buds and  inflorescences   

                    

                            

          In just a bit more than a capsule, this is how I came to be.

             (a bonafide goat ~ Capricorn Girl)  

 

     I am of the baby boomer generation; very much in confluence with the rhythm of my age, yet a prim and proper teenager in the turbulent sixties.

                                                                 

     I thank Dad and Nanay  -  ( Sofronio Yu Libarios and Leona Dolon )- for having spared me the lifetime agony of carrying a disagreeable name. I thoroughly like what they gave me. They could have christened me Inocencia, being born on Innocents' day, but Ana Bella it was! Somehow, it made me the way I would be; what I am.  My Ana is for " a collection of literary pieces" not anarchy or anaconda; and my Bella is for 'belles lettre' not bellicose or belladona.

                                    

                                                        

        Growing up in a musical family of 5 sisters-(Daisy, Josefina, Aida, Leonita, and Natividad), and a brother -(Sofronio II) was both harmonious and discordant. All my siblings were pleasantly tuned even then, with Dad's incessant coaching on timing and the sharps and the flats of do-re-mi. I was the one, though, who had the most penchant for performing before audiences, steering me to win in local amateur singing contests.

                                                            

          As an operetta star in my elementary grades at the Leyte Normal Laboratory School- Tacloban City, Philippines, I sang, danced, and acted on stage with unbridled flair.  In high school at St. Paul's College- Tacloban, garnering medals (in declamation contests) for my class, school, and province became the major active force of my student life that I almost failed in Physics and Oriental History.

                                                              

    College life at the Divine Word University-Tacloban was one glorious, lustrous 4-year episode.  Even as a freshman, I already got invitations to join prime University organizations, but in deference to Dad's restrictions, I had to content myself with just one affiliation, which had to be the little theatre - my one true love. And so I was the shy and cripple Laura in Tennessee William's The Glass Menagerie; the two-timing wife Nora in Guerrero's Three Rats; a woman-scorned in a dramatic monologue, The Stronger; and a poem reader in a Valentine poetry reading presentation.

                                                                             

     I also voice-acted in most of the University-On-The-Air radio dramas turned out by the DRUG -the Drama and Radio United Group - of DWU. As if these were not enough, I was incessantly asked to render a song or two as intermission numbers in some campus affairs, prompting Dad to admonish me that I was 'spreading myself too thin', and worse, that I was being taken advantage of! I never thought of it in either way, though. I gloried in all that.  Besides, what could be a better excuse for getting Nanay to buy me a new dress than being invited to perform on stage?

                                                       

            My junior and senior years were full.  I got into the Alpha Phi Omega Auxilliary Sorority without a scratch, so it was only right that I requited my masters' goodwill.  I birthed out the  musicale The Sound Of Music for presentation on the DWU stage : wrote the script, taught all the songs, had my sister accompany at the piano, and played Maria. I was chosen Miss Liberal Arts by the dean and instructors of the liberal arts department, and that to me was a most fitting title for one who had such a many-splendored college life.

                                  

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