For over a year and a half, my beloved Lifestyle editor (and wedding ninang) Tita Millet Mananquil along with my desk Editor Scott Garceau (yes, he is beloved to me too) allowed me (well, allowed may not be to the appropriate word. Tolerated is more like it) to chronicle my merry march towards domestic incarceration.

And, voila, “I Do or I Die! RJ Ledesma’s Imaginary Guide to Getting Married and Other Man-Made Disasters (As Told to him by his Yaya)” was born! For my three female readers, fellow DOMs and my No Girlfriend Since Birth (NGSB) barkada who have not been religiously following this column since its inception, here a few excerpts from the book.  I beseech you to pick up a copy of the book and help me finance RJ Ledesma’ foundation for his baby’s college education plan.

On the engagement:

I recall a telephone conversation with one of my best friends whom I first confided in with regard to my marriage plans.  Although I confess that I couldn’t really understand him clearly because his voice sounded muffled.  I think it was because he was hiding in the closet while his wife was screaming for him to give her a pedicure.

“RJ,” he whispered, “marriage has its ups and downs. And the best way to deal with the downs is with anti-inflammatory medication. But when you’ve screwed up really bad, the best thing that you can give her is the memory of a great engagement.”

Heeding the dictates of my inner cheese, I decided that I would serenade her for my proposal. (Some of you might be under the impression that I was gunning for the best marriage proposal of the year, but you must understand that the very idea that I was dating this fantastic woman is almost as unbelievable as this chief executive surviving her term of office. We knew of each other in college, but during those days our paths never crossed.  One of us was a cheerleader slash model, the other was a debate team captain slash geek.  And to this day, I still don’t know what she saw in a cheerleader like me.)

So I came up with an engagement song list that I thought would capture the spirit of a twilight marriage proposal, however “Afternoon Delight” or “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” didn’t seem quite right. After much soul-searching and weaning myself away from WRock, I decided on a medley of three songs that were a cross section of boy band pop, drippy romance and classic Frank Sinatra (because you can never go wrong with Frank): Wet Wet Wet’s “Love is All Around,” Julia Fordham by way of Nina’s “Love Moves in Mysterious Ways,” and Frank Sinatra’s “Someday.”  I was tempted to sneak in Sting’s “Every Breath You Take” and Adam Sandler’s comical “I Wanna Grow Old With You,” but after a good smacking in the head by my best friend, he reminded me, “This is a harana (serenade), you fool, not a night at the karaoke club.”

During the proposal, I tried to belt out the rest of my well-crafted medley, but the lyrics had melted away from my head once she hid her tears behind her hand.  So I just hummed out the tunes to the songs that I had so agonizingly memorized and inconveniently forgotten, and drew her close to me as we swayed to the beat of our hearts.

“Why are you crying?” I asked.

“Because this is not the dress I wanted to wear for my engagement.”  We both laughed.

“My love for you has grown like a mustard seed.” I proclaimed.  She crumpled her nose and raised an eyebrow.  Later I found out that she thought I had said, “My love for you has grown like an atomic mushroom.” Up to now, I am still unsure as to what sort of hard drugs she had taken before our trip to Tagaytay. But after the initial confusion, she finally recognized the next line: “I love you and I would like to do yoga with you for the rest of my life.”

I pulled out a small red box from my coat pocket and slowly coaxed it open.

“Will you marry me?”

And so here we were in a torch-lit garden along the windswept mountain ridges of Tagaytay overlooking Taal Volcano, with the sun lazily descending over the lake, and blessed by the presence of those nearest and dearest to us.  What would be her answer?

“Yes,” she cooed.

Whew.  I didn’t have to sorrowfully consume copious amounts of alcohol that night.

On the wedding preparations:

I didn’t really plan to get involved in my wedding preparations for health reasons.  This is because I always thought that a bride-to-be was much like a boxer in training for a title bout.  They are fierce, they are focused, and if you distract them in any way they will leave you a candidate for brain damage.   If I left my fiancée alone to pick the patterns for her bridesmaids’ dresses, she would leave me alone to plan for my pre- and post- bachelor’s parties.  (No, love. I promise you that was just a joke.  There will be no other girls in the room aside from those you can watch in the videoke.  Just because we were holding the bachelor’s parties in Airforce One doesn’t mean that there is anything else going on.)

