Make it a rule—Your Sunday is sacred

Why the seventh day of the week is all-important for life-of-the-party, ever energetic, always fun Odette Pumaren

BY AA PATAWARAN

Jan 18, 2025 08:18 AM

  

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AT A GLANCE

• ‘I associate Sundays with my mom’s famous kare kare and salmon sinigang.’

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Odette Pumaren wears many hats. She’s one you’d like to run into at parties because she is always oozing with energy and style. One glance, whether she is a friend or not, and you know she’s fun. She’s also girl boss, VP at Luminax, a company involved in design and construction, particularly of sports facilities, where she is in charge of business development and strategic partnerships. But of all the hats she wears, she is most happy wearing that of a family woman, wife and life partner to basketball hero and Quezon City representative Franz Pumaren and mother of three, Luigi, Nico, and Maxine. It’s a role she cherishes the most, what she considers her proudest life work, so even now that her children are all grown, raised to be independent, always able to stand their own, Odette sees to it that they continue to strengthen their bonds and make more family memories, if only on Sundays when they are all most available. This is why, to Odette, Sunday is sacred. “Having a busy family means less time to connect,” she says. “So I really look forward to being with them on Sunday, sharing stories about their experiences over the week.” 

TOKYO DRIFT Traveling with the family is one thing of Odette's favorite things

 

What is your idea of a perfect Sunday?

It would be a day spent catching up with my family after a long work week. 

 

Best word to describe Sunday

Sacred 

 

LAZY AFTERNOON In Amsterdam

 

Book you recommend as a Sunday read

Daily devotions like Jesus Calling by Sarah Young  

 

Best Sunday companion

The best Sunday companion is always the family, with whom to reconnect and recharge. But, aside from family, if I could be with someone I’d really like to meet on a Sunday, it would be Michelle Obama. I have always admired and looked up to her. 

 

DREAM UPON THE SKYLINE In Hong Kong by Victoria Harbor

 

What is the most extravagant thing you could think of having or doing on a Sunday? 

It would be traveling. My family and I enjoy traveling to new places, trying different cuisines, and exploring new cultures.  

 

What would be the perfect topic for Sunday brunch conversation? 

Having a busy family means less time to connect, so I really look forward to being with them on Sunday, sharing stories about their experiences over the week. Most of the time we talk about politics. 

 

SUNBEAMS AND PRAYERS In Florence

 

Best movie or series that once made your Sunday

Currently, it’s Nobody Wants This, the romcom starring Adam Brody as a newly single rabbi and Kristen Bell as a cynical sex podcaster. I’m a hopeless romantic.

 

A quotable quote about Sunday that’s made for you

I can do everything through Him who gives me strength. —Philippians 4:13

 

ON THE DANUBE Sailing in Budapest, with the magnificent Hungarian Parliament Building behind her

 

What does “wear your Sunday best” mean to you?

Sunday best means exactly what it does. It’s about putting your best foot forward, taking the time to honor the day, whether it’s through personal style or the significance of the activities planned. 

 

If you were to write a book about the Sundays of your life, what would be the title? 

Sunday Kind of Love

 

BEACH NIGHTS In Boracay on a sultry evening

 

Best Sunday ever in your memory

The best Sunday is whenever our family, including my parents and siblings, also nephews and nieces are complete. It’s always nice when, complete as a family, we hear mass together, especially since everyone is busy working during the week. The best Sunday ever is really about just taking the time to catch up and unwind together with the people you love the most. 

 

IF YOU CAN MAKE IT THERE In New York

 

Worst Sunday in your life

The worst Sunday is when a family member is ill. 

 

CENTRAL PARK New York in autumn

 

If Sunday were a flavor, what would this flavor be?

I associate Sundays with my mom’s famous kare kare and salmon sinigang. 

 

TROMP L'OEIL In Lyon, the second most populous city in France

 

Where in the world would you like to be next Sunday, if you can just go there by magic?

I would transport myself to Paris.

Why would James Bond want his martini shaken, not stirred?

And why would you? A martini masterclass at Spritz

BY AA PATAWARAN

Jan 14, 2025 00:18 AM

  

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AT A GLANCE

• Martinis are the only American invention as perfect as a sonnet. —H. L. Mencken 

 

Images IAN SANTOS

Does James Bond really like his martini shaken, not stirred? Maybe if he prefers his martini cloudy, aerated, and diluted. Traditionalists like their martini, a mix of gin and vermouth in its simplest, truest form, stirred for 45 seconds. 

