It’s Carnival time, and yes we jamming still

THE EDITOR: Leave all soca people alone. Straight soca, chutney soca, dancehall music. Carnival time is here. This is the season when some citizens can make enough money to feed themselves for the rest of the year by just having one fete.

A newspaper story mentioning that it is $150,000 to have Kees Dieffentaller entertaining the patrons means Kees is not there because he loves you. The man is working. You have to pay the going rate.

At an average of $750 a ticket (some cost a lot more) and 2,000- 3,500 happy patrons (sometimes more), fete promoters are laughing all the way to the bank.

The fee charged by Kees will be the same for all mainstream soca artistes. I cannot imagine the chutney soca performers charging less or their promoters suffering. I will not be so “farse” and out of place to query Machel Montano’s – the first of the $100,000 performers – present-day fee.

So, for those citizens who do not like noise, get some ear plugs. Take your medication and forget about calling the EMA or the police. As the young people say, “learn to live with it.”

This is the season to make merry. One or two nights out of your life should not kill you. Think about your sacrifice as putting some money into the hands of the caterers and bar workers.

Even the street vendors cannot wait to put up their stalls outside the fetes. And the breakfast party beach fetes are getting really popular. More money is being made during the wee hours of the morning. Scandal and bacchanal as the sun rises in the East.

Carnival in TT is not to be sneezed at. It is the time of the year when we do not care who is the government. Even the bandits take a breather to play mas just like everybody else. The entire country relaxes for two full days.

And, as the Trini-to-the-bone people who can afford to come home from foreign every year will tell you, they cannot miss the action. The dancing and prancing, the beautiful people, the calypsoes, the steelband music. It is a feeling of total abandonment of every-day problems. Carnival in TT is a unique brand of good, cheap mental therapy.

Man the city could fall down, we jamming still.

LYNETTE JOSEPH

Diego Martin