There is a reason why there is a glut of wedding magazines, wedding checklists and wedding management software applications for the brides-to-be, but there is no such equivalent for the grooms-to-be.  This is because there are only five things a man must know in preparation for his wedding day:

1. To do whatever his bride-to-be tells him to do;
2. To know what day his wedding is supposed to be;
3. To know what he is supposed to wear for the wedding;
4. To know if he will be paying in check, card or with the sale of another vital organ, and;
5. To know if his bride-to-be will kindly kindly allow her groom to have a very modest bachelor’s party (Please, love. Please, please, please.  It will only be with videoke).

Men may not know this, but our significant others have been play-acting their ideal wedding scenario in their heads since they were little children.  My fiancée shared with me that when she was eight years old, her dream was to dress like Cinderella in her wedding gown while she walked down the aisle.  When she was a teenager, she wanted to dress like Princess Diana in her wedding dress. And as an, ehem, young adult, she wants to dress like Eva Longoria in her wedding gown.

On the other hand, we have slightly different childhood dreams from their fiancées.  At eight years old, my dream was to become a superhero. When I was a teenager, my dream was to become a bomba (naked) star.  When I was in my twenties, my dream was to become filthy rich.   When I hit my thirties, I wanted to keep my dreams simple.  So I wanted to become a filthy rich superhero bomba star.

On the Pamanhikan:

Ah, the pamanhikan.  It is a time-honored ritual in our country, much the same way that pagtutuli (circumcision) and self-flagellation during Holy Week are rituals.  All these rituals involve some pain, some bloodletting and some close encounters with the loss of genitalia.  However, remember that the pamanhikan is only the penultimate step in this ritualized hazing process.  Before your potential father-in-law can even cock a rifle at your forehead, grit his teeth and blurt out, “Ano ba yung plano mo para sa anak ko (What are your plans for my daughter)?” in front of your whole family, you must first undergo the background checks, the massive credit card loans, and the failed assassination attempts that form part of your panliligaw (courtship). 

And as all Pinoy men know, when you make ligaw (court) a woman, you are making ligaw the totality of that woman. And that sum total includes her lola, her lola’s yaya, her titos, her titas, her cousins, her pamangkins (buy her godkids something that looks really expensive), her relatives within the sixth degree of consanguinity, her family friends, her barkada, her high school classmates, her college classmates, her officemates, her supervisor, her gym partners, her kickboxing teacher (be especially nice to him), her church community, her father confessor (try not to go to confession with him), her barangay captain, her manicurista, her hair stylist, everyone in the contacts list of her cellphone, and all of her Facebook friends. And, of course, her yaya (but make sure your own yaya knows that she occupies a special place in your heart).

All eyes on the dinner table slowly turned toward my fiancee’s dad.  Her dad uncrossed his arms, placed both his hands on the table.  Everyone stopped fidgeting in his seat.  He lifted the wine glass to his mouth, took a sip, and, in his best Marlon Brando impression, rasped “When you spoke to me about..,” he paused and took another sip of wine. “I think you are very good for each other and that you asked my daughter at the right time in her life. So, I told myself when I got back to Manila I would give you an answer.” He looked up at the ceiling and exhaled. “Which is maybe yes.”

I got up from my seat to shake her dad’s hand.  But as I approached him, he stood up and extended both his arms. “Welcome to the family,” he smiled and gave me a nice, firm hug. While we hugged, my future father-in-law bent down and whispered into my ear.  “Remember, the prenuptial agreement has a two-year redemption period.” Then he hugged me tighter.  “But I’ve always let it lapse.”   Now let’s get you fitted with a chastity belt.

On the wedding day:

When the church doors swung open, I thought my bride would surprise me with some drama. But there were no smoke machines, no midget circus acrobats and no slow moving doves from a John Woo movie. Watching my bride glide down the aisle was dramatic enough. And she glided down like an angel. I wished time would slow to a crawl so that everyone in the church could marvel at how radiant my bride looked that evening. And it almost felt that way as she moved slowly yet regally toward the altar. Later on I found out she moved so slowly because the wedding dress weighed about three hundred pounds.

It took her a good thirty minutes to make her way down the aisle because one of her Bible-thumping aunts hopped in front of the walkway and played patintero with my soon-to-be-bride while screeching, “Pray to the Lord! Pray to the Heavens! Pray to God that he is the right one for yooouuu!!!” After my mom had knocked her aunt out with a stiletto heel, we thought that everything would proceed smoothly, except that her dad had feigned a heart attack.