 

Kyle Ley

 

There are other myths surrounding martini, prompted maybe by its uncertain origins, often attributed to the Martinez cocktail, a mix of Old Tom gin, sweet vermouth, maraschino liqueur, and bitters, crafted in California for a miner traveling to or from Martinez in California.  

Sebastian Fernandez and Daniel Obrado

 

Arrun Bhavnani and Antonio Ressano

 

Tricia Centenera and Mexican consul Octavio Vara

Winston Churchill, for instance, who was believed to like his martini without the vermouth, drank neither martini nor gin. But well, who doesn’t love a good martini? Holly Golightly did, who held it in her gloved hand at a house party in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, so did Jackie O and Frank Sinatra. Let’s not forget Sugar Kane, the Marilyn Monroe character, who makes martinis in a hot water bottle aboard a train in Some Like It Hot, mixing comedy with cocktails.

 

Rocio Olbes, Monique Madsen, and Ria Prieto

 

AFTER PARTY Spritz has become the pregame and postgame hotspot in Manila 

And so when Spritz, the pregame and afterparty hotspot on Toledo corner L.P. Leviste Streets at Salcedo Village in Makati City, sent an invitation to a masterclass on martini, I signed up with enthusiasm, especially as Spritz owner and cocktail master Kyle Ley, who sneaked out of his parents’ company at the Peninsula Lobby and managed to get a cocktail out of The Bar when he was at the ripe old age of 10, was going to conduct it.

 

US consul Tyler Johnson, Isabel Francisco, and Katie Stuntz

 

Chinkee Koppe, Pepper Teehankee, Isabel Francisco, and the author

 

In the perfect martini, according to Kyle, simplicity reigns supreme, but it’s a craft that requires mastery, such as, he points out, “in the seamless pour—a single glistening stream, flowing gracefully from vessel to glass, reminiscent of fine wine being decanted.” 

 

At Spritz, martini, using two distinct types of London dry gin sourced from Italy is an artful creation. “The Spritz martini stands out for its bone-dry precision, meticulously crafted with the freshest vermouth that elevates every sip,” says Kyle. “It’s uniquely aged in amphora to impart a rich complexity and finished with a house-cured olive to give it an artisanal touch.”

 

Chinkee Koppe and Angelo Comsti

 

Shauna Popple-Williams, Indu Vimmi Badlani, and Bianca Syching

 

More than a drink, the martini is an experience, enhanced by each element, from ingredient selection to presentation. It really is the drink to toast with on any occasion, gender-neutral, simple yet complex, flexible, and easy to drink, perfect for Bette Davis and Queen Elizabeth or Ernest Hemingway and Humphrey Bogart, even the fictional character Homer Simpson, and most certainly for you.

 

Ines Tambunting and Louie Alviedo

 

Paco Cojuangco and Alexandra Lisbona Cojuangco

 

Chase Crewdson and Matt Williams

 

In pop culture, its status is legendary. Its appeal is timeless, associated forever with sophistication, power, and style.

 

Cheers to the perfect martini!

Are you happy? Or sad? Or both

When emotions, good and bad, come simultaneously and you are crying and laughing at the same time

BY AA PATAWARAN

Nov 27, 2024 12:45 PM

  

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AT A GLANCE

• Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried. —Megan Devine, It’s OK that You’re Not OK 

 

Sometimes, I don’t know if I’m well.

 

It’s not about looking A-OK when you are rotting away inside. I feel good and bad at the same time on some days that I get confused which is which. 

 

When I was younger, I thought it was because I was writing all the time, expressing myself, and I have no problem discussing my personal life the way I would discuss the apartheid or the Holocaust or an impending zombie apocalypse. It is also the reason I have never ever in my life needed a shoulder to cry on, or so I think. But I usually keep my troubles to myself, sharing them only when it’s appropriate, never quite to vent off or release the pressure, but by way of conversation, which really is my ice breaker, unskilled as I am in the art of small talk, so I get to talk beyond the weather or appearances or the freshness of the floral centerpieces at a party, even with strangers, as long as they are as open as I am.

