I was shoeing an hour ago and I remembered the feast of my old hometown is getting near. I missed the feast. It's "Fiesta" in tagalog. The best part for me is the day before the fiesta. It's where us, the townfolks, have time to enjoy the festivities without much guests. We cook what we can out of the prepared ingredients but we prefer to call it "Sampling" so we won't look as if we had our own buffet. We'll talk from afternoon till night about plans for the big day. Questions like:

Who do you think will come?
What food to serve first?
Who will do the dishes?
Is the ice enough?
Is the charcoal enough?
Should we ask Linda to help in cooking?
Are we done with the charcoal?

After covering more questions than I care to think about, we can say that we are all set. A little knick knacks and we are out of the house for the stage shows. If you haven't seen the Barrio style of stage shows... you're not exactly missing much. But to us, it's the highlight of our day. It's an array of comedians, circus freaks, magicians, singers and a lot more people we don't know who would do almost anything for 10 minutes of fame and small dough. But there's these local performers that are well know in our province. Even my father and uncles watched them before. One of them is Totoy Bato. This guy is like Dolphy in our town. Even better. He has a lot of songs that will tickle your funnybones. You should know Kapampangan to understand most his songs. We even record his performances on tape. Cassettes that is. Other performers include, Haring Solomon singer Boy Sullivan, The PorkChop duo (you probably know them), and a band that are composed of Priests of different parishes in the province. They call themselves the "Among Band". And no, they don't sing church songs for that will be ridiculous.

You probably think I'm a little too "townie". Well, that's the different side of me. My heart belongs to that old town where the air is cool and sunsets can be viewed anywhere in the open field. Where everybody knows you and you to them. Where the church, school and the market are only a few blocks away. You can stay on the rooftop and gaze at the wide open sky. We run and play in the rain, check out gutters with large amounts of water flowing so we can follow the water and let it flow on our heads, eventually laugh because it tickles our scalps. I miss that town and I'll come home to it in a few days.

And to think this all started with putting on a shoe...