When my bride and I finally plopped down from exhaustion onto our matrimonial bed, all legal-like and church-approved, I turned over to her and excitedly whispered. “There’s one last thing that I have to do.”

Her eyes grew large. “You don’t need that anymore, love. We’re married now!”

I picked up my cellphone and held it in front of her face. I scrolled over to her name on my phone’s contact list, and edited her entry. She looked at me and broke out into a smile when my phone finally read ‘Vanessa Ledesma.’

“Wala nang bawian (There’s no more refund),” I snickered. Then I gently lifted her head, and gently kissed my wife on the lips. And this was as close to heaven as I was ever going to get.

I wanted to give the No Girlfriends Since Birth (NGSBs), the Dirty Old Men (DOMs) and the administration a respite from my weekly regurgitation of one-liners and thinly-veiled innuendo as I invite my three female readers to assist me in my most pressing charity work: The charity of my baby Fortune Ledesma’s escalating diaper budget.

My new humor book “I Do or I Die! RJ Ledesma’s Imaginary Guide to Getting Married and Other Man-Made Disasters (As Told to him by his Yaya)” from Anvil Publishing is a compilation of my columns in the Philippine Star that details my blissful descent into reclusio domestica. And just how blissful was it on the way down?  Well, I invite you to read the foreword written by my creative writing teacher and fellow Star columinst Dr. Isagani Cruz.

If his foreword doesn’t persuade you to cover this month’s budget for diapers, I don’t know what will.

The forgettable 1921 novel Scaramouche opens with these unforgettable lines: “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” All Filipinos were born with a gift of laughter, but very few realize that the world is mad.

For the world – at least the world that Filipinos live in – is mad, not in the American sense that It is a Mad Mad Mad Mad World nor in the African sense that The Gods Must Be Crazy nor in the Latin American magic / magical / marvelous realist sense, but in a distinctively Filipino, laugh-while-your-house-is-burning sense, the only sense that has made Filipinos treat a coup d’état as a revolution and a fiesta at the same time, enjoying junk food while kicking out an acknowledged dictator or a perceived degenerate, later forgiving and forgetting all personal and political hurts, grinning while posing for photos with record-breaking thieves and erstwhile objects of collective hatred, lying down and enjoying being literally or figuratively raped and boasting about it.

You cannot get any weirder than in the Philippines, and RJ Ledesma (http://rjledesma.net/) knows it. Using the oldest trick in the literary book, which is to create a character who is a character, he has raised his nanny (called a yaya in the Philippines, with a complete subculture built on the name, including a language codified by professional linguists as “Yaya English”) to the level of an icon.

All this sounds much too serious in an introduction to a book that calls out not to be taken seriously, but comedy is much too funny to be left to people with a sense of humor.

Aristotle, the great brain that he was and even with his too-valued two-valued logic, could not make heads or non-heads out of comedy. He wrote some random notes, realized that his reputation two centuries hence would be ruined if the notes would be discovered, and promptly ate the notes. Yes, ate them. (Since everything he wrote was preserved by his followers, it is safe to say that, to prevent his fans from overzeal, he himself ensured the non-survival of his notes on comedy by eating them. It was the only way to frustrate those wishing to sink their teeth into everything he wrote. It was also a way not to have to eat his words in the future against his will. To prove me wrong, you would have to build a time machine and, even then, you would have to catch Aristotle at the very moment he was composing the missing treatise on comedy. I could have painted a more probable scenario, but it would be toilet humor, quite unbecoming a professor.)

A number of otherwise sober people have since pontificated about comedy, among them Henri Bergson, who famously quipped that man is the animal that laughs, conveniently ignoring the loud laughter of women at such a sexist, exclusivist, anti-feminist, politically incorrect outburst. Real-life life-and-death medical doctors, led by Robin Williams’ fictional Patch Adams (not the real Patch Adams, born Hunter Campbell Adams, who set up a very serious clinic in West Virginia that is leading a very serious war against very serious medical insurance but, yes, is better known for traveling around the world with his doctor-friends dressed up as clowns healing children just by looking silly), have also been continually coming up with evidence that laughter, as Reader’s Digest discovered zillions of issues ago, is the best medicine.