 

When Jo Malone, for instance, was launched in Manila, we were at Blackbird’s airy, bright dining room with the noonday streaming sunbeams in through the picture windows, and, well, it was a fashionista event blathering with fashion statements. But by the time dessert was served, I was surrounded by all these girls, the most beautiful in the room, and we were deep in conversation over champagne. No, we weren’t talking about wood sage and sea salt, English pear and freesia, blue agava and cacao, or nutmeg and ginger on this good day, we were talking about depression and suicide and how hard it was to be lonely or worried or terrified for no or all reasons. 

 

Either I am in full control of my emotions or I am an emotional wreck that has yet to be diagnosed, not that I am a stranger to psychology. I saw a psychiatrist, no less than the head of the psychiatry department at St. Luke’s, for a whole year when I was in my teens, but even she, the late great Dr. Lourdes Lapuz, did not give me any diagnostic label as much as my friends did or still do, who would so easily, as if they had a master’s in psychology, call me an overthinker or self-indulgent with feelings of loneliness or oversensitive or reeling from generational trauma. 

 

Nor did Dr. Lapuz prescribe any meds for me, which she did for my younger brother, who was seeing her at the same time. And yet, throughout my life, I feel I have been searching for answers I cannot even pin down, whether through philosophy or meditation or religion or history.

 

The truth is I suspect I am happy. I am at home in this world, where I have found many friends and a place I can call my own. Recently, at a dinner for my book club, The Very Extra Book Club, which has four Scorpios, including me, among its members, the others being Nix Alañon, Jae de Veyra-Pickrell, and Stephanie Zubiri, I raised the question: Would you rather cry in a Rolls-Royce or in a trike and is there difference? I raise the idea of being Scorpio because Scorpios are often described as intense, intuitive, and deeply emotional, but I can say the same thing of our other non-Scorpio members Pauline Juan, Rajo Laurel, Rocio Olbes, Marielle Santos-Po, and Farah Mae Sy, who would know that crying in a Rolls-Royce or in a trike is a statement on the universality of anguish. The Very Extra Book Club, especially before the pandemic, which put our mental health under grave assault, has neither been afraid of life’s most terrifying truths nor most terrible lies. We have always faced up to the most unsettling questions literature raises about life. 

 

In a way this is me—I’ve never been protective of my psyche or my soul or my heart. I read everything, including trash. I would watch the most depressing film, if it means washing my soul of it after with something uplifting the way I read Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull after immersing myself in Gabriel García Márquez’s 100 Years of Solitude and its disturbingly comic, senses-grating, soul-moving magic realism. I am drawn to people who have as great potential to hurt me as to love me or even to people who cannot love me but whose presence in my life I treasure. As a teenager, though I was 150 percent loved and though I love people, I resonated with Morrisey’s contempt for people in The Smiths’ classic “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.”        

 

But I guess self-awareness is no antidote to the deep lows of life and, in recent years, now that I am older, the blows are more personal, more damaging. And yet I still walk the earth with a spring in my step. And yet I still break into dance even as I am harboring a broken heart. And yet my heart sings to desperate songs like Måneskin’s cover of “Beggin.’” And yet I love some people as much as I hate them, or I love them even as I see through their lies, their machinations, their contempt, their indifference.   

 

Life is hard, that’s true, a bed of roses full of wounding, deadly thorns. I want to be happy 100 percent. Impossible, I know, but I think it’s all a matter of perspective. I can be 10 percent happy. It’s just 10 percent, but if I should focus on the 10 percent, without being blind to the rest of the equation, I should realize I am happy anyway.

Slow Sunday mornings with a Schnoodle

If she could, brand strategist and creative consultant Monique Madsen would invite Martha Stewart over for more Martha hacks and home tips.

BY AA PATAWARAN

Nov 9, 2024 09:36 AM 

AT A GLANCE

• ‘Honestly, after traveling and a few hectic weeks lately, I just want to be at home with my family.’

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THE SUNDAY DRILL

SUNDAY COMFORT Monique Madsen lounging at home in a Natori kaftan

I met Monique Madsen in the middle of nowhere, on the high seas of Hong Kong, aboard the Genting Dream, a 151,300-ton, 335-meter-long, 40-meter-wide, and 18-deck-tall dream of a cruise ship run by Dream Cruises out of the former British colony.  

