrested development. “I don’t even know how to do bank stuff,” she says with just a hint of frustration. The life of a celebrity has its perks, but in the end, it’s just a bubble that’s waiting to be popped. Heart wants to be ready for life outside the bubble.
So while we still have a couple of years to enjoy Heart Evangelista’s effervescence on television, I suggest that fans savor what we have now. Right now, she is still happy to be everywhere, to be someone who has the privilege of entertaining the masses on a daily basis. But she is already looking at the life beyond that of celebrity. She is going to try to live a more normal life, using the same work ethic that she used to excel in show business in order to succeed in other, less absurd fields. And while nothing is ever a sure thing in this world, it feels like Heart will find success in whatever it is that she ends up doing. The keen business sense that she already exhibits will likely serve her well. Her odd mix of pragmatism and positivity ought to make her a pretty effective leader.
Yes, she might still show up in a movie or two, never forgetting how much the industry has done for her, but Heart is growing up. She seems to think that there’s more to life than being a celebrity. She’s all set on breaking our collective hearts, depriving audiences of her natural charm. Like the greatest love affairs, this just isn’t meant to last.

Ed: Oh how time flies.. here’s a feature on Andrea de Guzman — now Andrea Mago from earlier this year.

“My idea of fun is anything to do with travel, friends, my fiancé, and food!”


Words by Luis Katigbak | Photographed by Pam Viguera
Shot on location at Xocolat, Libis

“Funny you mentioned my commercials,” Andrea de Guzman laughs. “Alexis would bug me non-stop– at the cafeteria, in the car, on the way to the classroom, at a random spot somewhere outside school, and even in the middle of lunch, to give him a montage performance of my roles. And I’d be like, ‘Montage? No way!’ but deep inside I’d be like, ‘What’s a montage?’”

Light-hearted, candid, and charming: these are no doubt a few of the qualities that drew the young, late, lamented film critic Alexis Tioseco to Andrea. Their friendship was cemented over midnight nacho runs and “coffee over useless conversation.” “He was my biggest fan, or at least he made me feel that he was,” Andrea recalls with affection.

You may remember Andrea as, among other roles, the best friend in that KC Concepcion ad who discovers the benefits of a certain energy pill. There may be some truth to it, because these days her schedule is nothing but busy: “As a full-time job, I teach [Art and Social Graces to] first year high school kids at Bannister Academy. On occasion, I write for several lifestyle publications. In between working on lesson plans and food or travel write-ups, I run to the recording studio to squeeze in little voice-over jobs for TV and radio ads.” She’s also a writer and speaker for I AM S.T.R.O.N.G., a group of college students and young professionals that promotes proper decision-making for the youth through books and talks given throughout the country.

Andrea’s plans for the future include getting married this December, starting a family, “working out and achieving the Alessandra Ambrosio figure,” and putting up her own preschool. “There’s a lot of fulfillment in seeing your ideas materialize,” Andrea says of her teaching. “When I sorted through my first few unit plans, test papers, handouts, lesson plans, Powerpoint presentations, I was like, ‘Wow, I made these.’” Alexis, as always, would have been proud. ν

THIRD TIME’S A CHARM

You can never, never have enough of Anne Curtis.

And as we celebrate UNO’s 8th anniversary, we thought it would be perfect to have one of best-selling cover girls shot by lensman extraordinaire Xander Angeles (whose cover and pictorial prove that Anne can be smokin’ without having to light up a cigarette).

So as part of my personal thank you to Anne for gracing our cover, my wife and I contributed about two hundred bucks to Anne’s paycheck by watching Star Cinema’s No Other Woman, which is by far the highest grossing local movie of the year (Incidentally, they shot the closing scene of the movie in this really great weekend market called Mercato Centrale.

Judging the copious amount of tears I, este, my wife shed during the movie, I’d say Anne delivered quite a stellar performance while sharing screen time with my cousin, Derek Ramsay.

Ok, ok. My reel life cousin Derek Ramsay.

Allow me to explain. Aside from editing this fine men’s magazine of purty pictures and high-fallutin’ words, another one of my jobs that help subsidize my credit card loans is that of a – cough, cough – actor.

