The Miller in Manila: comic Lynn Ruth discovers the benefits of now being 85

On her last appearance in this blog, London-based American stand-up storytelling comic and late-blooming burlesque dancer Lynn Ruth Miller was telling tales of her six – count ‘em, six – 85th birthday parties in London and Brighton and was on her way to Cannes. 

Now she is in the Far East.

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It started in the tube train going to London Airport. I wondered how on earth I was going to get my heavy, heavy case up stairs and escalators when I got to Terminal 3.

But a lovely man said he too was getting off at my terminal and WITHOUT MY ASKING dragged the case up escalators, down escalators through swinging doors right to my check-in desk. Then he hugged me and hurried off to his job. He is the one who replaces the floor tiles in the terminal when disgusting clods like me tramp on them and dislodge them.  

I make my living telling naughty jokes that emasculate men and I am properly ashamed. This man represents Britain at its Best even though he was a Bulgarian immigrant who could barely speak English and sends his whole paycheck home to his starving mother and over-privileged cat.

I flew Philippine Airlines and it felt like I was going first class instead of steerage. Their planes are immaculate and roomy. 

I had been told everyone has a helluva time in Immigration at Manila Airport, but Filipinos love little old ladies. At least the ones in Immigration do. Despite the fact that I couldn’t remember the day I was leaving and forgot the name of the hotel I was in, I was whooshed through the line and literally given my bag as it sailed around the carousel by two eager young men who were afraid I would fall apart and my bones would scatter all over their luggage.   

Two policemen called me “Darling” and showed me the reception area at the airport. That was when magic happened.  

The warm reception for Lynn Ruth at Manila Airport

Dilip Budhrani was there with his wife Saira, and his two children Mika (8 going on 21) and Vedant (11 going on 40). Both children hugged me and handed me a spectacular bouquet of flowers. I felt like Cinderella before midnight.  

I was taken to The Picasso Boutique Hotel in Salcedo Village in Makati City. The walls are filled with Picassos from his cubist period. I went up to my room expecting a ROOM.

Instead I was in a three room suite that is bigger than my entire Stamford Hill flat. It had an electric range, a refrigerator, the usual tea kettle and with teas and coffees and a sunken bathtub.

I felt like I should have had my hair and nails done and got a complete overhaul before entering the place. 

Naturally I had no idea how to turn on the recessed lights, open the refrigerator or find the closet, but 8 year old Mika knew. Then all of us went out for dinner at a Spanish restaurant down the street. Guess what was waiting for me when I came back after an amazing dinner at Terry’s? ANOTHER birthday cake.

I was beginning to think I could never live up to what these people expect of me. I am far too ordinary.

However I was wrong. 

I went to the Relik Bar and performed my show This Is Your Future to THE most appreciative audience ever.  

The guy in the front table was David Charlton from Sunderland who owns a chain of beauty salons. He took one look at me and insisted I go to one of his salons to get made over before the show tomorrow night – in Manila, not Sunderland. 

Sunderland is very North in England, which explains why he understood the underlying filth in my performance. No-one else in the place knew what dogging was… and he probably invented it. He has a glamorous Filipino partner who was conservatively dressed, which must puzzle him. Girls up north in England go out on the town with a fur wrap and band-aids over their bits.

“Response got me all revved up…”

The next day I did my inspirational talk Optimistic Living at The Union Jack Tavern. To my shock, the place was filled and I told my silly stories about giving it a go, no matter how bleak the prospects. They evidently loved it. They told me this was because it gave them hope that, even though they had messed up their lives, they had another chance to make things right. Their response got me all revved up to do Ageing is Amazing. Sadly I had forgotten to bring my costume for this event.

But Dilip’s wife Saira managed to get together an acceptable costume, a feather boa and some disposable diapers. Her PR friend had loads and loads of wigs. I rehearsed the songs over and over and OVER and remembered it all and sung without a mistake. I got a standing ovation for that one. Afterwards, guess what they brought up on stage?

ANOTHER birthday cake.

A word about Manila…  

It has unbelievable traffic and buildings with offices open all night. These are the call centers. More than 1 million Filipinos now work at call centers and in related outsourcing businesses, mostly serving American companies. Corporations such as Citibank, Safeway, Chevron and Aetna as well as smaller companies ranging from a Georgia medical collection agency to a New York spa operator that outsources its customer appointments. People in these centers earn as much as $700 a month (£535.50) which is double the salary of a Manila bank teller.  

Flying high – “Filipinos are uncommonly polite and caring.”

Filipinos are uncommonly polite and caring.

You never enter a door that someone doesn’t open for you (at least I didn’t) and, when I was out in a sudden rainstorm, a lovely man walked me under his umbrella to an intersection where he was turning and a young woman going the opposite direction then turned around and took me to the hotel.    