There is no end to writers that attempt to write comedy. Many comics are funny, but few are hilarious. Ledesma is, well, hilarious.

What makes him even more hilarious than most writers of comedy (and there are not, sadly enough, too many of them in the Philippines, at least not as many as the grim-and-determined, anti-feudalist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-Manila, anti-English, anti-Malacañang constipated types) is that he finds even things familiar to us funny.

Ledesma was my student in creative writing at De La Salle University. In the beginning, he fancied himself an economist, taking up an undergraduate degree in economics. I like to flatter myself by saying that I snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by making him go the route of underpaid, unpaid, unappreciated, unwanted creative writers instead of the yellow brick road leading to, perhaps, a reign as the country’s economic czar or even a small-but-terrible economics-major president (as you read the book, you will see how many times the most unliked president in the history of the nation gets ridiculed). Of course, Ledesma is not really small, unless you believe everything he says about himself.

In my creative writing classes, despite my having been educated as a poststructuralist, postcolonial, postfeminist, postmarxist, post-post-something or other, I revert back to formalism and recite as my mantra the underrated dictum of the Russian Formalists, namely, that creative writers should make the familiar unfamiliar (there’s even a long, coined word for it, but it smacks of pretentiousness, so I only whisper it to my students when I catch them texting or doodling or otherwise not paying close attention to every profound syllable I utter). “Defamiliarization” is a word guaranteed to make even the dumbest basketball player in class sit up and pretend to listen, if only because it sounds obscene.

Ledesma makes everything seem unfamiliar, from the conventional rituals of getting married to going on a foreign trip to realizing that one is balding. That is the secret of his humor: he makes his fellowmen (yes, men as in male gender, not men as in all men are created equal or are mortal) laugh at themselves. Not being a woman nor even inclined to become one, despite that being the fashion among macho men these days, I cannot even guess at how a woman will react to the continuous ribbing aimed at what we unreconstructed males used to regard as the gentle sex before a decidedly ungentle widow accused an even more decidedly ungentle woman of stealing the presidency not once, but twice. Hell hath no fury and all that, but why, in heaven’s name, can men no longer talk about women in disdainful terms without being hauled to court for sexual harassment, political discrimination, misogyny, or whatever? I am sure women, when they are alone, have all kinds of nasty things to say about men, but men, being the denser sex, do not have an inkling of what is really going on. But I am only guessing.

Ledesma is also always only guessing. His ribbing is never not in jest, but where there is comic smoke, there is bound to be tragic truth. Or so the philosophers say, or should say, or should have said. In any case, it will not pay to take Ledesma too seriously, though it makes perfect sense to pay for this book you are reading, in case you just borrowed it, or are just browsing through it in a bookstore, or stole it at gunpoint from someone not willing to give up a cellphone but willing to give up what gives much more pleasure than the latest ringtone or the received message “I love you too,” which happens to be a template on many cellphones (and like most templates, totally meaningless).

Not at all meaningless is the love that these pages clearly reflect, a love not three removes from reality (as that other Greek philosopher without a sense of humor liked to characterize anything he disliked) but very, very real, even more real than a reality television show. Ledesma’s love for his significant other oozes out of the laughter, exactly like the Tagalized Spanish “karinyo brutal,” a bit like imported, expensive chocolate that melts in your mouth and surprises you with some kind of nut inside. Not that Ledesma is a nut, though I suppose he himself would not hesitate to call himself that. As my student, he cannot not be a non-nut, since I always pride myself on being better than my students at anything, even in being a nut.

At the end of the day, I am very proud of RJ Ledesma, one of the best students I have ever had in my creative writing classes. I do not mean that in terms of grades; I do not even remember if he got a good grade, though he must have or he would not have invited me to write this foreword. What I mean is that he has parlayed the little he learned from my class into something I myself would never be able to accomplish – a set of lovely essays bordering on creative nonfiction, classic comedy, and – to use the L word – literature. Needless to say, I am sick with envy. I mean, I would do anything to have written this book, which is about how to live happily before, during, and even after a fairy-tale wedding.

Now that I am old and bald and living in surrealist Philippines, I still laugh out loud, and I laugh loudest when I encounter the comic spurts of genius that Ledesma exhibits in this book, as well as in his earlier book, in his columns, and in his blog.

