Danny Vibas
Regine Velasquez celebrates her 20th year in show biz this October and November with a two-night concert on October 13 and 14 at the Araneta Coliseum and a much-awaited movie with Robin Padilla slated to be shown next month.
And how is the Songbird of Asia taking her 20th year in show biz as a singer, actress, TV host and concert and record producer?
Joyfully, gratefully, meditatively—and with some pains and hurts on the side.
To promote the movie and the concert, Regine met with the show-biz press twice last week and the huddles were only a few days apart from each other. The second press conference was held on Thursday, the afternoon that Typhoon Milenyo was ravaging Metro Manila. It was on those two occasions that she revealed her strength and vulnerabilities as she marks two fruitful decades in show business.
The first presscon was for the movie Till I Met You, a coproduction of GMA Films and Viva Films, which reunites her with Robin five years after they teamed up in Kailangan Ko’y Ikaw.
Since Till I Met You is meant to be a romantic film with touches of comedy and drama, the scribes grilled Regine about the state of her heart—and even of her virginity.
She admitted she is in love—but not with Robin, she impishly stressed. Unfortunately (for us, nosy people) she didn’t want to reveal the guy’s name. Robin, in a separate huddle in the same event revealed that Regine has admitted to him the same, but Robin also kept mum about the guy’s identity.
After so much ribbing and hedging, Regine also revealed in an intimate huddle with the media that she had already given herself to her unnamed boyfriend. At one point, she gleefully declared: “You don’t have to worry about me, guys. I do have time for sex!”
Her revelation made it to the headlines of some tabloids. And at the Thursday afternoon press huddle for her Big Dome concert (which is simply titled 20), a broadsheet columnist asked her to reconfirm her statement.
And Regine declared: “Well, I am not 18 anymore. I think for my age, it’s even an embarrassment to admit that I lost my virginity only recently—and, happily it was to a guy I really care for and who, in turn, loves and respects me a lot!
“My being not 18 anymore is the reason I have been doing kissing scenes in my movies—though, happily, despite those kissing scenes, my movies have always been considered wholesome.”
Regine also confided how she terribly gets hurt by criticisms from strangers who may not know anything at all about performing or about looking good. She further admitted that she is affected even by mere hearsays about her performance, her choice of songs in a concert, or about her looks. She reacts to hardly identifiable bloggers in the Internet who find fault in her.
“I’ve been singing since I was five years old, so I can’t help but get hurt when I hear that some perfect stranger who probably can’t even carry a tune had commented that I was out of tune in some part of a song!
“It’s easier for me to take criticisms about my acting since I am really new to it compared to my experience as a singer. I can give up acting for months and years, which I’ve actually done, but not singing. I feel its what I do best, so I can’t help but get hurt when people talk about it as if I never had the right to sing and I had not proven anything as a singer,” she confided.
Regine asserted that as a singer, all that she really cares for is to please her audience. “It’s true what Ronnie [Henares, her ex-manager who will direct 20] said about my having changed my repertoire for the concert three times. And it’s all because in the first two line-ups, I included a lot of songs, which I thought were the people’s favorites, not necessarily mine.
“But afterward, I realized, in all my concerts in the past I sang what I felt were the peoples favorites. So, for the first time, let me sing songs that are my favorites and which had something to do with my career and with my life at one time or another.”
Regine actually began in show business as Chona Velasquez, the grand champion in the TV amateur singing contest Tanghalan ng Kampeon hosted by Pilita Corrales and the late comedian Bert Marcelo. Pilita was Regine’s first manager, followed by Ronnie Henares with whom she stayed for 13 years (before transforming her sister Cacai, a sometime singer herself, to become her manager).
It was Ronnie who had her show-biz name changed to Regine when he learned that her real name is Regina.
How the poor promdi girl Chona from Balagtas, Bulacan, became the sexy, sophisticated and wealthy Songbird of Asia is what 20 will be all about.
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