Señor Gomez Speaks on Mas'

Narcenio 'