Ruben and Janet Nepales: Joined together by love and creative passion

Ruben and Janet Nepales. Photo by Hydee Abrahan, make-up by Rod Alcover, hair by Willy Lacap, and Janet's terno by Oliver Tolentino

“Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.” – Rainer Maria Rilke

Ruben and Janet Nepales exchanged vows at the Albertson’s wedding chapel on Wilshire, under an arch of fake flowers and a stained curtain. Despite the simple and somewhat tacky venue, the uncommon richness and high notes of their true love was undeniable on that special day.

That fateful August day

“I wrote my marriage proposal to my wife Janet on a publicity still of ‘The Muppets Take Manhattan’ that shows the glamorous porcine diva and her beloved getting married.  Janet has always loved Miss Piggy (I wonder why). Flash-forward to many years later [Nov. 2011] and suddenly, we had a chance to interview Miss P and Kermit about their new movie, ‘The Muppets.’ I asked Janet to bring the still so we can show it to the couple. She carefully took out the photo from a page of our wedding album,” Ruben narrated in his Philippine Daily Inquirer column (Nov. 26, 2011).

In their wedding album, Ruben wrote The Wedding, on August 1985:  ”During the exchange of vows, as we held each other’s right hand, I recited every word, every promise, looking straight into Janet’s eyes and giving her my most loving smile.  She sensed the magic of that moment too for she responded with equal awe and conviction.  For one brief shining moment, there was just the two of us. (En route to dinner [at the Castaways] she would whisper to me how that moment gave her goose bumps.  Ah, love – it transcends tacky things.)”

“Then we stepped out into Wilshire Boulevard, still ablaze with the golden sunshine even at past seven in the evening. ‘Imagine if I were in a wedding gown,’ Janet laughed. That won’t be so strange, we said. In Las Vegas, we saw newlyweds in their fineries queuing in lines or strolling casually, high-heeled shoes in hand, on the strip,” Ruben further recounted in The Wedding.

On their way to Castaway in Burbank for the reception, Ruben was probably feeling warm and fuzzy as he romantically wrote:

“I was right. In time, we were climbing up a road carved on a mountain. Charming Baguio came to mind. The golf course’s greens softened the arid state of the surrounding hills. There was a light on each of the palm trees lining the route. Then The Castaway was in view. We were led to the terrace for cocktails before dinner. The view of LA and Burbank was breathtaking. The twinkling lights became more dazzling as it got darker into the night. On our right, the sun has set but it left several hues of fiery gold in the horizon. It was time for drinks and a toast. Janet and I knew the night was going to end beautifully. Then there was a bonus spectacle to an already grand view: a vapor trail left by a rocket in the vast, starry skies.

God is wonderful.

Yes, we’ll have an interesting story to tell our children and grandchildren.”

Fast forward to the present

Watch them in red carpet events at the Golden Globes, Hollywood movie premieres, at home with their family, attending friends’ parties, pictorials with LA’s photographers, even a Mother’s Day breakfast at La Maison du Pain, you can sense Janet and Ruben’s genuine and grounded personalities.

Their love for writing is continuously reflected in the insights and lessons that they glean from their interview subjects — allowing them to have a constant wellspring of joy, like thriving spiritual millionaires.

“God made things happen for us,” Janet said, while Ruben affirmed how wonderful God was (and still is) to them.

Both have earned their place in the scheme of things, each having spent thirty-something years in their respective writing careers.

Both are members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, with Ruben on the governing board. He was recently named a finalist in the National Entertainment Journalism awards, given by the Los Angeles Press Club in the USA. He also received the Most Outstanding Alumni Award in Media from the Faculty of Arts and Letters of the University of Santo Tomas in the Philippines. His Philippine Inquirer column appears three times each week.  Ruben is also a contributing editor for Balikbayan Magazine.

Janet has received accolades as the Journalist of the Year Award from Celebrity Chronicle and Outstanding MultiMedia Alumni Award from Quezon City High School, where she was the valedictorian of her class.  She has columns in Philippine News, Manila Bulletin, OK!Philippines Magazine, Female Network.com, Balikbayan Magazine and Candy Magazine. She also serves as a television correspondent for GMA-7 network in the Philippines.

