Rick Meets Dick!

OH, WHO GIVES A FART ABOUT JOHN TAYLOR ANYMORE. Rick Astley sings, plays drums and guitar, is five years younger AND doesn't need cow poison in his face. Last Friday, August 1, my friends and I, undeterred by rainy weather, trooped to the Araneta Coliseum to see the man who charmed us all, twenty-odd years ago, with his baby face, too-big suit and squeaky-clean dance music. Rick Astley, now 42 and a father of one, finally came to see us twenty-odd years late. He's barely altered except perhaps for ten pounds and a different haircut. His voice is as deep as it ever was. Ten seconds into "Together Forever" and it was just like we were giddy high school girls all over again.



Renny, Nikki, Effie, Gay and I were (regrettably) too cheap to spare the cash for better seats, so we ended up slumming in General Admission, where there aren't any seats at all; just crumbling cement steps functioning as both seat and floor. We were so high up that the sound was awful, and Rick was all of two inches tall to the naked eye, but that didn't stop us from dancing like heathen women and screaming "I love you!" every ten minutes (okay, that was just me). It was a very good thing that I remembered to borrow my brother-in-law's binoculars or I would not have had the pleasure of discovering that Rick Astley was wearing Adidas sneakers with his black suit and skinny tie, that he kept sipping from a coffee cup in between songs, and that he hasn't any sort of tummy flab one would normally expect in a man in his forties (what a babe).



There were two people in the audience marked by fate to have a close encounter with the man that night. The first was Gina, handpicked by Rick to sing "My Arms Keep Missing You" with him (it helped that she was in his face from the very start of the show, obstinately snapping pictures from a corner of the stage). Her voice was barely audible and the pitch was perhaps too low for a woman, but she carried on admirably, and was well-rewarded with a kiss, a bear hug, and her right hand on Rick's left buttock. I would have sold my liver to take her place on that stage. There's one question I'm dying to ask Gina - does the man smell good? I imagine he must smell like fresh laundry. Or cookies fresh out of the oven.


Lucky person number two? Rick's number one fan in the Philippines - Roderick Paulate ! He got to sing along on stage for the encore, "Never Gonna Give You Up". I'll bet neither Rick nor the concert organizers imagined that Kuya Dick would end up singing almost the entire song AND dancing all over the stage like a wayward chorus member in a dance musical for an entire shocking minute. God bless Dick Paulate, he recognized the chance of a lifetime, and he gave it his all. Thanks to Roderick, here's one more thing Rick Astley is never gonna do... he's never gonna forget us now.