Watch Me Entertain Myself!

Sacha Guitry once said, "You can pretend to be serious, but you can't pretend to be witty." Oh yes, I'm the great pretender.
(pilot episode: 20 January 2004)

Monday, May 18, 2009

Life Is A Beach! (Or, Laughter Is The Best Medicine)


Went to Virgin Beach (http://virginbeachresort.com/) in Laiya, Batangas over the weekend with TA friends. Nice place! (But a misnomer, as far as we were concerned.)

I love my friends from theater because we know how to entertain ourselves best. We don’t need drugs or alcohol to get us going—just our creativity and the desire to crack a joke that will make the others laugh. Gagawin ang lahat para bumenta lang.

Exhibit A: the corruption of 1-2-3 Pass!

You all know the card game. Be the first to complete 4-of-a-kind (for example, 4 kings) by passing on to the person on your right a card you don’t need. The moment one completes a 4-of-a-kind, he or she slams his/her hand on the center of the table, and the rest have to slam their hands down too—the last one whose hand is at the topmost of the pile loses.

We started playing around 9pm onwards. We were causing quite a commotion, so the staff kindly asked us to lower the volume. Which made the game doubly funny—it’s hilarious when you’re all trying to hold your laughter down! After a while we changed the rules: instead of slamming a hand down, the first one who completes a 4-of-a-kind should raise both hands up in the air (“Now put your hands up!”) and shout—well, more like stage-whisper—the word “Diva!”, and everyone follows suit. The first few rounds ended up with all of us crumpling with laughter, not laugh-out-loud boisterous but stage-whispered guffawing, which gave everyone a strenuous abdominal workout.

Then someone had a brilliant idea of changing the choreography: instead of merely raising one’s hands, each one of us should come up with our own movement to accompany the word “Diva!” So what happened was that every time someone completed a 4-of-a-kind, there was a one-second delay, as everybody had to look first at the particular movement being made before they could copy it. Every round disintegrated into a mess of bodies writhing in uncontrollable laughter that everyone tried to mute to no avail. Good thing no one complained.

As for the resort, I’ve been told that it’s one of the cleanest and best maintained resorts in that Laiya strip. The ocean floor drops deep so near the shore, so non-swimmers can only stay very near the sand. But snorkeling is great—we rode a boat to the snorkeling site and spent minutes swimming with the fishes.

More pics!







It’s a great beach getaway if you want to spend a fun weekend with friends or family. I have no idea if there is an area in that strip that accommodates extra-curricular activities like the “Cave” in Gaylera, but I didn’t bother to find out.

Sometimes silly trumps sex.

2 comments:

Ming Meows said...

wow ha. virgin talaga.

Herbs D. said...

i was wondering it it was a misnomer due to the fact that there were no virgins around :P?