What more can an aging professor want? Now, let me show you the first two hundred items in my bucket list, beginning with writing a book like this one you are holding in your hands …

Dear all,

Please check out my new book from Anvil Publishing, “I Do or I Die! RJ Ledesma’s Imaginary Guide to Getting Married and Other Man-Made Disasters (As Told to him by his Yaya” now available at National Bookstores and Powerbooks nationwide! Please buy a copy and help me pay for my baby’s diapers!

I am reprinting the foreword to my book written by my former Creative Writing professor and mentor Dr. Isagani Cruz.  Thanks again Dr. Cruz for the great foreword!

The forgettable 1921 novel Scaramouche opens with these unforgettable lines: “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” All Filipinos were born with a gift of laughter, but very few realize that the world is mad.

For the world – at least the world that Filipinos live in – is mad, not in the American sense that It is a Mad Mad Mad Mad World nor in the African sense that The Gods Must Be Crazy nor in the Latin American magic / magical / marvelous realist sense, but in a distinctively Filipino, laugh-while-your-house-is-burning sense, the only sense that has made Filipinos treat a coup d’état as a revolution and a fiesta at the same time, enjoying junk food while kicking out an acknowledged dictator or a perceived degenerate, later forgiving and forgetting all personal and political hurts, grinning while posing for photos with record-breaking thieves and erstwhile objects of collective hatred, lying down and enjoying being literally or figuratively raped and boasting about it.

You cannot get any weirder than in the Philippines, and RJ Ledesma (http://rjledesma.net/) knows it. Using the oldest trick in the literary book, which is to create a character who is a character, he has raised his nanny (called a yaya in the Philippines, with a complete subculture built on the name, including a language codified by professional linguists as “Yaya English”) to the level of an icon.

All this sounds much too serious in an introduction to a book that calls out not to be taken seriously, but comedy is much too funny to be left to people with a sense of humor.

Aristotle, the great brain that he was and even with his too-valued two-valued logic, could not make heads or non-heads out of comedy. He wrote some random notes, realized that his reputation two centuries hence would be ruined if the notes would be discovered, and promptly ate the notes. Yes, ate them. (Since everything he wrote was preserved by his followers, it is safe to say that, to prevent his fans from overzeal, he himself ensured the non-survival of his notes on comedy by eating them. It was the only way to frustrate those wishing to sink their teeth into everything he wrote. It was also a way not to have to eat his words in the future against his will. To prove me wrong, you would have to build a time machine and, even then, you would have to catch Aristotle at the very moment he was composing the missing treatise on comedy. I could have painted a more probable scenario, but it would be toilet humor, quite unbecoming a professor.)

A number of otherwise sober people have since pontificated about comedy, among them Henri Bergson, who famously quipped that man is the animal that laughs, conveniently ignoring the loud laughter of women at such a sexist, exclusivist, anti-feminist, politically incorrect outburst. Real-life life-and-death medical doctors, led by Robin Williams’ fictional Patch Adams (not the real Patch Adams, born Hunter Campbell Adams, who set up a very serious clinic in West Virginia that is leading a very serious war against very serious medical insurance but, yes, is better known for traveling around the world with his doctor-friends dressed up as clowns healing children just by looking silly), have also been continually coming up with evidence that laughter, as Reader’s Digest discovered zillions of issues ago, is the best medicine.

There is no end to writers that attempt to write comedy. Many comics are funny, but few are hilarious. Ledesma is, well, hilarious.

What makes him even more hilarious than most writers of comedy (and there are not, sadly enough, too many of them in the Philippines, at least not as many as the grim-and-determined, anti-feudalist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-Manila, anti-English, anti-Malacañang constipated types) is that he finds even things familiar to us funny.

Ledesma was my student in creative writing at De La Salle University. In the beginning, he fancied himself an economist, taking up an undergraduate degree in economics. I like to flatter myself by saying that I snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by making him go the route of underpaid, unpaid, unappreciated, unwanted creative writers instead of the yellow brick road leading to, perhaps, a reign as the country’s economic czar or even a small-but-terrible economics-major president (as you read the book, you will see how many times the most unliked president in the history of the nation gets ridiculed). Of course, Ledesma is not really small, unless you believe everything he says about himself.

