Pinoy Christmas Party

Last night I attended Aimee's company Christmas party. This party was quite different than what I'm used to from a Canadian Christmas party. At the office Christmas parties I've attended in Canada there's usually dinner, drinks, some hired entertainment and various speeches thanking the staff for all the hard work they did that year. This recent Filipino Christmas party had the speeches, the food and the entertainment but in this case, the entertainment wasn't hired, it was supplied by the staff.

The staff were broken into 7 teams and each team had to put on their own show. The shows could be singing, dancing, acting ... basically anything. The shows were judged and the 3 top teams would win cash prizes. This year the judges were management (Aimee and her family) and special guests (myself and two others). Now imagine yourself being a judge for a Filipino variety show. It's really not that easy when you think about it. I don't understand the language so anything involving spoken comedy won't work on me. Anything that involves Filipino pop culture like current to old television shows will also make no sense to me. So I was at a bit of a disadvantage as a judge in this competition. Judging was organized this way: Creativity 30%, Originality 30%, Costumes 30%, and Audience Impact 10%. So the competition started. Each team put together a 20 minute show. I won't bore you (or excite you for that matter) with the details but it was pretty much what I thought: all in tagalog, and all cultural references I didn't understand. So I had to judge on how the entertainment effected me even without understanding most of it. Most of the employees are men so cross-dressing seemed to be quite common among all the team's shows. One team did a spoof on "Deal Or No Deal" (finally, some pop culture I understand), and all the 'beautiful models' were men in dresses. One team did a beauty pageant, once again, men in dresses. There was even a cheerleader team, once again men in dresses only this time, miniskirts. Pretty much every team had at least one man in a dress. So finally all 7 teams performed and it was time for us judges fill out the points. I added up my points and based on that picked my 3 top teams. I was happy to see that my Team 1, and Team 2 ended up being the winners with the other judges as well. Oddly though, my last team ended up being Team 3 with the other judges. I actually thought their performance was terrible. But hey, I'm a Canadian, I didn't understand the language nor the cultural references, so maybe Team 3 really was that good. To me though, I just didn't get it!

Being a confused judge is a perfect way to start off the holiday season!