Your e-mail message:

"Manong, when I was in grade school, the ACT used to have its plays at the Meralco Theater.

One year, when I was in grade 6/7, they decided to stage it at our local gym and it was titled 'Tolda.'

Was that yours?

"I was going through your blog and two of the works were introduced by JB Capino.

This guy was my batchmate at UST High.  I was in the p.m. classes and he was in the a.m.

I don't think he remembers me.  He wrote for the high school paper; and his works, be it poetry

or prose, were way above everybody. I remember him for his very lofty air which I knew was due to intellectual superiority.

The guy was really a man of letters: brilliant and confident...while I was a goof bag.

"I stayed in Cubao circa '93/'94:  on Brooklyn St. and one of those apartments a few blocks behind Ali Mall.

Malapit lang po ba kayo dito?

" Your plays and other works (I know it's a lot of work.  May be scanning the pages will do.), we, your readers, hope to see them online.

"Salamat po.

"__________________"

My reply:

Hi __________________!

Yes, Tolda was mine. That play is in a book titled Pagkamulat Sa Kastilyo, available at UST Publishing House and still in print until further notice, after which I will post the entire book in cyberspace. What you may have seen, however, was my musical Luwalhati, which was staged in Meralco Theater. Tolda was staged the following year, but in Ateneo Grade School's auditorium, with Lance Martinez, son of actor Leo Martinez, and Gerard Reyes in the lead roles. It was held in the auditorium because it was impossible to do it in Meralco Theater, which has a strike-down-the-set-after-every-performance policy, and it would have been hell on earth for the crew to take down the full carnival set every night.

JB was my student in college. I believe he has been a professor at UC San Diego for the longest time. He is one of the most superb and insightful writers I have ever known. Rather than having "a very lofty air," he is, as I recall from when he was my student, a person who has preferred to lay back. An artist chooses to be that way when he has frequently been wounded for being an artist by the people who matter the most to him. I sincerely hope that he leaps out of the box and begins to take risks again someday. But one cannot be a professor and a major artist at the same time.

Brooklyn Street is in the northeast quadrant of Cubao. I am in the southwest quadrant. If you can imagine Cubao with x and y axes and Cubao Crossing as the center, Brooklyn Street is in the upper right quadrant and my house is in the quadrant diagonally across it. The second place you mentioned, Ali Mall, is, on the other hand, in the southeast quadrant, between the two quadrants I already mentioned.

A detailed description of the Cubao quadrants are in my albeit fictional book Maligayang Pagdating Sa Sitio Catacutan.