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.”
Seguerra has just launched a moving song “Shelter of the Broken” to honor the memory of Mommy Caring.
The wake for the awesome Solis is on the seventh floor of Aeternitas Chapels & Columbarium at Commonwealth Avenue, Batasan Hills, Quezon City, right beside St. Peter Parish: Shrine of Leaders.
On Wednesday morning (9 July), her remains will be buried at Holy Cross Memorial Park in Novaliches, Quezon City.
Solis' two daughters arrived separately from the US: Sneezy McDonald, 55, and Sloopy Solis, 53.
It seems that no one knows that Solis' married surname is Pasamonte. Her ex-husband, she once told us, is an architect. We used to hang out with Solis as part of her showbiz journo group that included talent manager-publicist Boy C. de Guia, her co-host in the short-lived showbiz talk show Scoop on IBC-13.
Our very first trip to Hong Kong was with that group that included GMA-7 showbiz reporter Lhar Santiago and freelance showbiz journo Pilar Mateo, daughter of the once very famous character actor Renato del Prado (whose real surname was Mateo).
“Retired” actress Gretchen Barretto has been quietly minding her fighting cock business, which she has had for some three to four years now with gambling lord Atong Ang as main partner. She has also been silently maintaining a conjugal relationship with billionaire businessman Tonyboy Cojuanco. It may have not occurred to her that a day will come when she and Ang will be later linked to the disappearance of about 100 sabungeros in late 2022 and until 2023. Both have denied the accusation.
Barretto and Ang have not been summoned as of this writing by Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla as part of the initial investigation on the death of about 100 cockfighters.
Since Ang has been linked to lovely Barretto women (not just to Gretchen, actually) in and out of showbiz for some years now, his involvements and entanglements are reported in the entertainment section of media outlets as if he were an actor or film/TV producer. In fact, it’s his ongoing romance now with the former Mrs. Cesar Montano, actress Sunshine Cruz, that keeps him visible in the showbiz pages and websites.
Cruz's being a mother of three grown-up daughters fathered by Montano does not bother Ang at all. Neither does Montano seemed alarmed by his ex-wife's dalliance with the gambling lord. Cruz herself has just denounced the buzz about Ang's alleged involvement with the alleged mass murder of cockfighters.
Julia seems about to become preoccupied with a showbiz project actor-producer Enrique Gil, the boyfriend left behind in Manila by Liza Soberano for a Hollywood odyssey that has produced so far in about five years a co-starring role in the horror-comedy Lisa Frankinstein.
Barretto and Gil are speculated to be working on a new project together after they were seen in a meeting with film directors Antoinette Jadaone and Dan Villegas, and executives of the latter’s production company Slingshot Studios.