Thirty years ago, would anyone have dared call a certain Imelda Marcos mad? Forty years ago, who could have conceived of a Cultural Center of the Philippines and built it like a dream – i.e., an impossible feat, a premature fantasy constructed against all odds and political critics? If not madness, was it a stroke of genius?

Friday night, Sept. 11, amid lashing wind and rain, CCP rang up the curtains to unveil a show with the audacious title of “Imelda: Muse and Madness” to celebrate the 40th year of its founding. Earlier in the day, demonstrators braved the wind and rain to denounce the event as a shameless throwback to Marcosian times, comparing Ferdinand to Adolf and wondering why CCP had to mark the former’s birthday when neo-Nazis don’t bother to celebrate Hitler’s.

In the crowd – but where were Madame’s Blue Ladies? – I spotted a lady who friends say spent close to US$500,000 during the Martial Law years in the ‘70s to help bring down the “conjugal dictatorship” by publishing a weekly newspaper in New York for the consumption of Filipinos, Fil-Ams, as well as American opinion makers and lawmakers. The newspaper thrived for a little over a year before its owner was forced to shut it down for lack of revenues.

So when I saw her applauding the show and overheard her telling her companions how “gorgeous” Madame IRM looked with her jeweled collar of white diamonds entwined with colored stones, I was forced to ask her, with just a bit of sarcasm in my voice, “Shouldn’t you be outside with the demonstrators?”

With a look that seemed to say, “Do you think I’m mad also?” she delivered a mini-speech which I found laudable, considering the abruptness of my question. In essence, she said it was only proper that “credit be duly given” to someone who had made sure that the “soul of the people was fed” with music and the arts. She continued, “In the last two years, since I had an open-heart surgery, I have devoted my time to helping sick people, in the course of which I have had to go to the Kidney Center, the Lung Center, the Heart Center. She built those Centers. If she had not done so, what would we have today?” (More on Thursday)