Both mainstream and peripheral Pinoy showbiz sectors are alive these days even as the scenery is marked with two departures for the life hereafter. 

On the periphery, a former actress is being implicated in the disappearance of 100 sabungeros (cockfighters) a few years back but it is only now that someone has come out to say that the ex-actress and her business partner are among those responsible for the decimation of the hardly known cockfighters.

Television’s superstars and rising talents, along with seasoned singers and well-followed newcomers in the pop music industry, keep mainstream showbiz dynamic. We can count in, too, the seemingly profitable and fulfilling stage productions in Metro Manila, as well as foreign idols who come and go with concerts that may even be more commercially successful than those of Pinoy pop idols.

Pinoy films are still very much around but none of them in the past few months have been bragged as hits in the moviehouses. Some, though, are occasionally reported to be on the Top 10 movies streamed on Netflix. Big movies, such as Quezon of TBA Productions, are slated to be shown in October yet, not in August, as previously publicized. It’s a biography of Philippine Commonweath President Manuel L. Quezon, topbilled by Jericho Rosales, who is more popular these days as the boyfriend of ABS-CBN major actress-star Janine Gutierrez. August is Quezon’s birth month.

The irrepressible talent manager and showbiz columnist Lolit Solis has passed on. And so has the mother of singer-actor Ice Seguerra — Mommy Caring — who may be considered the second most known Pinoy personality fondly addressed as “mother,” the first being film producer-talent developer Mother Lily (whose legal surname is Yu-Monteverde). [Annabelle Rama is an un-ignorable mother of stars, but we Pinoy showbiz fans have never affixed “mommy” or “nanay” to her name.]

It was Caridad Yamson-Seguerra who lovingly shepherded off-camera her menopause daughter Aiza Seguerra into child superstardom. It’s fascinating that she did it without being labelled “stage mother.” And then she never made an issue about Aiza first revealing herself as lesbian and later as a transman who changed their showbiz name to androgynous “Ice.”