Nora Aunor and My Generation

By Joey Salagado

A hazy childhood memory of standing in front of a palatial house in Barrio Kapitolyo, probably with an elder female cousin, a Noranian, squeezed in with other Noranians. We stood in front of this house for hours. Nora Aunor had either just moved into this house or was shooting a movie there. No one was sure, but there we were, standing in the sun hoping to catch a glimpse of Nora. We went home without seeing her, for no one was really sure if that was her house, or if she was shooting a movie. It’s just that a Noranian heard it from another Noranian who heard it from another Noranian and pretty soon Noranians from Barrio Pineda were trooping to that house in Barrio Kapitolyo with the tall white gate.

To my generation, she was Nora Aunor, plain Guy, not yet Ate Guy for she was still a teenager. Not yet anointed Superstar but surely that was her trajectory. Not yet the award-winning actress, the Nora of Bona, Minsan Isang Gamu-Gamo, Himala. Not yet the broken idol, the conflicted, imperfect rebel. She was a rising star who looked just like us.

She was Nora Aunor the singer, the teen idol. She was on the radio, on magazine covers, on those quaint little booklets called “song hits,” on variety shows airing on black and white television. Nora was always there. The golden voice and the sad eyes. The Guy to Pip, or Tirso Cruz III, and to Manny de Leon, Kokoy Laurel, and this Indian actor Sajid Khan.

We didn’t care for the Matt Monro covers that endeared her to our parents. We sang along to Tiny Bubbles and Pearly Shells, and her duets with Pip. Edgar Mortiz says he was first paired with Nora but the love team didn’t click with the masa. Perhaps because both of them looked masa, whereas Pip and the others were tisoy, and a tisoy falling for someone who looked masa feeds on aspirations of upward mobility. It is something to embrace, even with their weird looking doll named Maria Leonora Teresa.

Nora’s death was a collective memory trigger. Good times, bad times, political upheavals, personal struggles, finding escape and solace in her songs and movies. She inhabited our lives, made us sing and swoon, broke our hearts, lifted our spirits. In death, she made us whole again.