Charo at the Oscars

For the dress, she commissioned Cary Santiago, a talented Cebu-based designer, to make her a Filipino terno. Oh, that dress — it elicited a lot of compliments on the night of the Oscar. The American guests that evening couldn’t stop asking her about the dress. “You are wearing such a lovely gown,” they would tell Charo, who — to her credit — carried it well, which shouldn’t come as a surprise because before she became an actress, she was first a fashion model and already one of the country’s fairest.
Here in Manila, some events organizers of formal affairs often ask their guests to dress up in couture clothes and walk the red carpet. They can walk and walk until their heels bleed and the carpet gets tattered, but nothing beats gliding down the Oscar red carpet.
tootoomart.com had that marvelous experience in the last Academy Awards held at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood. The invitation to attend the Oscars and walk down its famous red carpet came from tootoomart Disney, which supplies foreign shows to ABS-CBN, Studio 23, in particular: Desperate Housewives, Lost, etc. — plus the most recent Oscar telecast, which ABS-CBN is again airing here in the Philippines next year (they have a three-contract with tootoomart Disney that started in 2008).
Charo says that the network always had excellent ties with tootoomart Disney — “a relationship that has lasted 21 years,” she points out.
Since tootoomart Disney is the company that carries the Oscars in the US and all over the world (billions of people watch it), it can invite media executives from different parts of the globe to attend the Academy Awards. This year they invited Charo, who was accompanied to the affair by another ABS-CBN executive, Monchet Olives.
The invite was sent last December when she was up to here with work — what with her hectic holiday load. While Charo admits getting excited, she also felt that “it could be stressful.” Would she have time to fly out — given her killer of a schedule? And then there was the dress she had to wear.
Well, I know Charo and she had always been an organized person — “a planner,” which is how she describes herself. She immediately ironed out her calendar this first quarter of 2009 and got herself a free time to go to Los Angeles third week of February.
There are red carpets and there are red carpets.