Boots on smoking hazards

Boots Anson-Roa is well known among movie fans and entertainment watchers as one of the country’s enduring and most liked personalities. Yet behind the smiling facade is a story of cigarettes’ tragic impact on her family. In a revealing talk before media practitioners and journalists in the recently held forum Glamour, Smoke and Mirrors: A Seminar on Women, Media and Tobacco, Boots narrated how Pete, her husband of 43 years, smoked to his death in 2007.

“Pete started smoking when he was 15,” according to her. “During his active days in the entertainment industry where he dealt mostly with production, Pete was doing three packs of cigarettes a day.” Then he suffered a stroke in 1997 which left him paralyzed for 10 years. “But that didn’t deter him from smoking,” confides Boots. He continued to smoke two packs of cigarettes a day; and inhale its attendant nicotine and 4,000 chemical and other compounds which give a stick of cigarette its highs as well as its insidious dangers. And not even his doctors could stop him as Pete would reason out that he had only a few more years to enjoy this habit.

But unknown to many, Boots also lost both her parents to cancer brought about by their heavy-smoking. Her father, Oscar Moreno, dubbed as the Clark Gable of Philippine movies, was smoking heavily until he contracted Miliary Tuberculosis in 1985. “After testing positive for TB, my father didn’t want to have anything to do with cigarettes,” says Boots. “My mother’s smoking habit, on the other hand, started when she couldn’t convince my father to stop. So she decided to smoke as well until she contracted cancer when she was 71.” Boots’ mom passed away 11 months after she was diagnosed with cancer in 1991.

Boots somehow attributes cigarette smoking as a “predisposition to a lifestyle” influenced by the people around you. Her maternal and paternal grandparents are smokers. “What you are exposed to becomes ingrained and also becomes part of your lifestyle.” But despite her close proximity to chain-smokers, Boots somehow never developed the habit. She did smoke at some point in her life, but it was short-lived. “It started when the late direk Lino Brocka asked me to learn how to smoke for a play we were doing,” Boots recalls. One who is for realism, direk Lino would have none of Boots’ “inhale, exhale” acting so she learned how to smoke. “That started my one to two sticks a day smoking.” But she only smoked after meals. Known for playing the role of the Virgin Mary in several movies and stage dramas, Boots was one time smoking a cigarette after a meal with her family inside a restaurant when she overheard the kids on the other table said,” Si Mama Mary, nagsisigarilyo! (Mama Mary smokes!).” Her family had a big laugh after that but she also realized the kind of impact she makes on other people. “I quit smoking after that incident.”

In the case of her late husband, Pete, it was only when he found out that he had gastric cancer that he decided to stop. That was in early 2007. In July of the same year, the cancer metastasized into his lung and brains. Five weeks later, he passed on. Boots divulged the physical pain that her husband went through during those last weeks of his confinement. “Pete regretted that he did not listen to his family’s pleas to stop smoking.” So during his remaining days, Pete would tell all those who cared to listen that if there was one advice he would like to impart to his family and loved ones, it was that people should give up smoking. “Look at what happened to me,” he would tell them.

In an industry where smoking is often glamorized on TV and movie screens, and is seen as a status symbol among the young, Boots admits that it would be a hard battle to fight. “I cannot speak for the entire industry”. But she is hopeful that her colleagues could help lessen, if not eradicate, this deadly habit that afflicts many in the world of entertainment by actively advocating that people should stop smoking and by coming up with testimonials about its adverse effects. “I am in fact, willing to be the poster woman for the anti-smoking campaign and make a personal appeal to my colleagues in the movie and TV industry,” Boots said. For someone like her who has to juggle several hats (executive director of Mowelfund, broadcast professor, Radio and TV personality, mother and grandmother), Boots does not mind wearing another one (anti-smoking advocate) if only to honor the memory of her beloved husband by imparting his most important advice to young and old alike — stop smoking or just don’t even start.