10 December 2009: Just Me, Justice

President Obama, in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech at Oslo, spoke at length about “a just peace” and, of course, “a just war.”  He uses the word “just” only as an adjective, meaning “honorable and fair in one’s dealings and actions…consistent with moral right; righteous…valid within the law; legitimate…based on fact or sound reason;…

30 November 2009: Tiger Gets a Woody!

Tiger Woods is finally living up to his name.  Okay, so the guy gets a woody with some other lady.  He and his wife alledgedly get into a spat.  He tries to leave in his car.  She chases after him with a golf club and starts swinging.  Did she bash him with an iron or, ironically, with a wood?  In any…

26 November 2009: Head of Gobbler

Thanksgiving is not one of the holidays I grew up with in the Philippines—and so, although I have much to be thankful for, every year on this special day I find myself wishing that I had written a seasonal theatre piece to be performed entirely by actors dressed as turkeys, a spoof of Ibsen’s HEDDA…

11 November 2009: How Deep Within Is The Enemy?

When 9/11 struck, a collective sigh of relief was heard from among the Filipinos I knew in the United States.  “Thank God the perpetrators were not brown,” they cried, although I’m not sure what skin pigmentation they would assign to Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda terrorists in the Middle East.  If not also brown, then what?  Tan?…

7 November 2009: Play It Again, Uncle Sam

In Billy Wilder’s wonderfully wacky 1961 political satire One, Two, Three, there is a hilarious scene which shows the young East Berlin communist spy (Horst Buchholz) being “tortured” by American CIA interrogators. Their secret method is to play a hit song from the period, “Itsy, Bitsy, Teenie, Weenie, Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini,” over and over, until…