Why should one be surprised that when table chatter turns to Ruby Tuason these days, it’s not so much the pork barrel issue that Manila gossip dwells on, but another interesting detail of the socialite’s life?

The plunder case suspect, who asked to turn state witness in the Janet Napoles pork barrel scam, is described by friends as a feisty woman who, when she caught her husband cheating on her, dumped all his stuff on the front yard—including his “Gucci shoes,” a woman friend says—and burned them.

Her hubby, the late Butch Tuason, came home just in time to see the bonfire. But had he come a few minutes earlier, he could have been thrown into the fire, too, the friend adds, in jest.

Over lunch, the friend also recalls, in passing, how Ruby’s sleuthing on her husband’s peccadilloes would crack them up—“like she would stake out the apartment where she believed her husband kept his mistress, and with a megaphone to call out to them!”

Nooo, we all chorus at the table; you must be exaggerating.

No, this female friend swears. “But I learned a lot from her on how to handle a man. She really loved him, and [vice versa]. An interesting love story.”

In the end, her friends say, Ruby was around to attend to her husband’s wake and funeral. While they also point out that Butch was the love of her life, he wasn’t her first husband. She was Mrs. Laygo (she has two sons with him) before she was free to marry Butch in Vegas. (Some friends of Butch’s first wife, however, claim that Butch and his first wife, Vicky Preysler, stayed officially married.)

At that lunch, we also learn that Ruby and her sister Mercedes (who would die of cancer)—their family name is Chan—did well in the late 1980s buying and placing TV ads for the Louie Beltran show “Straight From the Shoulder,” which ran in those years, and media-buying for Nestlé, also in those years.

Butch’s first wife, Vicky Preysler, is the sister of Isabel Preysler, the Manila-born socialite who has become a high-profile celebrity in Europe and a favorite cover of “Hola!” Isabel’s also known as the first wife of Julio Iglesias and the mother of Enrique Iglesias.

Ruby’s friends recall how Julio would hang out with Ruby and Butch whenever he was here in those good old days.

But if Ruby was a fighter for her man, she is also a good homemaker, her friends say. She is a good cook, who’s known for her puttanesca and her prawns in coconut and aligue sauce.

This plunder suspect/state witness/socialite (click on Teddyboy Locsin’s Teditorial)/bonfire maker also prays the rosary, the novena and visits the Blessed Sacrament every day, they say.