In my creative writing classes, despite my having been educated as a poststructuralist, postcolonial, postfeminist, postmarxist, post-post-something or other, I revert back to formalism and recite as my mantra the underrated dictum of the Russian Formalists, namely, that creative writers should make the familiar unfamiliar (there’s even a long, coined word for it, but it smacks of pretentiousness, so I only whisper it to my students when I catch them texting or doodling or otherwise not paying close attention to every profound syllable I utter). “Defamiliarization” is a word guaranteed to make even the dumbest basketball player in class sit up and pretend to listen, if only because it sounds obscene.

Ledesma makes everything seem unfamiliar, from the conventional rituals of getting married to going on a foreign trip to realizing that one is balding. That is the secret of his humor: he makes his fellowmen (yes, men as in male gender, not men as in all men are created equal or are mortal) laugh at themselves. Not being a woman nor even inclined to become one, despite that being the fashion among macho men these days, I cannot even guess at how a woman will react to the continuous ribbing aimed at what we unreconstructed males used to regard as the gentle sex before a decidedly ungentle widow accused an even more decidedly ungentle woman of stealing the presidency not once, but twice. Hell hath no fury and all that, but why, in heaven’s name, can men no longer talk about women in disdainful terms without being hauled to court for sexual harassment, political discrimination, misogyny, or whatever? I am sure women, when they are alone, have all kinds of nasty things to say about men, but men, being the denser sex, do not have an inkling of what is really going on. But I am only guessing.

Ledesma is also always only guessing. His ribbing is never not in jest, but where there is comic smoke, there is bound to be tragic truth. Or so the philosophers say, or should say, or should have said. In any case, it will not pay to take Ledesma too seriously, though it makes perfect sense to pay for this book you are reading, in case you just borrowed it, or are just browsing through it in a bookstore, or stole it at gunpoint from someone not willing to give up a cellphone but willing to give up what gives much more pleasure than the latest ringtone or the received message “I love you too,” which happens to be a template on many cellphones (and like most templates, totally meaningless).

Not at all meaningless is the love that these pages clearly reflect, a love not three removes from reality (as that other Greek philosopher without a sense of humor liked to characterize anything he disliked) but very, very real, even more real than a reality television show. Ledesma’s love for his significant other oozes out of the laughter, exactly like the Tagalized Spanish “karinyo brutal,” a bit like imported, expensive chocolate that melts in your mouth and surprises you with some kind of nut inside. Not that Ledesma is a nut, though I suppose he himself would not hesitate to call himself that. As my student, he cannot not be a non-nut, since I always pride myself on being better than my students at anything, even in being a nut.

At the end of the day, I am very proud of RJ Ledesma, one of the best students I have ever had in my creative writing classes. I do not mean that in terms of grades; I do not even remember if he got a good grade, though he must have or he would not have invited me to write this foreword. What I mean is that he has parlayed the little he learned from my class into something I myself would never be able to accomplish – a set of lovely essays bordering on creative nonfiction, classic comedy, and – to use the L word – literature. Needless to say, I am sick with envy. I mean, I would do anything to have written this book, which is about how to live happily before, during, and even after a fairy-tale wedding.

Now that I am old and bald and living in surrealist Philippines, I still laugh out loud, and I laugh loudest when I encounter the comic spurts of genius that Ledesma exhibits in this book, as well as in his earlier book, in his columns, and in his blog.

What more can an aging professor want? Now, let me show you the first two hundred items in my bucket list, beginning with writing a book like this one you are holding in your hands …

Isagani R. Cruz
Professor Emeritus
De La Salle University

His yaya made him do it.

As a chubby be-pimpled teenager slash 80s pop icon slash alpha-nerd, RJ Ledesma was the laughingstock of his peers because his Yaya Cora was with him wherever he went, be it to the disco or to a soiree or the banyo.

RJ with his Yaya Cora

After several years and extensive psychological counseling, the tables are now turned and RJ struck back at his detractors.  Newspaper columnist and magazine editor (but now a fading 80s pop icon) has written a best-selling book (his mom bought a lot of copies) from Anvil Publishing entitled “Lies My Yaya Should Have Told Me, RJ Ledesma’s Imaginary Guide To Whine and Women” about his ruminations on dating and mating in the 21^st century, which collects his columns from Manila Times (“Playing With My Tools”) and the Philippine Star (“Pogi From A Parallel Universe”).   