When I did the inspirational talk, a lovely woman gave me a truly exquisite scarf beautifully wrapped to welcome me to Manila. I walked by a deli just to check it out and, when I returned to grab a coffee and a scone, that doorman remembered me and welcomed me. I came back the next day for an omelette and again he greeted me as if I were his best friend.  

This kind of thing does not happen in America.

If you get caught in a rainstorm there, it is your problem and, if you walk by a store without going in and SPENDING LOTS OF MONEY, they hate you.

Such is the culture from which I sprouted. 

Donald Trump is no surprise.  

Next stop, Jakarta in Indonesia.  

… CONTINUED HERE …

 

UFOs, toad-vomiting, the KGB, the CIA and Saddam Hussein’s gay marriage

I went to the first day of the Fortean Times‘ UnConvention at the University of Westminster today to see comedian Helen Keen’s hour long show It Is Rocket Science! which blends science, comedy and bizarre facts and unusually sat among even more bizarre fare. She was wildly enthusiastic, even by her high standards.

Fortean Times is the self-proclaimed ‘Journal of Strange Phenomena’ which non-readers assume concocts loony stories of crop circles, UFOs and conspiracy theories but which regular readers know casts a sceptical eye on anything strange and apparently inexplicable.

Presentations in today’s UnConvention included Ian Ridpath comprehensively demolishing the so-called Rendelesham Forest UFO Incident by going back to the original sources – US Air Force reports, UK police records and audio tapes actually recorded at the time – to reveal rational and arguably even mundane explanations of allegedly alien events which have escalated into OTT UFO myth – basically, he convincingly argued that the alleged ‘alien craft’ was a combination of a known falling fireball that night and a local lighthouse’s flashing light. It was an interesting dissection of how a myth gathers momentum.

As was Jan Bondeson’s talk on “The Bosom Serpent” – hundreds of years of stories of snakes, frogs and even a hen lurking inside people’s bodies. Jan, a senior lecturer and consultant rheumatologist at Cardiff University by day, came over as a cross between Dr Strangelove and Jimmy Carr with a droll line in dry humour. I was particularly impressed with his telling of the true tale of Catharina Geisslerin, the so-called Toad-Vomiting Woman of Altenburg, and how the cure for another historical figure’s frog-vomiting was to drink three pints of horse urine. Well, I guess that would cure you of complaining about anything else although the alternative remedies of luring snakes out of their lair in people’s stomachs by enticing them with sweet-smelling milk or cheese or even using an improvised fishing rod seem a tad easier.

Then there was Mark Pilkington on myth-making by the world’s Intelligence services and tales of how a Chinese lantern can become a time-travelling Nazi flying saucer and how Communist insurgents in the Philippines were routed by the CIA’s leaked fictional rumours of a winged vampire (something only topped by Helen Keen’s revelation in It Is Rocket Science! of American plans in World War II to attack mainland Japan using thousands of bats with miniature bombs attached to them).

Aside from Mark Pilkington’s tales of the KGB’s First Directorate and their successful plot to spread a false rumour that AIDs resulted from CIA plans to develop a genetic and/or ethnic weapon… and the Rand Corporation’s 1950 paper by Jean M.Hungerford on “The Exploitation of Superstitions for Purposes of Psychological Warfare”, I was particularly interested to hear that the US Government’s short-lived Psychological Strategy Board as long ago as the early 1950s had suggested using existing respected cultural organisations to spread stories.

In the 1990s, I knew a Western European who, during the Cold War, had been a deep cover sleeper agent for the Soviets. He had been ‘run’ via the East Germans. When he was caught by the Americans in Germany, they debriefed him in Washington, but not in any CIA or Defense Department building. He was instead debriefed by the CIA in the offices of a major international cultural magazine.

The most fascinating thing I learnt during today’s UnConvention, though, was about Generoso Pope Jnr, a man I had never heard of before. Formerly employed by the CIA’s psychological warfare unit and with links to the Mafia (his son’s godfather was mob boss Frank Costello), Generoso Pope Jnr bought the New York Enquirer in 1952 (allegedly with money from Costello) and re-named it the National Enquirer, spawning future stories which not only claimed that the existence of the Mafia was a myth concocted by the Communists but also, via its sister paper the Weekly World News, publishing stories of an alien face on the Moon, the dead Elvis Presley seen working in local grocery stores and a gay marriage between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden with the happy couple adopting a shaved ape baby named Robert, who posed as a human child.

Now THAT’s what I CALL a conspiracy theory!

And who would have thought either the Mafia or the CIA had a sense of humour?