A former editor and associate publisher, Monique is now an entrepreneur, running her own consulting company Modeme as a brand strategist and creative director specializing in personal branding, marketing, digital branding, and social media services.

She’s a true-blue city girl, even in the 18 years she spent discovering the world, making a place for herself in cities like Copenhagen and Shanghai. While she has more control of her time now that she has her own company, Monique is still in love with downtime, treasuring every opportunity to sit back and relax, to live life at a pace that doesn’t anymore involve running in heels. She enjoys dining out with friends, doting on her three-year-old schnoodle, and consuming copious amounts of black coffee if it isn’t happy hour.

BRUNCHTIME With her schnoodle Malthe and her bestfriend, Argentinian consul Fabricio Sordoni

What is your idea of a perfect Sunday?
A very slow morning! I have slow mornings daily as I wake up quite early, but on Sundays, it’s very relaxing to know I can sleep in if I want to.

 

Best Sunday ever in your memory.
Going to the park with my dog Malthe with friends and their dogs too, then heading to Wildflour for brunch or going to the Sunday market together at Salcedo Village. It’s always a leisurely brunch or a late lunch with friends.

 

Best word to describe Sunday.
Slow!

PERK ME UP Wake up to the smell of coffee

Book you would recommend as a Sunday read
I’m not reading a book right now, but on Sunday mornings I love having my coffee while reading “Modern Love” articles in The New York Times before browsing news headlines.

 

What is the most extravagant thing you could think of having or doing on a Sunday? 
I love tinkering around my home, whether tending to my plants, editing my closet, or doing the laundry! It’s the kind of downtime I rarely have these days as I usually end up still socializing on a Sunday.

 

What would be the perfect topic for Sunday brunch conversation? 
I love Sunday brunches with my friends— it’s the best! Conversations span from random everyday things, recent trips, dating anecdotes to more serious subjects like politics, life goals, and career plans.

MARKET DAY Sunday morning a the Salcedo Weekend Market

Best movie or series that once made your Sunday
Great Expectations, the 1998 movie with De Niro, Ethan Hawke, Chris Cooper, and Gwyneth Paltrow. I’m a huge Dickens fan, I buy hardbounds of his when I travel. I know movie versions are usually disappointing but this one is really good. I cried buckets, ugly cried, and it felt so good.

 

A quotable quote about Sunday that’s made for you
“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” It’s a Greek proverb, also a line from one of my favorite Netflix series After Life. I love this because I love trees— and on Sundays I love going to the park.

ALL RISE Breakfast with her Sunday Squad, neighbors and expats, from left, Sebástian Fernández, Daniel Obrado,  Monique, Marian Majer, Jozi Grenz, Mitzi Cañafranca, and superdogs Malthe and Pablo

What does “wear your Sunday Best” mean to you?
Loungewear, my Natori robe, or silk pjs, but if I’m going out for a proper brunch—anything in linen and in white.

 

If you were to write a book about the Sundays of your life, what would be the title? 
There’s not enough hours on a Sunday.

PLAYDATE Monique's three-year-old schnoodle Malthe

Best Sunday companion.
My dog Malthe. I love snuggles in the couch and long, off-leash walks in the park with him. If I could invite someone I find most intriguing, I’d invite Martha Stewart over for sure. Sundays are an errand day and I can never have enough Martha life hacks, like how to get stubborn stains out of my whites, how to store wool and cashmere in this weather, and how to make a mean espresso martini to sip in between chores. I think my dad is the best Sunday companion too. He is the most interesting person to me. He’s a well-read, He’s an early riser who walks two hours every morning and reads up on everything, whether current events or politics or history. He is so old-school and it’s simply refreshing to get the point of view of someone who’s off social media.

 

Best Sunday in your life.
It was with an amazing ex-boyfriend, apples, and coffee, telling stories, and laughing in bed.

 

Worst Sunday in your life.
Well, I’m 41. There’s been quite a few Sundays spent recovering from hangovers due to regrettable nightouts and one too many glasses of mixed drinks.

WHO LET THE DOGS OUT These dogs, meeting in the park, love Sundays too

If Sunday were a flavor, what would this flavor be?
Avocado toasts for brunch. Better yet, eggs Benedict, black coffee, and more black coffee

Where in the world would you like to be next Sunday, if you can just go there by magic?
Honestly, after traveling and a few hectic weeks lately, I just want to be at home with my family.