Veteran RP actress Moody Diaz shares tomb with mother
Veteran RP actress Moody Diaz shares tomb with mother
By Alistair McIntosh
MANILA (Reuter): Moody Diaz and her mother have been occupying the same tomb in Manila's North Cemetery for about 10 years now. The difference is that Moody, a veteran Filipino actress, is alive and her mother isn't.
Moody, a delightful 66-year-old, is one of a small community of the living who reside among the dead in the crowded cemetery.
Most have been forced to find shelter here among the elaborate tombs because of high rents in the booming Philippine capital of about eight million people.
"It's peaceful and I have very nice neighbors," she tells an interviewer, meaning the live ones.
Of the others, she says: "They're already dead. What can they do?"
When people ask where she lives, she replies: "The Quiet Village".
On Tuesday, however, the cemetery was anything but peaceful with thousands of Filipinos visiting family tombs to celebrate All Saints' Day, a Roman Catholic holy day honoring the dead.
The festival is one of the biggest events of the year in Asia's only mainly Christian country.
The crowds provide a welcome financial windfall, Moody explains as she serves coffee and chocolate cake to a visitor in her small but well appointed two-story tomb which has electricity, a refrigerator, radio and television.
She rents out her toilet for two pesos (about 80 U.S. cents) a visit. "Year before last it was 50 centavos, last year it was one peso and this year my neighbors told me I should charge two pesos."
Visiting families and neighbors also share their food with her, delighted at having a real-live celebrity among them.
Moody built and paid for her mother's tomb about 15 years ago and says she moved in about 10 years back after a financial contretemps with a crooked lawyer.
She has four children, 13 grandchildren and one great grandchild. Her children keep asking her to move in with them but she says they don't have much money themselves and she doesn't want to be a burden.
Moody, born Modesta Diaz Mejia, started work at 14 as a dance hall hostess to support the family during Japan's World War II occupation of the Philippines.
She became a chorus line dancer until spotted by a talent agent and given movie roles.
She made her mark later in her career in comedy roles on television and in the movies and continued to work until a couple of years ago when she had to have surgery.
Seaman
She was married once, she says, to an American seaman called Harry. "I loved that man so much -- but not any more."
She met Harry in the 1970s when he visited the Philippines as a seaman. They kept in touch and eventually he came back to marry her in 1982.
He stayed for three weeks and then returned to the United States, ostensibly to retire from his job and come back to live in the Philippines.
Moody never saw him again, although she still wears the ring. Moody doesn't have chairs so visitors sit on the floor and lean back against her mother's sarcophagus as she displays her photograph album with its wedding pictures and shots from her stage and screen career.
Moody says she isn't really bitter about Harry, but admits sometimes it would be nice to have a living companion.
"Someone to give my back a rub when it's sore. Forget the sex, I'm too old."