It’s the year-end issue and we are happy to recollect the best of our LifEASTyle cover stories and features for 2010. We met a lot of colorful personalities this year—from book authors to Broadway performers to reality TV stars. We also met controversial personalities, top chefs and aspiring actors and actresses.
Here are some of our favorites.
In January, we met Mally Roncal, a celebrity make-up artist.
As a young girl, Mally has always been interested in color and make-up, experimenting with her mother, who happens to be an incredible beauty herself. With her parents both being doctors, initially Mally was determined to follow in her parents’ footsteps. Still, she never abandoned her inner passion for art, makeup and fashion.
Fortunately, with encouragement and inspiration from mentors (including fashion stylist team Mathu and Zaldy, and celebrity hair stylist Danilo, whom she met while designing for Kalinka), Mally decided to let her pre-med education take a backseat and instead pursue her ultimate dream: to explore the power of make-up.
Mally quickly moved to the top of the “it” list of “who’s who” in the beauty industry, quickly becoming one of the industry’s most sought-after talent. Some of the world’s top celebrities turn to her to prepare for their most important career moments. In addition to that, Mally has also been featured on several top-rating TV shows like Oprah, The Today Show, Isaac, The View, and many more. Her long list of clientele includes Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, Mary J. Blige, Hayden Penettierre, Rihanna, Teri Hatcher, Celine Dion and supermodel Petra Nemcova.The following month, we featured Project Runway contestant Jay Nicolas Sario.
Jay Nicolas Sario, who was then working as visual merchandiser and lead stylist of Gap Inc.’s kids division is the first Filipino designer to ever make it to the show, which is now on its seventh season.
“I’m proud to be able to represent and be part of history,” exclaimed Sario, who was born and raised in Laoag City, Ilocos Norte. He and his family moved to Hawaii when he was 17. He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area five years later and has lived there since.
“I tried out because I have a friend who tried out for Season 6 and made it really far. When I saw how far he was able to go, I said, ‘If he can do it, then I should be able to do it as well’. I created a portfolio knowing that Season 7 was casting,” he added.
A month later, he got a call from the casting director asking him to go to Los Angeles to meet with Tim Gunn and the rest of the crew.
Then, there’s 20-year-old Olympian JR Celski, who captured our hearts during the Olympic games in Vancouver.
John Robert Sabado Celski was 12 years old when he watched Apollo Anton Ohno win the gold at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake. He was an inline skater back then but seeing Ohno inspired him to try and transition to speed skating as well.
He trained hard and at the age of 15, barely made it to Team USA to the Olympics in Torino because he was underage by 17 days. Celski went back training and for more than a couple of years, he gained more confidence. He won two gold medals and two bronzes at the world championships last year and by September, he made it to Team USA, and he was on his way to his dream to compete in the Vancouver Games.
JR not only made the US Olympic team, but won bronze in the 1,500 and 5,000-meter relays. He is now looking forward and plans to compete in the 2014 Games in Sochi, Russia.
By springtime, we were trekking to Ditmas Park in Brooklyn to visit Purple Yam, Romy Dorotan and Amy Besa’s newest project.
After 14 years in Manhattan’s SoHo district, the couple closed Cendrillon, their famous restaurant. Frequent diners, foodies and fans all felt sad that their favorite Filipino joint in the city has closed shop.
In November 2009, Purple Yam opened its doors to enthusiastic diners in the up- and-coming neighborhood of Ditmas Park in Brooklyn.
“Business is really good,” Chef Romy tells us during one of our recent visits to Purple Yam.
Chef Romy explains that they needed a new identity as a restaurant when they decided to move. They thought of “ube” but then it needed explanation to people who do not know about it. They used Purple Yam instead.
The components, according to Chef Romy are working well—their neighborhood and its environs are being noticed by a lot of people now; Filipino fans and old Cendrillon followers have also been trekking to the new place because they miss the food so much.
Along the way, we met Catherine Ricafort, originally from Thousand Oaks, California. She took up Industrial and Systems Engineering (with a minor in Musical Theatre) at the University of Southern California (USC) as a presidential scholar and graduated last May 2009.