For all those who had the first signs of pubic hair emerge in the late eighties, you may remember me as a chubby, be-pimpled and curly-haired adolescent hawking a carbonated orange softdrink in a series of commercials that ran from 1988 to 1991.

But ever since that initial surge in caffeine and sugar-fueled popularity, I have been clawing my way back into limelight. Unfortunately, my attempts at a showbiz comeback has probably been less successful than that of Jojo Alejar’s

Nonetheless, I have had a couple of flashlight moments in today’s showbiz scene.  After twenty or so years in the media business, I have all but four movies to my credit. I played Sam Milby’s cousin in Star Cinema’s And I Love You So, Cherie Gil’s lawyer in Working Girls 2010, and guest roles in indie films Senior Year by Jerrold Tarog and Kaye for Komiks by Arnold Arre. Then I also played a recurring role as Derek Ramsay’s cousin on ABS-CBN’s Habang May Buhay and Gretchen Barretto’s lawyer on ABS-CBN’s Magkaribal  (Can you spot the trend? I played both Sam and Derek’s first cousins. Therefore, I am related to greatness).

In my desperation to reclaim the spotlight, I even created, executive produced and appeared in my own late night show (no, it is not Jojo A All the Way), it was the critically-acclaimed (my mom was very critical of it) cult hit (the cult members are now in hiding) Studio 23’s The Men’s Room with UNO contributor and stand-up comic Tim Tayag.

But alas, even me appearing half-naked on late night television did to upgrade my popularity to the highly carbonated levels that I enjoyed in my youth.

Nowadays I have to show interested parties within a ten feet radius my pocket album filled with newspaper clippings and 80s photos to remind them of my royal status. However, there are a few out there who still appreciate my thespian efforts.

Why, just recently, I was buying a cup of coffee in one of the ubiquitous café that line Tomas Morato when a giddy young man in his early twenties tapped me on the shoulder and asked if he could take a picture with me.

After five minutes of fixing my hair and applying foundation, I gladly obliged. When our thirty-minute photo session ended (I insisted he take our picture from several hundred angles), I thanked the young man for the opportunity.

“Remember to tag me!” I said to him as he waved goodbye.

The young man waved back. “Thanks again, Mayor Bistek!”

-RJ Ledesma
Editor-in-Chief

[Shameless plugging ends here.]

directed and cut by Jason Tan
produced by Dix Buhay
music by Malek Lopez

In art  provocateur Jenna Genio’s kingdom, the female of the species is decidedly more ready than the male.

Originally published in UNO July 2010 issue

PHOTOGRAPHY BY LILEN UY | Creative Direction by Juan Caguicla | Art Direction by Norman Crisologo | Sittings Editor France Pinzon | Styling By Mara Reyes | Makeup by Diane de Castro | Hair by Borge Aloba, L’Oreal Professionnel

To Call Aubrey Miles a “rolling stone” isn’t implying she gathers no moss but only to declare this screen vamp and former  Amazing Race contestant is still going the distance

Originally published in UNO July 2010

“All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget,” wrote the art critic John Berger. “Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.” After spending the past twelve months looking at and admiring the most beautiful women in the country, the quote is especially resonant for us and for our readers. “We love women,” was something we declared from the get-go, as well as the belief that there’s more to them than their surfaces—although we admit we’re as weak for those surfaces as anybody. We also deplore the practice of using digital tools to turn them into wax models instead of emphasizing natural beauty or, more importantly, as a means to get underneath the skin of our subjects. If anything, we picture them with their characters draped around themselves: the only nudity we truly indulge in is the stripping off of the carapaces of convenient perception. Given that the broad consensus among psychologists is that memory isn’t so much reproductive as it is reconstructive—“a blurry mixture of accurate and inaccurate recollections”—the following pages offers a sidereal tour of the past year, revealing not merely skin-deep nostalgia but a new flesh.

Originally published in UNO June 2010 issue

Her dad knew Hendrix and her mom went by the alias Electrika. No wonder, then, that Sarah Meier-Albano grew up to be the coolest superheroine.

