Community Conversations

I’ve been playing mas as long as I can remember.  I grew up in the Belmont neighborhood of Port of Spain, Trinidad. As a child, when I heard the drummers and steelbands coming down the hill at 4am on Carnival morning I knew J’ouvert was about to begin! I would grab one of my mother’s dresses for a costume and run out in our yard and join in. I got the idea from seeing a man playing mas wearing his wife’s dress and hat—he was just walking down the street and everybody was laughing. It was a comical thing, to see a man in a dress. Now my father didn’t approve of me wearing a dress, but my mother understood that J’ouvert was about comedy, about theater.