Carnival memories

As remembered by David Williams… On any Ash Wednesday morning it is possible to walk the streets of Port of Spain and see dis-guarded pieces of thousands of costumes. Shaque the Ash Wednesday King was a street dweller who would walk the streets after carnival and pick up all these pieces of $1000 costumes. He collected them together, put them on, and in his own world, all on his own, here we had the king coming down. It made complete sense to him. It looked good, and it had no competition, so he was the king. The costume was made from pieces of previous years’Read More →

As remembered by David Williams… The costume was to highlight the beauty of the rain, and the ugliness of how things can change with acid rain and the destruction of the environment. We had little or no budget. We went to a store in San Juan that no longer exists. When you a shopping a dollar or two a yard, it is not mas cloth you can buy. It is cloth with a dis-color that people want to get off their hands. But we saw this netted sun-bleached thing, between grey and dirty blue. You probably couldn’t use it for anything else except exactly whatRead More →

As remembered by David Williams… This costume was about pushing for sanitary conditions in the city. The idea was to make litter actually come alive to show the terror and the monster that it is. We took regular clothes and covered them with basic litter. Old chicken boxes, old paper, plastic bottles – to keep the reality of the costume intact. It remained authentic. We didn’t try to put no set of good thing on it – just straight litter. Just like how it would look in the canals. As the mas was passing the judges, someone carried the boy in the costume up inRead More →