Someone needs to explain the secret identity thing to Sarah Meier-Albano. The way it works is, your normal everyday self is pretty much the opposite of your superheroic persona. Batman is dark and brooding and scary, so Bruce Wayne is frivolous and flirty and flashy. Superman has all the powers ever and descends from the sky like some kind of Space Jesus, so Clark Kent is meek and mild-mannered and generally unobtrusive. That’s how it goes. But Sarah, even when she’s not fighting crime while decked out in costume, is already jaw-droppingly impressive, on a day-to-day basis. I should know; I’ve worked with her. The woman has super powers, no doubt.

Working with Sarah—who is one of our most recognizable and admired hosts and models, and also happens to be a talented writer—is, in one word, a dream. When I was writing event and TV scripts for MTV Philippines, I could count on her, first of all, to remember everything with frightening accuracy (a fond and somewhat surreal memory: Sarah going up the steps of the old MTV building in the Fort, while effortlessly reciting a convoluted philosophical passage by Heidegger that I had dropped into an MTV VJ Hunt script as a joke). Second, one could also count on her to ad-lib brilliantly, and actually improve the script in many ways. It was a welcome lesson in humility, to be lurking backstage and witness the weaknesses in your script corrected live.

And it’s not just her sheer presence and her ability to think on her feet: Sarah’s powers extend to the printed word as well. When I was working for a monthly music magazine, I asked her to write something about hip-hop, and she delivered an amazing essay about her love for the genre. However, I happened to correct what I thought was a grammatical error, only to realize after we had gone to press that she was right and I was wrong. And this is what I do for a living. Like I said: lessons in humility. When I co-founded my own music magazine a year or so later, we gave her a monthly column and pretty much let her do what she wanted with it, and she never disappointed.

And having just gushed about Sarah’s way with words, I’m going to step back now and let her tell her stories in her own.

SECRET ORIGINS
“My childhood was, I’d like to say ordinary, but I don’t know, depends on who you’re talking to.” Sarah’s dad was a Swiss businessman who met and married her Pinay mother—a model named Electrika—in Hong Kong. “I was born and raised there, and I was an only child up until I was 7 years old, at which time my little brother, Albert, was born. Hong Kong was my playground and I loved it.”

Sarah recalls: lessons in tennis, swimming and golf; an endless parade of Pinoy creative people—designers, furniture makers, and the like—dropping by their home, for tea or mahjong with her mom; her elementary education in a German-Swiss International School, which required an hour-and-a-half trip up a mountain peak every day (“I do remember the trips as being a time for me to daydream, so that was good”); her aborted Cantonese lessons; and her first modeling gigs. “I had my first modeling job, as a fitting model for Esprit, at the age of five. So that was my first paycheck, with which I bought a pink BMX bike. And my first fashion show was at about the age of eight.” She was also a straight-A student, who for the most part gave her parents no reason for stress, and “was always in the corner reading books all day.”

And then there were the travels. “My dad worked hard and had a lot of business trips, and my parents made it a point to bring me to a different country every single year, so that was an amazing experience for me. I remember doing drives around Europe, I remember just random visuals: of playing with a monkey in Bali, riding on a motorbike with my Dad picking pineapples—I don’t know where that was—chilling on a yacht in Thailand. Going to the States, picking strawberries by my grandfather’s friends’ backyard or something. A cross-country drive through the United States. All these things. I was really blessed in terms of traveling.”

Sarah is also very grateful for having grown up both Swiss and Filipino. “There’s the feeling of being part of more than one thing, I guess, being part of a European culture and being part of an Asian culture and bringing the beauty of both and melding them into one and really knowing that the world is mine to conquer [laughs]. I feel that people that were not exposed to different cultures don’t really have that sense of ‘the world is my playground’ which I have had since I was a kid.”

Once a year, the family would stay in the Philippines, and at the end of her elementary school education, they moved back here, and Sarah ended up enrolling in seventh grade at the International School Manila.

