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By Rome Jorge, Lifestyle Editor
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Skarlet
Romero with June Cadiz,
professor at the UP College
of Music at Bar Ten O2.
The lady now smiles
after singing the blues away. |
She won Best Jazz Recording Artist and Best
Producer at the 2007 Awit Awards for her highly acclaimed 2006 album
The Powder Room Stories. She is the proprietor and chanteuse of Bar
TEN 02, a bona fide jazz den with Art Deco appeal and mouthwatering
cuisine where jazz, ska, blues, reggae and rock musicians hangout
and jam to the delight audiences. She is the undisputed diva of ska
music, commanding utmost respect from “rude boys” and
“skavengers” as vocalist of the Brownbeat All Stars and Put3ska,
famous for the bouncy ska/punk anthem “Manila Girl.”
She even earns a place in Goth music lore as
lead singer for the seminal group Ardourn Delirium. Famous for being
irrepressible, spirited and bubbly, she is all that and promises
even so much more. Just don’t call her Myra Rauro anymore.
“Just call me Myra. I want Ruaro out of my
life. It insults my daughter, it insults my partner, it insults my
whole being,” she declares.
Skarlet, as she is known today, is also
“Tanya,” the alias for an anonymous account of spousal abuse and
parental betrayal entitled “Living in Fear” written by Jocelyn
de Jesus for the May 2008 issue of Marie Claire magazine.
Producer, restaurateur, artist, icon and mother
at age 38, she finally comes out of the powder room and speaks out
against abuse. Incognito no more, she now testifies as Skarlet. She
dares reveal a side battered black and blue.
The bruising beat
She recounts how she as a 12-year-old girl was
groped and sexually harassed by her brother-in-law and how her
mother hushed the whole matter without indignation or apology. Her
confessional composition entitled “Myawong” from The Powder Room
Stories album narrated the betrayal:
Mother shook her head
How could she accuse me
Of tearing the family apart
Of shredding my sister’s heart
She sealed my lips
And forever looked away
And sadness carved a whole in my heart
I learned never to trust anyone
It’s just me from now on
Taught to silently tolerate such abuse, she went
on endure being battered and humiliated by a boyfriend who made her
into an unwitting courier for his drugs. Having never taken
narcotics herself, she only realized what she was delivering when
she read in a newspaper that one of those that her husband had
regularly asked her to meet was killed in a buy-bust operation.
After enduring being hit with telephone books and being dangled by
her ankles above a stairwell, she finally fled with only the clothes
on her back. However, the pattern of pain set by her mother did not
end with this first relationship.
At age 23, while working at a fine-dining
restaurant belting Broadway and opera songs, she married a
co-worker. What was supposed to be marital bliss turned into a
nightmare of alcohol-fueled abuse. Her husband would punch her and
humiliate her in public during his many bouts of drunken rage.
Again, her mother counseled her to endure the pummeling and be a
dutiful subservient wife. “Please don’t give me more problems in
my old age,” her mother remarked.
Even after the success that she enjoyed with
Put3ska and the bands string of hits, her husband’s abuse
continued. As her musical artistry matured, so did her resolve
harden. She finally broke free from his hold in 1998, the same year
her mother finally apologized to her.
Her maiden solo album as Skarlet completes the
circle of healing. “Cathartics, it is. Some of my songs in the
Powder Room have been in my writings since I was 12-year-old,” she
confides. Today, she is a woman who is empowered and blissful.
To hear Skarlet sing, be it on her album or live
at Bar TEN 02, is to witness a woman craft honesty into art. She
sets an example for her fellow musicians, not only as an
entrepreneurial artist who produces her own albums and owns her own
venue, but also as a woman who pens songs to heal her self and
others as well.
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