First is Vilma Santos, who never fails to thank us for what we write about her. Even now that she’s already a governor no less, we’d still receive personal text messages from her expressing her gratefulness.
Then there’s the late Fernando Poe Jr. who even sent us a telegram from Bataan saying he read the article we wrote about him and that he’s shooting in Mariveles so he can’t personally thank us. He later sent us a sack of rice as a gesture of his gratefulness.
Through the years, other stars who extended their gratitude to us for what we wrote about them are Sharon Cuneta, Christopher de Leon, Lorna Tolentino, Gina Alajar, Janice de Belen, Armida Siguion Reyna, Ruffa Gutierrez, Diether Ocampo, Ryan Agoncillo, Marian Rivera (who even said “thanks for defending me”), Iza Calzado, Donna Villa, Lovi Poe, Edu Manzano, Eugene Domingo, Eddie Garcia, and the late Rudy Fernandez. Among directors, the ones who have thanked for our positive reviews of their work are Joel Lamangan, Jay Altarejos, and Maryo de los Reyes.
There might be others, but these are the only ones we can think of at the moment. Nagmarka talaga sila sa amin and we want to thank them for thanking us. As for that starlet on whom we’ve written so many positive things (we even defended her when other writers made fun of her “malalaking pata” and her inept hosting in “Starstruck”) but who never even acknowledged that she read the good things we wrote about her and yet had the gall to lecture us on how we should write our column and to demand that we issue an erratum because she didn’t like what we wrote about her (which is actually meant to promote her new movie), we guess she’ll always remain a starlet. GMA-7 has given her all the breaks but she has never really achieved stardom yet. Barbie Forteza and Bea Binene are even bigger than her now, simply because masa viewers don’t really like her. And to all the writers who took up the cudgels for us, our sincerest thanks for understanding where we stand in this.