BIRDS OF PREY
Sarah would establish herself as a sought-after model while still in her teens, but to this day, she has some qualms about the field. “It really takes a very strong, grounded sort of person to live through the world of modeling and come out sane. Surprise surprise, for those who haven’t noticed, models are the most insecure people that you will ever meet, and I think it’s just because on a day-to-day basis you’re subject to criticism or expectations on things that sometimes you cannot control or have any say on. For example, your eyes are set too wide apart or your hair is the wrong texture. Your chin is the wrong shape or your face is too round. You waist is too big. Your torso’s not proportioned.

“All of that stuff, it gets hard, and depending on who you are, you feel like there’s something inadequate about you… And the lessons, they come quick and they come hard, and the truth does hurt sometimes but you grow up really fast in this industry. I have nothing but love for it, but I also have reservations, and once again you have to be secure, strong and grounded as a person to be okay as a model.”

As for her hosting career—that kicked off with a rather dramatic twist of events. “I remember the Philippine leg of the Ford Supermodel of the World contest [in 1999] which my manager, Joey Espino, had a franchise of, so he was staging the contest and search here and had asked me to come on board as scriptwriter. On the day of the press conference at the Intercon, which I believe Rustom Padilla was supposed to host, Rustom felt ill that day and gave an hour’s notice before the presscon, so my manager looks over at me and he goes, ‘You know the script because you wrote it—go find something to wear, you’re hosting the press conference.’ And I just remember saying, Holy crap, are you serious? There was a part of me that was nervous but another part of me that—to make a superhero reference—just threw off the daywear, and there’s a superhero outfit underneath. This was my time to shine: ‘Oh damn—bring it!’ I crossed the street to Mango and bought this olive green, sort of sexy woman version of a suit, and came back to the event and because I had written it and edited it and revised it so many times it came naturally to me. I stood up there and pretty much killed it.”

SONIC DISRUPTORS
MTV came calling almost immediately afterwards, and before long Sarah had realized her oft-expressed desire to become an MTV VJ. After going for what she thought was a screen test with MTV Asia in Singapore but which ended up being her first segments for airing, the head of Creative in MTV Asia talked to her and basically gave her the intro spiel for incoming VJs. “I just remember that feeling, going ‘Aw, man, I’m here, this is what I wanted, and here I am’ and that kind of set the roller coaster that was my life at MTV for the next five years or so.”

“The day-to-day at MTV… it was fun, I don’t know how else to describe it. Yes, it was work, but obviously music is a huge passion of mine and I guess that’s always been steeped in me, my mom’s a major soul head and my dad was a rock ‘n’ roll kind of guy. It really came out in my years at MTV, where I got a high off of interviewing artists and really asking about their creative process.” The experience was something that “will always be part of my heart,” Sarah says; “Imagine—[you’re] a teenager and everybody who grew up with you is in college, and here you are flying off to some country and interviewing a superstar artist, and it’s really great.”

While she’s had too many encounters with stars to mention, Sarah pinpoints her favorite interview easily. “When I was in New York and I was already five months pregnant, MTV called me and said, ‘Can you shoot in Brooklyn for Alicia Keys Unplugged?’ I said hell yeah.” It was not the lovely Ms. Keys that Sarah was most excited to meet, however (she had already interviewed Alicia years before, and in fact Alicia had reportedly developed a little girl-crush on her, according to the producer); it was one of the special guests.

“I went and I got to interview Common, who’s definitely on my list of favorite artists of all time. That was a huge thrill for me, especially since it was my final MTV interview, and it was New York of all places, and it was with this important of a dude in my life. That was the best and most thrilling and fulfilling interview I’ve ever done. That performance—Alicia Keys Unplugged—it was Alicia Keys, Mos Def, Common, and Damian Marley, so you can imagine how I felt. It was a great great day.”

ASTRO CITY
And speaking of that concrete jungle where dreams are made— “New York City, the reason also why I moved to New York in the first place was to get away. It was at the point in my life, my career, where I felt so pressured. I was in the public eye for the wrong reasons, this was in the middle of my relationship with Borgy [Manotoc], which I remember crying about to my Mom—which doesn’t happen very often, so you know that it’s pretty serious. I think I said, I just wanna go somewhere where I can disappear, nobody knows my name, you know, walk in the streets and be a nobody. And she laughed, and said, ‘There’s only one place I have been to like that, and it’s New York City.’

