Boots Anson, 'colegiala': The way she was

MANILA, Philippines - She is a senior citizen (although she looks less than 60), and has no qualms about revealing her age: Maria Elisa Anson (nicknamed Boots after an American comic strip character), born in Manila on Jan. 13, 1945. A few weeks later, the Americans returned to reclaim the country from the Japanese yoke; and the Philippines was plunged into war again.

“My mother told me I gave her a real hard time because I was a 9.3 pounder,” recalls Boots with amusement. “There was no electricity, no anesthesia, and high forceps.”

Her mother was Belen Cristobal Anson, a chemist and pharmacy graduate, and a direct descendant of the writer Epifanio de los Santos (after whom EDSA is named). Her father, Oscar Anson (later the screen actor Oscar Moreno) was a merchant mariner and “free spirit.”

When Boots, eldest of four siblings, was in college, her parents separated. The father went abroad and married again, and that is why the children of Belen Anson have seven half-brothers and half-sisters.

Her stage debut (Grade 1) was quite spectacular. At St. Mary’s College in Quezon City, Boots, aged six, played all the parts (complete with costume changes) in a multi-character presentation of Little Red Riding Hood. It was her mother who made the costumes.

The following year, Boots transferred to the ritzy Assumption College in Herran (now Pedro Gil), Manila, where she studied until completing high school. The Mistress of Class was Mother Teresita, who is still around today: “She doesn’t look like she has aged a bit. This is one of the blessings of mga monjas and priests because of their spiritual state siguro, their constant faith, they are insulated from the useless anxieties of the world that we are subjected to. Mother Teresita is very diminutive, demure.”

Once, during a long queue, Boots took out her ballpen and started doodling at the back of the girl in front of her classmate (daughter of Augusto Syjuco) who, of course, got mad. “That was the only naughty thing I did in school,” she laughs. After that she became very religious (“sumobra naman ang pagkamanang”). The turning point was a retreat conducted by Fr. Lorenzo Ma. Guerrero, S.J. (an uncle).

She remembers the Assumption nuns as “pretty strict, stringent with rules. Ako man, I think I overreacted to the rules, I overobeyed them siguro. I became sensitized, scrupulous…”

When she was a sophomore, she felt the Lord was calling her. So she consulted their Mistress of Class and told her “I think I have a vocation.” Sister Angela neither encouraged nor discouraged her. She simply observed, “well, young people your age usually go through a stage where they feel they have a calling. So, think about it and we’ll see what happens.”

By the time she was a senior, Boots still felt the same way. So she sought out Sister Angela again but this time also informed her that her parents wanted her to study at the University of the Philippines.

At that time — the ‘60s — the priests and nuns of the exclusive Catholic colleges frowned upon their graduates studying at the UP because it was secular, coed and deemed “too liberal.” An exception was Sister Angela who advised Boots that “it might be a good idea for you to go to UP and loosen up a bit, for you are too uptight.”

Thus, our young manang, who couldn’t even go to parties (not even in High School prom) because her father was overly strict, went over to the UP and suffered a culture shock: “There were boys all over the place!” To top it all, she had to enroll all by herself, and to learn how to commute because the family car was not always available.

Boots had graduated from the Assumption with honors and at the state university, she became a scholar, maintained her high grades while having “loads of extracurricular activities” again. She honed her acting skills at the UP Dramatic Club, headed by playwright Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero (a posthumous national artist and another uncle).

She missed being cum laude by .05 and was not able to finish her thesis because, by her senior year, she was already a Channel 5 Dance-o-Rama co-host, earning P600 a month (a big amount those days) plus car and chauffeur.

It was at Dance-o-Rama where she met Pete Roa, and after about a year they eloped! The rest of Boots’ story is well known to the reader. It is a book of life well lived with several chapters still unfolding.