Yes, mga kapatid, Nora was an Atenista.

Times have really changed.  Last weekend, I wanted to see a Cinemalaya entry – Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa – in Greenbelt.  I was at the ticket booth an hour before the screening, but I couldn’t get a seat.  Pinoy movies are now a hot ticket.  In my youth, we didn’t dare tell our friends that we went to see one.  You’d be easily branded as bakya or low-class if you did.

But I did see a lot of them and they were mostly Nora Aunor movies, because I had no choice.  My yaya Carmen, then the biggest Noranian in the whole of Pampanga, would bring me to the theatre after school without my parents’ consent.  On days without yaya, my dad would take me to Charles Bronson movies.  I enjoyed the eclectic range.  But I enjoyed Nora more.  Bronson, the archetypal urban warrior, had only one brand of acting – staunch, and craggy-faced in good times and bad.

Those days, anyone could not imagine the Philippines without Nora Aunor (and the Marcoses, perhaps).  She changed the course of Philippine movies and the music scene. She outsold foreign artists.  Her best movies were pure art.  Her fans were ready to kill if anyone dared to malign her.  Had they known that students from Ateneo de Manila ostracized her when she enrolled in the university, the biggest class war since Bastille could’ve erupted in the hills of Barangka.  By the way, she didn’t finish a semester because of all the burgis ribbing.

It’s been reported that she’ll be back home soon after being away for many years.  I hope it’s true.  This Noranian would continue to root for her even if she’s garbed in her trademark acid-washed denim jacket and short skirt.  Even if the washed-up rapper John Robinson is in tow.  Even if she acts badly.  After the great director-mentors Brocka and Bernal died, she never had a performance that could equal her turns in Himala and Bona. She deserves my love to this day.  She saved me from Bronson.