“[New York City] rang very strongly in my consciousness, and I decided to [go there]. Basically what happened was that a week after that, my manager gave me a call and said, ‘Look, there’s an agency in New York that wants to fly you out,’ and I said ‘Oh man, if this is not a sign, I don’t know what is.’ So I said okay, and went to New York maybe for the wrong reasons—like I know a lot of people wanted me to go out there to further my modeling career and really to rep the Philippines but at that point in time that wasn’t my frame of mind.

“I saw a lot of ugly things in the modeling scene out in New York. Maybe I was exposed to the wrong things at the wrong point in my life, but you know, I just stepped away from it because it’s not something that I want. To be completely honest—this is the first time I’m saying this—I don’t even know that modeling per se is something that I’ve ever truly had a calling for. I don’t know, it’s something that I’m grateful for, yes, something that I owe a lot to, something that I take seriously, something that I wanted to be the best at, but at the same time, I always knew that it’s a stepping-stone, so the attachment wasn’t really there. I must have let people down.

“But basically what happened was, I used New York as my fine Sarah time, so for a year I splurged and splurged and spent. You know, lived the fancy New York life and went shopping all the time and took cabs everywhere because I was too lazy to take the subway, went to clubs, hung out, met people; running the circuit, should we say. And after all that I realized that that was not who I was. So either it was a very expensive mistake or a very expensive lesson. Either way, I came out of it knowing that that’s not what I wanted any more, that’s not something that was part of my life. I met [her now-husband] Banj in New York soon after my dad was really really ill with cancer, and in the days after New Year’s 2004 he finally passed away after a long fight, and I came back to Manila to keep the family together and see what needed to be done. Banj came with me and we came back here and started back up at MTV again, but there’s a different kind of beat that I was playing to by this point.”

THE DREAMING
“My love for music.. It’s strong, man.  It defines so much of who I am. There have been a lot of very difficult times in my life, and I don’t know that, without music, that I would have been able to process them and come out as strong as I have. It sucks answering this because it feels like I’m trivializing a lot, but you know—wait for the book!” [laughs]

“The composing, performing side is a dream that I would like to one day saunter into, but I don’t know if I’m ready yet, I’m still coming to grips with my own legitimacy as an artist. I think the term ‘artist’ has always been something I’ve put on a pedestal, and to accept or admit and allow myself to say that I’m one is still a process. I’d really love to, you know—I was chatting with a friend from Hong Kong that I grew up with and she goes, ‘So, did you end up becoming a singer?’ and I said, what.
“That’s what my childhood was like, you know, I wanted to be a singer when I grew up. And it never panned out. I guess my voice changed over the years and I had forgotten all about that, strangely enough. And I was talking to my mom about that recently and she said, ‘Yes, you were chosen to sing in front of Princess Diana when she visited Hong Kong,’ and I’m sitting there like What, are you serious? And you start getting flashbacks of the plays you were in, singing so-and-so solo, and you’re like Dang, I really did want to be a singer. And then you go into the bathroom and you try singing again, and it just doesn’t sound like it should sound like, and you’re like, Okay, I’m going to let that one go…” But she adds: “I’m not gonna lie, that’s in my list of things to do, to record a song before I die.”

WORLD’S FINEST
Currently Sarah can be heard on the radio—U92 FM, to be exact, 6 to 10 AM in the morning, Mondays to Fridays—with co-host Vicky Herrera, on The Dollhouse, the station’s flagship morning talk and music show. “Radio was one of those things that I really wanted to get involved in. I think I wanted to take the edge off being ‘that model,’ and having to use the face and the body to define how I made my money, and who I was a lot of the time. To come on and have a medium where you can communicate and not have to be seen or be critiqued on what you look like, it was very empowering for me.” She and Vicky use their show to entertain, and to educate as well; they want people tuning in “to get something positive, and not just mundane talk or dirty talk,” while at the same time “keeping things light, so that it’s digestible too.”

