Let me get this straight: I have a penchant for celebrities and even more framing the moment (and unintentionally, the embarrassment) of my starstruckness over them. I thought my coming of age in college has triumphed over this borne-from-high school jologosity, but since I started working for a famous boss, I knew I was destined to continue rubbing elbows with them (celebrities) and that it's no longer my doing, but the cosmic forces (or showbizness).
It goes without saying that when it was time for me to goodbye, this fabulous part of my job was one of the most difficult to let go. Fair enough, the cosmos didn't let me without a last hurrah. On the Wednesday of my last week at work, I met Mr David Henry Hwang. Don't narrow your eyes and "Who?"
Wikipedia writes David Henry Hwang is a contemporary American playwright who has risen to prominence as the pre-eminent Asian American dramatist in the US.
His most famous work was M Butterfly, for which he won the 1989 Tony Award for Best Play. He also received a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was his second. He received a third one this year for a partly autobiographical play that he finished in 2007.
As theorized many times, socially the world is small, and indeed, Mr Hwang happens to be a distant relative of my former boss. He dropped by our showroom with his two adorable kids, actress wife and the rest of his family while visiting here in Cebu after decades of having been based in the US.
Trusting that I will be civilized with a literati (and not my usual starstrucked), my boss introduced me to him, allowing an exchange of pretense proficiency in literature (in my part) that was remarkable in that I had mistaken Isak Dinesen as a he. The rest, I may say, I have to pat myself in the back for. I did not stumble through my English (which is always nervous and stumbling every time I'm with famousity). I carried on a conversation that he started, "What form of literature do you write in?". The exchange of English words was quite long that I even elicited from my boss, "Tabian man diay kaayo ni si Vita."
When I told Mr Hwang I enjoyed short stories, he recommended Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales. Like a literati myself, I also recommended Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. When he seconded, I assumed he has read Roy so I went as far as suggesting that he make a play based on it. I don't remember if a lightbulb flashed over his head, but anyway, that was the best part of our conversation (allow me to continue calling our little chat as such). In fact, that was the best advice I had ever given anybody and I'm glad I dared to. How many times do you get to advise a Tony awardee? If in the coming years, he comes out with a theater adaption of the masterpiece and forgets to thank me, I shall thank myself. :)
Other than that he was generous enough to spend precious has-won-a-Tony-award minutes with a literature tyro like me and that he has won a Tony, it was his calm, no pretense demeanor that truly moved me with starstruckness. And like how all episodes with celebrities end with me, I had my photo taken with him (below, with Daisy).
Later that night, I saw Mr Hwang brisk-walking after his adorable kids in Metro Ayala's Department Store. I almost missed him in his gray shirt, grayer hair, and grayest black pants. Everybody else just brisk-walked past him. Lucky me, I knew the greatness in my midst.
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