On her 18th birthday party tomorrow, March 19, Julia Montes will have one of today’s hottest young actors, Coco Martin, as an escort.

Her choice has everyone guessing or asking the fate of Enchong Dee, her ex-flame who recently has allegedly been courting her again.

“But of course he is invited to the party,” Montes said of Dee, whose name press reporters noticed was not one of her ‘18 roses’.
“His name had not been included during the planning since we were not sure about his schedule, so we decided not to place him in the category of ‘18 Roses’. Otherwise we might end up lacking one ‘rose’. ”

Whatever she had said during the recent press conference held for her birthday party, many showbiz scribes believe the non-inclusion of Dee’s name in the list of 18 young men, who will band together to signify 18 roses, is an indication that she has no more plans of reviving their fizzled-out relationship.

The whole setup and programme for Montes’s debut party have been inspired by the scenes in ‘Cinderella’ and Shakespeare’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’.

She said she hopes that this would remind the public how young she still is, despite her essaying mature roles on TV. “Yes, the public has really forgotten that I am just turning 18,” she happily said.

Montes said she is both nervous and excited for her debut party, to be thrown by her mother network ABS-CBN for her, considering that so many people are involved and will be attended by the brightest stars and powerful honchos of the entertainment industry.

She and Martin were together in ‘Walang Hanggan’ ’ (No End), a successful TV drama series that just recently concluded on ABS-CBN, more popularly known as the Kapamilya (One Family) Network.

The actor-model-swimmer Dee is part of ABS-CBN’s Star Magic group of contract artists, and is the younger brother of the actor-model AJ Dee. He is in the cast of the ongoing drama series, ‘Ina, Kapatid, Anak’ (Mother, Sibling, Child).

Born Mara Hautea Schnittka, Montes is of German-Filipino descent. Her German father left her and her mother, a deaf woman living in Pandacan, Manila, when she was little.