As the host of Philippine Fashion Week TV, Sarah has some thoughts on that field too, of course:
“Fashion is one of the things that this country really needs to pay attention to and celebrate, because the talent is here. It’s like with basketball, the love for it, the skill, I guess, is already present, but the physical part of it is just not God-given—the height, the bulk. And people keep forcing the issue. Whereas singing is something that is integrated into our culture, Filipinos are good at it, but perhaps singers aren’t always as marketable as they could be to make it on an international level. When it comes to fashion though, we’re on point—we have everything it takes, except government support and more funding, but it’s definitely one of those things, an industry that I think the Filipino can dominate globally.
“I think Philippine Fashion Week has been an amazing platform for a lot of these designers to get a taste of what it might be like to show internationally, and to really up their game—the demands of coming up with a collection within a specific theme, the process of getting it approved to show at Philippine Fashion Week to begin with, the reactions of the audiences, and really being in the same arena as other amazing designers and bringing out the beautiful part of the challenge and the competition.” Sarah goes on to talk about designers working with organizations that support the use of natural indigenous fibers: “How can you not be proud? These are our local talents, using materials that are grown only here, and the pieces that they’re coming out with, this is stuff that’s being worn on red carpets at the Grammys and the Oscars and whatnot, you know?”

POWERS
We talk a bit about her family—she’s married to Banjo Albano, and they have a young daughter named Kaya—but, understandably, Sarah is reluctant to say too much. “I’m very private about my family life; it’s not something that I like to talk about too freely, and that’s just because it’s very very sacred to me. Let’s just say that it is within my family that I learned life’s most important lessons, and that the selflessness of a Godly type of love is something that I have only recently learned to embrace. It was a lot of ‘me’ before, very childish, like ‘I want this, I want this done that way, I’m gonna do this on my time…’ But once you become a part of something as beautiful and sacred as a family… I found so much solace in being in Church with them on Sundays, and you know, going out to eat, and doing art work, and being at the beach, building sand castles. It sounds so cliché but the beauty there is something I don’t know that I could ever express properly in words or in music.”

Having listed an impressive array of her known superpowers, I ask her what else she’s got in her arsenal.
“I think my powers are that I’m a scar kisser of sorts—I think that I’ve been blessed with a healing power? I think I know how to bring the best out in people. The passion for that is definitely something that’s there; I love one-on-one time with people and really getting to know their story. What happens off-air is that people hit me up via chat, via YM and I end up becoming a friend or an ear of sorts, and really talking them through some pretty hardcore issues that they’re going through in their life. But of course it’s one of those things that when it comes to my life, I have no idea where to start, right? [laughs] I like bringing people together; I think that introducing like-minded people or people that I think would mesh has become one of my fortes as well.

We wrap up the interview with some final superhero-themed questions. “What is my kryptonite? If you send me a killer playlist, dude, I’m down, flattened. Total ultimate complete knockout.”

“What’s the greatest adventure I’ve ever been on? Life in general. I think the journey from feigning power and having control over things to really knowing that power and control come with complete surrender. I’ve become a lot more spiritual, should we say, a lot more grounded and a lot more aware of who I am. I don’t know—I guess I’m growing up.”

Originally published in UNO June 2010 issue

GOING UNDERGROUND

My wife and I headed out to Puerto Princesa, Palawan to spawn.

But, admittedly, it is quite difficult to spawn if you are sharing a room with your two and a half year old daughter, your yaya and your in-laws (yes, that same father-in-law who custom-fitted you with a chastity belt when you and your then girlfriend, now wife were still dating).

To keep myself in a constantly amorous state during the whole weekend, I was on the lookout for the infamous (infamous in the same way that The Three Amigos were infamous) Palawan delicacy tamilok (wood worm), which is renowned for its, ehem, aphrodisiac qualities. However, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to break my vegetarian diet just for this worm (which I later found out was actually a slimy, fat and long mollusk that made most men feel inadequate because it was longer than a twelve-inch ruler.  More importantly, I have not read any scientific tests that herald the efficacy of eating tamilok versus watching really crude pornography).

