Baggage? Check.

Somewhere someone said that other than having two characters, the featured works of Set B or Pas de Deux of Virgin Labfest 6 shared nothing in common. In my reading there seemed to be. But before the blogging, I had to clarify "pas de deux". I knew it's something related to ballet (there are many French terms in ballet), and "deux" meant two (known to me courtesy of an Eighties soap commercial "une chantal, deux daphne, trois solange"). For quick fact check, Wikipedia.

Beyond the obvious two-character set-up of Pas de Deux - Higit Pa Dito (Allan Lopez), Collector's Item (Juliene Mendoza), Ondoy (Remi Velasco) - the narratives all had "baggage". The resulting communicative behavior around it BFF Eon splendidly fleshed out here.

With this set, I had a different kind of difficulty. Each story had something that spoke about and poked at my own past. If previous sets drained me emotionally like sharp jabs, this was a precise slash at the jugular.

I may be walking cliche, I have had my own son-to-mother moment - strange, it concerned my father, and much stranger, my mom also had an upright piano (Aray!). In high school, I was the oppressed nerd in one peer group, and an oppressor of nerdier nerds of another. Later, I'd also see myself in the unenviable role of wallflower friend cleaning up wreckages of others, unspoken adoration included (Aray! deux fois). In more recent past, in the domesticity I've co-created with my partner, we've had our share of ugly confrontations made uglier by economic strife. Yes, even the deal-breaker rhetoric.

As in pas de deux, two people will eventually reach a "coda", a finale that brings each other again face to face. What now? In VLF6 Set B, three options were offered: rearrange and start anew; sever and "kill"; or continue engagement (ugly or otherwise) until either first or second option become necessary. Truth being far stranger, real-life pas de deux does not resolve in one act.