Buhay Boldstar Lite

Buhay Boldstar Lite

Last weekend’s Sunday Inquirer Magazine featured the boldstar path to and from stardom.

On the cover was Asia Agcaoili—yes, the one with an incredibly boldstar name if ever there was one. Asia is all guts and (sana may) glory(ious) in her taco-wielding debut in Patricia Javier’s Bare Naked video. If all the other would-be bold stars do the full frontal in their solo ventures, Asia took it all off for but half a second, and in somebody else’s solo video at that. Oh well, got to get noticed. (And if I may add, that bit was the most interesting part in the video. All the others—Patricia in her feeling peeling yema mode, Patricia in her psychedelic loca mode, Patricia in her threesome with Asia and guy in tuod mode—were spectacularly boring. Buti na lang we got the video for 35 bucks in Quiapo.)

We first noticed Asia when she appeared in ABC5’s (and Ideal Mind’s) Single several seasons ago. Back then she looked like she could be a UP student, major in clothing tech, and good thing that the irony of it now is not lost on her. Writer Eric Caruncho also noted that there aren’t really a lot of boldstars coming from the State U, with only Giselle Sanchez and Michelle Aldana cheering from the rafters, so Asia should be a welcome, uh, addition? Anyway, it was also around that Single stint that she decided to go out and get a boob job. If that isn’t courage, what is? At least we know that no manager pushed her out there and get undressed. She’s doing it all by her lonesome, whatever her reasons may be.

If Asia’s papunta pa lang, Sarsi Emmanuelle is nakabalik na at babalik pa lang ulit sa pagbo-boldstar. The Brown Emmanuelle controlled the country’s collective obrero libog in the 80s together with the other softdrink beauties Pepsi Paloma and Coca Nicolas under the tutelage of the late Dr. Rey dela Cruz. But as like all stories of the rags-to-riches-to-rags mode, her mortal flaw was that she didn’t know how to handle her so-called fame. She fell in love and made the wrong decisions, and before you know it, she was in Cavite selling tickets in a perya.

Now she’s been dusted off that Altar of Forgotten Boldstars and reinstituted in a two-bit role in a soap opera. She’s feeling a bit rusty when she shouldn’t be, and she’s hoping to do a few movies down the line.

I tend to blur all these ‘rediscovered’ boldstar stories because they all seem the same: They were poor, daughters of unwed mothers with foreigners who left them, then they were forced to do the trade so they could lift their families out of poverty (“iahon sa paghihirap,” so to speak), they get minimal fame as a boldstar-du-jour, they fall in love, make mistakes, and find themselves stuck back in the same old rut where they came from. It’s like there’s only one Grand Narrative of the Boldstar, and there’s no escaping that.