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."