RJ takes his brand of irreverence to new lows with a book signing at Fully Booked, Bonifacio High Street, Bonifacio Global City, Taguig on November 22 (Saturday) at 5pm.  “Your yayas are welcome to come.” RJ added.

As a special treat, RJ will not only be reading excerpts from “Lies My Yaya Should Have Told Me” but also from his next book “I Do or I Die: RJ Ledesma’s Explosive Guide to Getting Married and other Man-Made Disasters (As told to him by his Yaya)”.  He will also be delivering a short lecture on humor writing.  As of press time, it was not confirmed if his yaya would be making an appearance.

Rj with spiritual adviser Gary Lising

Come to the book signing slash indoctrination and find out why everybody’s jumping into the yaya bandwagon!  Just check out these reviews:

“The book chronicles the author’s travails in the savage lands of the female species; one presided over by a girlfriend who won’t think twice about pummeling his man-parts with a gavel, a mother who’s amusingly overbearing, and, of course, a yaya who acts as the cackling entity looming over his manhood and the bastion of his subservience to the fairer sex…All the campy imagination makes for a riotous read…RJ writing of the 21^st century Pinoy man’s concerns, from the hazards of dating and the task of appeasing girlfriends we don’t seem to deserve, no matter how smart, funny, and rightfully geeky a  man is…RJ channels Steve Martin, Dolphy, and pre-duplex Ben Stiller…with RJ as our crash test dummy, we can stand at the sidelines rubbing our bellies and laughing nervously at how much of an absolutely clueless and lesser sex we are.” – Paolo Lorenzana of Philippine Star’s Supreme. 

“In Lies My Yaya Should Have Told Me, RJ’s strength lies more on hyperbole than irony.  There’s nothing to read between the lines and all the scenes are meant to be imaginatively relished and in some instances, cringed upon.  It’s evident that the author dips his foot into fiction but not only for effect: he finagles truths about the human condition – chiefly, the eternal interplay between a man and a woman – by enlarging and sculpting situations to suit his end…It’s commentary that doesn’t leave a bad taste on the mouth but interests just the same because it is so left-field, so dripping with humor.” – Carlomar Arcangel Daoanna of Daily Tribune.

“One might be fooled into thinking that the anecdotes and annotations are purely anchored on his yaya’s wisdom and female intuition…Whether it’s a sacred subject or not, RJ boldly explores the female figure in such a way that female readers are sure to get self-conscious, if not embarrassed, after putting down the book…Women, too, should pay heed to the author’s informational, albeit amusing, insights which our moms forgot to teach us in our formative years.” -  Candy Veneracion of Manila Bulletin. 

“The observations on pick-up lines, dating, courtship, and certain life-changing events, such as dealing with the parents of your girlfriend, are razor-sharp, laugh-out-loud (not just chuckle) funny, and most of the time, embarrassingly true.” – Gmeleen Faye B. Tomboc of ClickTheCity.com

“Rumor has it that a movie musicale based on the book (starring no les than the dashing Andrew E as Ledesma) is set to be released shortly before the campaign season of the next elections, where Ledesma is said to run for President under a platform of free government-subsidized soft drinks, a ban on all meat products and calls for an orange revolution…Kidding aside, the book delivers oodles on the science of romance such as the biochemistry of pheromones and oxytocins. It also delivers realistic situationers about romance and relationship for 21^st century Pinoys – like Catholic guilt about premarital sex and skulking about drive-in motels just the same.” – Rome Jorge of Manila Times.

“It made me cry.” – RJ Ledesma.

Shock jock Mo Twister, stand up comic Tim Tayag, Dirty Old Man Gary Lising, Dirty Young Adult RJ, tv host Sam Oh, and 80s icon and Tiger head Jojo Alejar

And, what perhaps is the most important lesson RJ has learned from his yaya?  According to Carlomar Daoanna. “He spirals into Dante Alighieri hell by knowing the fury connected with PMS and ovulation.  I have never read anything that is as reverential when it comes to woman’s body rhythms.”

His yaya has trained him well.

Please come to Fully Booked and buy a book, RJ needs to pay for his credit card bills.  

For more information on the launch, you can call Fully Booked Bonifacio High Street at (632) 858-7000/858-7036/858-7037/858-7038.

Lies My Yaya Should Have Told Me is now available at Fully Booked, National Bookstore and Power Books.