Both have gained an international fan base.  Ruben’s column was rated highest read by 7,000+ readers globally last year. Janet garnered a loyal following from her stories about the Twilight stars and stars in Hollywood.

You would think they would stop and say we have done enough. But Janet says she has not done enough yet. “I want to help young people, especially Filipino-Americans who are being forced, pressured by parents to take up law, medicine, accounting. The parents say that the artistic courses are not academic enough. When we interviewed Camille Mana, she finished an Economics degree in UC Berkeley in three years, and then, took up acting, which is her first love. She wished she had supportive parents.  Now, she is doing a play, where she is the lead actress, chosen to play Asuncion, by Jesse Eisenberg of the Social Network.”

A fun day of photos, memories and milestones

Janet and Ruben greeted us with warm hugs when we got to their high-rise unit for an interview. Rodrigo Alcover, who is known to his clients as the Van Gogh of make-up artists, did Janet’s make-up for the photo shoot.

Minutes later, one of LA’s finest and ace photographers, Hydee Ursolino Abrahan joined us for the much-awaited pictorial.  Hydee planned certain images of downtown skyscrapers and intentionally delayed it to capture the afternoon glow and the perimeter lights which flood the floors of the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall of the Los Angeles Music Center.

And while we’re in the thick of things, preparing for the shoot and exchanging stories at the same time, tales of Ruben and Janet’s first years, as a couple in the United States, resurfaced. Not only that, it became a narrative of their long and colorful journey as immigrants to America.

Janet described their first art acquisition as a couple: a stone sculpture of a mother balancing and playing with a girl on her legs, while this girl supported another girl on her back.  As serendipity would have it, two girls, Bianca Nicole and Rafaella Angelica, were born to Janet and Ruben, symbolic of their prosperous union.

Next to this art piece is a gift from Nicole and Rafaella for Ruben and Janet’s 25th wedding anniversary. Janet and Ruben shared that they both cried for their 25th renewal, affirming that their mutual love still fires them up, while celebrating their collective resilience of enduring hardships and adversities, when they were new immigrants then.

Janet and Ruben recalled their hard times, when Ruben had to take the bus from one seedy neighborhood to another, running fast to stay away from the crime elements of the neighborhood.  Janet did the same, wearing her fashionably designed clothes from the Philippines, taking the bus from work to where they lived downtown.  At that time, semi-decent housing existed in that part of town.  Janet recalled crying on her first night in their apartment.

Today, they live in a high-rise unit, surrounded by a music school, an art gallery, restaurants nearby, a cathedral, several ethnic landmarks, and of course Disney Hall nearby, where they can just walk to attend live concerts.  Their hard work has paid off, two well-educated girls, first in a private Catholic high school, then, a private art institute for Rafaella, and Nikki at a California’s top ranking public university.

Rafaella’s award of 3.6 GPA last semester is prominently displayed on a shelf.  Nikki recently graduated with honors with a Bachelor’s of Science degree, majoring in public health and a minor in Public Policy and Global Poverty and Practice.  She teaches children with special needs at a Los Angeles Charter School, while pursuing her Master’s Degree in Education.  Both Janet and Ruben share their pride about their children, particularly their abilities to write and to be articulate,  while courageously going after their dreams, a lesson perhaps the two girls learned from their parents who love their craft for writing.

A conversation with Janet and Ruben

Asian Journal (AJ): You are both successful writers. How have you negotiated your marriage to allow you to be fully together, without giving up parts of yourself?

Ruben: It is a partnership, a teamwork, [and we’re] fortunate to be in the same field.  Danger is to have competition, [which is] natural.  Somehow we got into an agreement, a compromise – who is going to break the story with the talent, say Daniel Radcliffe [of Harry Potter, now The Women in Black]. Darren Criss succeeded him in a year’s run of a Broadway play.  If I got to ask the question, and the angle is on the Filipino-American that succeeded him, then, I write the story.

Janet: We divide up the scoops before hand. We choose the different angles for the story, if in fashion, [I say], can I have that quote.  For example, OK Philippines is two months ahead so this interview with Twilight stars would be mine, while another interview closer to the film’s showing will be Ruben’s.  We have different styles, we can’t copy each other. He presents his personality based on his readers. For me, I slant it towards my readers too.

