Last night inside the cab, as Little River Band's Reminiscin' played on the radio, it was once again the yuppie 1990s in Hard Rock Cafe. Giordano tennis shirts (with the frog or the teddy bear on the left chest) and Giordano Blues jeans were the fashion. If you raised a pant leg up, you'd see white St. Michael's socks. Shoes were Doc Martens or Keds.
A chorus of "hurry don't be late, I can hardly wait" is sang by the crowd, who either drank multiple San Miguel Pale Pilsens (for this was before the Light beer came out) or pretended to get drunk with Cali Shandy. The 1990s were good times for a twentysomething year old. Myself? I was still too young to in the fray. I waited patiently at home, listening to my BoyzIIMen cassette tapes, watching the latest dramatic interludes in TGIS and Gimik, and reading about JTT on Bop! Magazine, until it would be my turn to finally be part of the crowd who hung out in Planet Mars, Jazz Rhythms, and even Club Dredd.
Alas, I enter my twenties too many years too late for reasonably-priced Giordanos. There are no more new Dredd heads. Show bands and grunge acts have been replaced by the fruit of a night of drunkenness amongst bossa nova, acoustic and pop music.
The last strains of Remiscin' fade as the Justin Beiber's ditty about his "baby, baby" begins to play. I look out the cab window at the vastly changed reality. This was not the Manila I'd hoped to grow up in. I ponder how it would feel to be spending the rest of the 2000s not entirely fitting in with the zeitgeist, and wondering where I'm going.