Catherine was a part of the national touring production of the musical A Chorus Line, essaying the principal role of Connie. Before her stint with A Chorus Line, Ricafort has been busy performing left and right, taking in roles of understudies and ensemble parts, in order to hone her career. The musical was revived on Broadway from 2006 to 2008, and the touring production began work immediately after the curtail fell.
Then came Pulitzer-prize winner Filipino-American Jose Antonio Vargas, who we met again during the Tribeca Film Festival.
Vargas, formerly with The Washington Post, wrote and co-produced the documentary The Other City, based on various stories that he reported for the newspaper.
When Vargas moved to Washington, DC in the summer of 2003 as a reporting intern, it was all about the White House, the Capitol, the museums. Then there were the politicians, the lobbyists and the journalists. Vargas, then 22 years old, grew to know a whole other Washington by riding the bus across town or by mere walking around the various neighborhoods.
“When people think of AIDS in America, they think, ‘Oh, it’s not here. It’s in Africa, in Southeast Asia. It’s over there.’ They think, ‘Oh, it has nothing to do with me, it’s ‘the other people’ who get HIV anyway.’ But AIDS is right here, among us, in individual stories and struggles and hopes that interconnect,” Vargas said.
We also met book authors Rafe Bartholomew, Miguel Syjuco and Dr. Connie Mariano.
Rafe has become a celebrity in the Filipino community for a variety of reasons—but mostly because he is the author of Pacific Rims: Beermen Ballin’ in Flip-Flops and the Philippines’ Unlikely Love Affair with Basketball, a book on Philippine basketball. With his frequent visits to Café 81 in the East Village to satiate his craving for Filipino food, he became friends with some of the restaurant’s other regulars.
Miguel is the man behind the book Ilustrado. Even before it was considered as a highly-anticipated debut novel, Ilustrado’s manuscript has already wowed the literati in the Philippines. In 2008, it won the Palanca Award, touted as the top literary prize in the country. Shortly after, it was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and eventually won the top plum, with $10,000 to boot. All these, two years before the actual book was published.
Dr. Connie, a Filipino American doctor, has achieved historic feats throughout her career as she broke barriers and shattered the glass ceiling. She is the first military woman to become the White House Physician to the President; the first woman Director of the White House Medical Unit and the first Filipino-American in US history to become a Navy Rear Admiral.
Dr. Mariano served nine years as White House doctor: First, for the final year of the term of George H.W. Bush; then for the entire eight years of Bill Clinton, and lastly, during the first year of George W. Bush’s first term in office. She has written a memoir on her stint at the White House and how she got there. It is called The White House Doctor: My Patients were Presidents.
As we closed the year, we met fabulous women who are making strides in their own fields of expertise: independent film producer Bessie Badilla and cake masters Candy Tamano Iannelli and Shirley Santos Yanga.
At her recent 52nd birthday bash (and yes, she doesn’t deny her age), the former supermodel unveiled and screened her latest project—Dance of My Life, a documentary on her life.
“It’s all about me,” Bessie says with a loud, infectious laugh. The film is centered on how one Filipina penetrated the all-Brazilian festival and became the first-ever Filipina Carnaval Queen.
Just before the year ended, we introduced you to two Filipina cake masters who are slowly making their niche in the cake industry,
Candy is behind Purple Elephant, a cupcake shop in the Upper East Side and Shirley maintains her cake business called Pastry Passion out of her White Plains home. The two continue to be inspiration for young Filipino-Americans who want to venture into the culinary industry, a field where Filipinos seem to excel.
Just ask Chef Alex Dino, who reinvented the tofu in his first cookbook—Modern Tofu: Delightfully Decadent and Healthy.
The running chef added another feather to his cap last month by winning the grand championship of Sears Chef Challenge, a seven-month long cooking competition that began with 24 chefs who were narrowed down to two finalists through a national online vote, regional in-store recipe demos and semi-final cook-offs.
For 2011, we look forward to bringing more inspiring Filipino-American personalities and businesses to inspire us as a community. We are cooking up something with a young Filipino-French businessman and another story on yet another Pinoy top chef (make that two!).
For now, we are closing 2010 with a fond goodbye. It has been good, but we are looking forward to a better 2011!
(www.asianjournal.com)
(NYNJ Dec 31-Jan 6, 2010 LifeEASTyle p.2)
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