Ruben: I do not shy away from women’s issues. We do not restrain or inhibit ourselves. If we want to write about it, we go ahead. When we are done with our pieces, we can read each other’s work, not before. Only after we are both done can we edit.

AJ: How do you tell each other the most minute, so-called microscopic truth?

Ruben: We do not have a problem about communication. I preface it, “Sweet, huwag kang magagalit.”

Janet: When Ruben says that, I have to set my emotions aside and hear it from his perspective. I was raised in a very competitive family. I was in grade school playing a game with those in high school and we played against each other. I competed in spelling, arts and declamation and of course, my father graduated valedictorian in Quezon City High School. I have to compete with that also.

Ruben: I realized that. So I told her there is no more competition in this part of your life. You can relax now.

Janet: Even as a mother, I could not understand why [my children] are friends with their competition.  I was not friends with my competition in high school.

AJ: How do you nurture and sustain a consistent life of positive energy and joy?

Ruben: We were both raised well.  Externally, you know what is true. What makes us grounded is we do not see ourselves as part of the stars in Hollywood. We get to know the stars, as human beings, just like you and me, but out in the public. So, the more we meet them, they become more and more human, and [we are no longer] in awe. For years, we were star-struck, until we realized they are human beings too.  We do not delude ourselves [that] we are part of Hollywood.

Janet: I am an actress in my own way. I enjoy the pictorial.  I enjoy dressing up. And then, back to doing the laundry, the trash, the cooking, picking up the kids.  “Look like a doll, work like a horse.” We believe in human beings and we donot highlight the flaws – we highlight the good in the person.

Ruben: I write about what I’m interested in, what my readers are interested in. I keep that perspective coming from the outside.

AJ: Your creative lives must have been shaped by a series of defining moments and successive choices – please elaborate.

Janet: In high school, I realized I want to be a journalist for life, interviewing people, getting to know them, writing about them, enjoying them.  I had a public relations teacher (Bettina Olmedo) who said to the class, “I will throw my hat to anyone who becomes a journalist here, no one in this class will become a journalist.”  I accepted that challenge, it never left my mind.

I got my writing skills from my dad, Vicente Rodriguez. He also cooks, sews, embroiders, dances,  [he is] a poet, a ghost writer, an orator, a carpenter, a champion badminton player, a champion basketball coach, and a jack of all trades.  Bottomline, he can learn anything. He went to school with Ninoy Aquino, same batch in UP Diliman.

Today, I love talking to kids in high school and college, I tell them visualize it, say it, it becomes true, my dreams here became true: I have a happy family, a good husband, good travels, good health and peace of mind. I keep telling my daughters to aim for what you love, money will follow, same way for the person you love.

Ruben: In grade school, I pretended [that] I was a newsreporter.  I was in fifth grade. I made up stories, wrote them and passed it on to friends in class.  My parents wanted me to be a doctor, [but] they did not impose it.  I wanted to be a journalist and they went along with that.  My mom, Socorro Viado Nepales wanted to be a journalist, but became a teacher instead.  I got my writing skills from her.

Legacies

When this writer asked Ruben about his legacy, he humbly demurred, “It is too early to talk about legacies. When I hear from readers [that we make them proud] it makes me feel [that] we are doing something right.  Hard work is involved.  For example, we had a busy work week: Asian Journal wanted an interview, I had a medical appointment, a Mahler technical rehearsal to go to, one can simply give up.  But, as a writer, Mahler is a historic concert [Gustavo Dudamel conducted 820 singers and 120 musicians to perform Mahler Symphony #8, “Symphony of a Thousand”, Part I, Veni creator spiritus and Part II, Final Scene of Goethe’s Faust, Part II], I have to make an effort to do it, sometimes to get up at 3am to cover the Oscars’ nominations, to be able to tell a story, and after, all is worth it, like today, a good pictorial.

This is not a George Lucas film, nor a teleserye from The Filipino Channel. Instead, it is the magical, but true-to-life story of the enduring love and marriage of Ruben and Janet Nepales — a partnership anchored on true love and unwavering passion. It is a story big enough to last for legacies to come, a fate that will be forever written in the stars.