HOW do you excuse yourself from a party without disappointing your hosts if you have to leave early and before you have delivered your speech? Simple. Ask your beauty queen to come along.
Which was exactly what Mandaue City Mayor Luigi Quisumbing did at the 38th anniversary of the Young Lawyers’ Association of Cebu (YLAC) at the Marco Polo Hotel the other night. Like most public figures during the holiday season, Luigi has to juggle his schedule between parties nightly and because we started our program late, as we always do, he had to rush to the next engagement before he could do his part as guest speaker.
But the Mandaue City mayor must have been told by his two closest legal advisers - Regal Oliva and Elaine Bathan - about our reputation for tardiness and appreciation of beauty, not necessarily in that order. So he brought along the reigning Miss Mandaue who, after he said something about message and messenger, he called to read his speech.
On cue, the beauty queen appeared from out of nowhere, walking down gracefully as only a beauty queen could the entire length of the aisle to the rostrum as shouts of “I love you Mandaue” and “Please marry me, Mandaue” reverberated through the hall. So distracted were the lawyers, some of whom, in fairness, are still single, that Luigi managed to slip out the door almost unnoticed, which is saying a lot considering his build.
We organized the YLAC 38 years ago. There were, according to Maning Legaspi, 21 of us, charter members, but there are only about ten left now, making us an endangered specie. It has never ceased to amuse me that our anniversary should fall on the feast day of the Immaculate Conception because when we formed the group, it was not for the purest of reasons.
We just wanted a venue to unburden ourselves. We were bullied by older practitioners who, in their insecurity, found validation in making us look more amateurish in the court room than we already were. We frequently found ourselves on the wrong end of a judge’s temper. And most of us still did not know how to bill our clients.
We would meet almost every Friday over beer and, if someone had scored big in the collection front, pork and chicken barbecue. But most of the time, we split the bill, evenly paying for the cost of finding comfort from shared misery.
After about two years of hit and miss, of addressing objections of “leading the witness” in the direct and of asking “misleading” or “irrelevant” questions in the cross, we gained confidence. Whereas it took us at least two days to compose a simple affidavit of loss when we were starting, we could prepare deeds as well as pleadings in one sitting in front of the typewriter. And the bullies did not scare us anymore.
As our confidence - and our membership - grew, we began to move out of our parochial settings and started getting involved in community issues. We were, if I am not mistaken, the first group to invite Sen. Jovito Salonga to speak on civil liberties. We were still under martial law then and the venue was crawling with military agents (Menmen Paredes, who was jailed for a long time, knew many of them) but we gave Salonga the loudest ovation that our hearts were capable of inspiring. Some of us were teary-eyed.
YLAC did not come into being from immaculate conception but along the way we found our soul. The new YLAC, led by Mark Anthony Gaviola, should strive to keep it. That’s their challenge.