My husband, Ben Cabrera, had always been fascinated by people from all backgrounds, mainly as subjects for his photography and paintings. For some years before I met him, he had already established an artist/model relationship with a scavenger in the Tondo squatter area of Manila where he had been brought up. The scavenger’s name was … Continue reading The Octopus Man
TIMES THEY ARE A’CHANGING
“Come mothers and fathers throughout the land And don’t criticize what you don’t understand Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command Your old road is rapidly agin’ Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand For the times they are a-changin’ “ This was the voice … Continue reading TIMES THEY ARE A’CHANGING
IT’S ONLY RITA BEING RITA
(a memoir of an enduring but unlikely friendship) “Who was that?” I asked when, after chatting for over an hour, Joe finally replaced the receiver. I was 19, newly arrived in New York, and had just moved into a studio above Carnegie Hall with a man 25 years my senior, Joseph X Dever, the very … Continue reading IT’S ONLY RITA BEING RITA
THE ORIGINAL IGO-ROCKET MAN
(An Interview with Kidlat Tahimik by Caroline Kennedy) London, November 1980 “And it’s going to be a long, long time Till touchdown brings me home and they’ll find I’m not the man they think I am at home, Oh, no, no, no, I’m the rocket man….” (with apologies to Elton John) Kidlat Tahimik, alias Eric … Continue reading THE ORIGINAL IGO-ROCKET MAN
A Valentine Memory
“Great! That’s it!” Nick Joaquin (aka Quijano de Manila), the Filipino National Artist for Literature clapped his hands. Under the light of the tiffany lamp his eyes sparkled. “That’s it!” he repeated as though we could all read his mind. “What? What’s it?” I asked. We were sitting around the centre table at Los Indios … Continue reading A Valentine Memory
CHILDREN OF PEACE & WAR
An Academic Paper for The University for Peace in Costa Rica - by Caroline Kennedy The first time I became personally involved with “global initiatives” involving theatre was in 1982 when Peace Child International, a British NGO, was conceived in the living room of a friends’ house in Buntingford, Hertfordshire, some fifty miles north of London. “Wouldn’t … Continue reading CHILDREN OF PEACE & WAR
The Letter
There is a letter, quite a long one, in fact. Since I can't show it to you, I shall describe it. It is handwritten, in ballpoint pen, in a sprawling, unfamiliar script, covering both sides of a sheet of graph paper, probably ripped from a child's exercise book. You can see it was written in … Continue reading The Letter
How It All Began
It was in the attic of an old English farmhouse, on a lovely autumn evening in September 1984, that this book had its beginnings. Two years earlier Caroline Kennedy, doing some research for a television film, had arrived at this same house to interview the owner, Pelham Pound. As they talked she found out he … Continue reading How It All Began
Nestled into the lush foothills of the massive southern mountain range overlooking Costa Rica’s Central Valley the ramshackle fortress of El Buen Pastor has obviously fallen on hard times. Not so long ago it was deemed unfit for its current use and condemned for demolition. So further down the road a more modern extension is … Continue reading
The Nuclear Power Plant Fiasco
I am adding this post-script to my article on "The Marcoses and the Missing Filipino Millions" because a couple of the comments I have received question whether the Philippines has a nuclear power plant or not. I was there when Imelda's cousin-in-law Herminio Disini was awarded a huge commission from Westinghouse to build a nuclear … Continue reading The Nuclear Power Plant Fiasco
Caroline Kennedy: My Travels 