MEDIUM RARE There we sat, around a round table that the Chinese call a lauriat table, “lau” and “diat” meaning a celebration. With Ray and Auntie Baby Arleen Fernandez presiding, we took our seats – Dr. Nemi Platon and her husband Johnny, who drove all the way from the family-owned maternity hospital in Batangas City; Nitz and Ed Toledo; myself and my companion.
Two seats would’ve been for Hollywood-based fashion designer Oliver Tolentino and his partner Andrew, but Oliver was tied down in Bangkok, where he presented a 29-piece collection for a fashion show celebrating Philippine-Thai friendship. So there we were, in Makati at New World Hotel’s Jasmine restaurant, where an empty chair, upholstered in a subdued red and standing to the right of Auntie Baby, was reserved for Princesse Fernandez, whom we lost five years ago. She was 51 (though she could’ve passed for 40), statuesque and beautiful.
She could’ve been a movie star like some of Oliver’s Hollywood-based clients, but Princesse’s high IQ qualified her to be a Mensa scholar and a feng shui advocate, and this dinner was being celebrated in her memory. Combining the wisdom of the ages with contemporary knowledge, Princesse was the embodiment of beauty and brains, with feet firmly planted on terra firma; thus her suggestions to those seeking advice were entirely practical, nothing out-of-this-world fantastical, for example, “Get out of the house. Go out and socialize.
Fortune awaits beyond your doors.
