TENDU (tahn – DIU) – “stretched”; a basic ballet movement where the leg is extended straight out from the supporting leg with the foot fully pointed. It can be done forward, sideward, or backward. Master choreographer George Balanchine considered it the most important exercise in ballet.

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More women are invading men’s turf.

The coolest proof I’ve seen of this recently is Hanna Roa, one of the snare drummers of the De La Salle University’s pep squad during the UAAP Season 67 opening ceremonies last July 10 at the Araneta Coliseum.

She was an instant standout; the former cheerleader who used to dance to the beat now makes the beat where even men dance to.

Doesn’t it just warm you to your toes in seeing that a lot more women now think out of their pretty pink boxes and do things that were once thought of as exclusive to men?

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UST students can be really embarrassing sometimes.

I know good manners and right conduct are not really taught in UST, but that is because it is assumed that college students already know how to behave appropriately in certain places and occasions, like when watching a play.

I recently watched one in La Consolacion College in Mendiola, along with other grade-hungry Thomasians of varying levels and colleges. Some of them apparently didn’t know that they should behave during the course of the play.

These people who kept talking must be really smart to be able to discern a play while talking with their seatmates at the same time. Or maybe their seatmates were all blind and deaf, thus they had to give each other the loud blow-by-blow account of what was happening on the stage five meters away. Or maybe the stage was especially built for people in farther seats to notice something remotely funny about anything else in the auditorium besides the play itself.

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The play was nothing impressive. But what if it’s something grander, like a Tchaikovsky ballet or a philharmonic concert?

I do not wish to curb anybody’s right to expression. Performing artists need to gauge the audience’s reactions, but I didn’t think they appreciate it when people laugh their heads off or talk loudly during particularly heavy and climactic scenes.

I’m also worried that an appalling behavior like that can affect how Thomasians would seem to other people, and how, we are alarmingly near to being branded as tacky or jologs.

Professors who assign their students to watch plays should teach them proper theater behavior.

I don’t think that by UST’s quadricentennial celebrations in 2011, we would want to be called, “UST, Asia’s oldest jologs university…”

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Congratulations to the UST Journalism Society for a well-attended acquaintance party last July 10 at the QC Sports Club. The food and the company were great.

Congratulations also to Ma’am Eggie (Eugenia Duran-Apostol) for being given the very first UP Gawad Plaridel Award for the media. I’ve always feared she would eventually be turned into our own version of those “dotty dear things” in England: aging women who are fawned over and adored, but never taken seriously. Judging from the nature of the award, she was treated seriously; and I’m glad.

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