Kasadyaan!

The middle of December in Dumaguete brought yet another Festival to our weary eyes – this time Foundation University 's “Kasadyaan”, in the vernacular for “happy time.” It's Foundation's contribution to the Christmas season here, complete with street parades, bands, a beauty contest , fireworks and at least one TV type “artiste” from Manila .

So, a brief history of this festival: in the late “50's”, which of course was Super Wide Screen Cinemascope and Beach Boys time, some of the Foundation Faculty decided that the school should have a celebration to finish off the year, sort of like Mardi Gras. In fact, they called it “Mardi Gras” to begin with. But they realized that Mardi Gras means “Fat Tuesday”, the day before the Lenten fast begins. But their festival was neither Tuesday, nor was it fat; so they dug into Cebuano and came up with “Kasadyaan”, and so it was renamed, and the rest is history.

Of course, every “fiest” has to have a “theme” and this year's theme for Kasadyaan was “Have Wings Will Fly!” Well, at least that's better than the fierce rival school's (now we all know who it is!) meaningless “Descending into Greatness.” What! With this theme, I expected a lot of winged costumes and I wasn't disappointed. Still, I expected a lot of birds; but as these pictures show, what we got were mostly butterflies. Perhaps the kids at FU just prefer to think of themselves as colorful insects.

No festival would be complete without a beauty contest and a queen, and this year's winner of the “Hara sa FU” title was the lovely Jay Dawn O. Esparcia, followed by runners-up Rainalyn C. Patajo and Vi Apple C. Galaritta. Poor Vi – her picture was displayed on the bright overhead TV screens under the name “VI APPLE” leading the audience to mutter “six apple? Is that her name?”, but she got her title anyway.

And so to the finish, in Foundation's main campus quadrangle, everyone gathered to see and hear ABS-CBN's rising young star Rodjun Cruz. He was greeted with the appropriate screams from the girls in the audience, screams which only got louder as he sang and danced for them, and he seemed to enjoy the audience as much as they enjoyed him! It would have been a perfect ending, except that the fireworks planned for the final song – a waterfall of fire down the face of the Education building – failed to fire at all, even after several attempts. Well you can't have everything, and what we got from “Kasadyaan” this year was more than enough – it was a “Happy Time” for everyone there….NOUS!*