with daring and imagination, we could venture forth and make our mark in it. The actress Lorli Villanueva was just a fresh graduate herself and only a few years older than us when she became our drama teacher. But through her, many of us signed up with the Philippine Educational Theater Association (Peta) for a summer theater workshop that had us apprentice with some of the country’s best-known theater personalities then. The Peta connection opened another door that led me to many places—I wrote my first television play at 16, which was produced on Balintataw . We had many other brilliant teachers at the Philippine Science High School—a young physicist named Vic Manarang, not yet the Ayala executive, was among them—but it took humanities teachers like Mrs. Vea and Ms. Villanueva to coax the creative spirit out of us budding nerds. Like I mentioned earlier, college for me proved to be a long, tortuous route. I became a student activist and dropped out of the University of the Philippines (UP) in my freshman year, and was arrested and imprisoned shortly after the declaration of martial law. After my release, I didn’t feel like going back to school, given how UP had become a virtual garrison; instead I found a job, got married, and began writing plays and stories on my own. In 1981 I received an invitation to join the Silliman Writers Workshop in Dumaguete, where the formidable Ed and Edith Tiempo held court, sifting through the work of young, new writers. Doc Ed must’ve seen something in mine, because he took me aside and told me something that would cause me many sleepless nights: “Save your soul. Go back to school.” He had known that I had dropped out of college and was churning out PR material for the government agency I was employed in.
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