During our visit, we took a 1.2 kilometer bakawan (mangrove) forest paddleboat ride to see hundred year old mangrove trees that jutted thirty meters into the sky.  Little did my wife know that I had an ulterior motive for taking her on the mangrove tour: Nesting inside rotting mangroves were the elusive tamiloks.  But I was warned to be careful scouring for these mollusks because – aside from trudging through muddy ground and evading discarded oyster shells and fallen tree branches – there could be some DOMs (read about DOMs in this issue’s BARRAGE, Page 18) lurking inside those rotting mangroves as well.

We had the privilege of being toured around the bakawan by Aida, the self proclaimed Lady Mangrove who pointed out to us the different varieties of plants and animals that occupied this protected area: There were yellow-striped snakes (makamandag), pythons, bayawaks (monitor lizards), porcupines, anteaters, parrots, myna, cockatoos, hornbills, wild pigs, and even some wild chickens (you knew they were wild by the way they foamed at the mouth). (Which brings us, we had Man vs Wild guy Bear Grylls teach us a thing or two about the wild on Page 96).

Later that afternoon, we had finally come to my declared purpose behind this trip (aside from spawning and eating tamilok) and that was a visit to the Puerto Princesa Underground River. Conveniently enough, Daluyon was a mere stone’s throw away from the Puerto Princesa Subterranean River national park (especially if you had a pitching arm like the Incredible Hulk’s).

One of the first structures we encountered was the aptly named bat cavern. There are seven different species of bats that lived inside these caves but, trust me, all their guano smelled the same. During our visit, the bats were taking their beauty while preparing for their night shift. So if we felt something cold and wet dripping on our clothes, that was fresh rainwater that had seeped in through the mountains. But if you felt something wet and sticky dripping on our clothes, then a bat must have used you for target practice.

Of course, we were kilometers deep inside a cave that was millions of years old. Who knows that kind of underground fumes this river was spewing? Joyce could have told me that he saw formations that resembled Paris Hilton (see Page 28 for more on the hotel heiress) and Chinese warships and the actual results of the 2004 Presidential elections and I probably still would have believed him.

But if we traveled further down the underground river, we would encounter a structure that was not subject to aesthetic interpretation: the fossilized remains of a twenty million year old dugong (sea cow) that has been embedded on the cave walls. Yes, that’s right. A fossil that’s even older than some of the DOMs out there.

As our paddleboat turned around and we headed back to the mouth of the river, it occurred to me that the underground river could be an exhilarating yet slightly terrifying experience at the same time. Especially when you realize that you are a more than a kilometer deep inside an underground cave that is underneath a mountain that is swarming with bats and swallows from above and eels in the brackish waters below and all that you can rely of for safety in a pitch black cave is the knowledge of your paddleboat operator and battery-powered searchlight. But probably the most terrifying part? Aside from the fact that your car battery might run out of juice or that bats go Signal Number Three all over your head? The fact that there was no cellphone signal inside the cave. The only Twitter that would be coming from the inside of the underground river would be from the swallows.

And so goes our desperate attempt to make our lives a little less boring that we present to you, our dear readers, a source of inspiration to go out there and look for some adventure (at a nifty price of P190, cha-ching!), For starters, we’ve got entertainer extraordinaires Hollywood’s Donald Glover and Fil-Canadian Mikey Bustos to share about their rising careers (See Page 22 and 46, respectively). Meanwhile, Jinno Rufino (Page 44) and the sexy Jacq Yu (Page 86) narrate about their own trips abroad to see some pretty mean cars in action.

Speaking of pretty, we’ve got two of the prettiest women on our covers this time around. Get to know hot and talented TV personalities Bianca Manalo (Page 56) and Sam Pinto (Page 64), who both talk about their rise to fame and the thrills of being up there.

So you see, adventure is just out there for you to stumble upon, whether in some underground river or within the confines of your own bakuran. Palawan was amazing, but it’s also nice to be back in the city, where bats are more known to produce films rather than guano. Whatever your fancy, may this UNO issue encourage you to stretch your legs, turn to the next page and let the fun begin.

-RJ Ledesma, Editor-in-Chief