Gretchen Barreto is having a word-war with another actress over Miss Barreto’s bringing an entourage of bodyguards and yayas wherever she goes. The other actress admittedly called the mistress of Tony Boy a prima donna, obviously distressed over the inconvenience of at least five bodyguards and a battery of alalays who are at Gretchen’s beck and call during the shoot of a movie where the two actresses are co-starring.
Realizing I haven’t got the slightest clue what the world had turned to the last 48-hours, this is the “important” banner story I got when I turned-on the TV hoping to hear the latest, most earth-shaking and deeply life-changing news the whole of humanity currently had to offer. Trying to beat deadlines and facing no one but my PC the last two days, this is the world I shut-out and was now returning to: one filthy rich kabit fighting for her right to choose how to spend the sustento her billionaire live-in partner spends on her.
Miss Barreto sighs how anyone could complain about the number of aides she brings when she herself couldn’t say for sure how many of them she has.
How tasteful and so socially-relevant of her. This is fast-becoming the most important pre-occupation of social-climbers: how to show-off and how to unabashedly comment on their showing-off like they don’t care.
Bitter, bitter, bitter me! I am again at bashing the haves with my have-nots angst. But please read on. (Gosh you should really see how Gretchen feigns subtlety like she was born to aristocracy and so boredly used to it!)
My wife, Gem, had been witness to how quite a commotion Gretchen’s party causes wherever she chooses to impose her grandiose presence. In one pictorial of Piolo Pascual where Gem was the brand manager, the ex-ST queen whose friend Boy Abunda fondly calls Greta, turned upside-down the studio of photographer Xander Angeles with so many burly strangers (feeling Kevin Costner) on the look-out for any suspicious-looking members of the pictorial staff. Picture the uniformed maids (with one even holding a microwave oven for Greta’s designer diet meal) invariably giggling “Ang pogi talaga ni Piolo!” and you can imagine what imposition Miss Barreto is pretending to be clueless about as obviously suggested by her keeping such entourage to this day.
Of course, the bodyguards & yayas, are all but a minor indication of what the likes of Gretchen Barreto have achieved or fights to achieve in a society that used to shun kabits and queridas. I can hear Greta protesting: “Oh, but I have long ceased to be a kabit ; the original Mrs. Cojuangco—may she rest in peace—has long died of a broken heart.”
There is a nice ring to the pet name Greta. It sounds so kontrabida. Not the Greta Garbo that Gretchen may fancy herself to be but the witches that eat children in fairytales. Such witches can never completely see the sin of sleeping with a married man, contributing to the demise of the original wife and flaunting long after she died the victory of their forbidden love against the repudiation of the holier-than-Thou moralists.
I have nothing personal against Miss Barreto. In fact, the many anecdotes about her rich-and-famous exploits amuse me no end; a favorite of mine was the RCBC incident. Be them exaggerated or not, the fact that they are easy to be believed reflects the reputation Gretchen has and pretends not to worry about. What I am anxious now is how paid publicists & bootlickers have learned to benefit from her and her kind.
So why should I care? It’s not MY money she’s spending. Yeah, and it’s neither hers—it’s the Cojuancos’. What a way to exact vengeance at the ruling class! At least Gretchen is helping distribute wealth away from the landed high society. By keeping her battalion of chuwariwaps, she is creating jobs and inadvertently boosting the Philippine economy.
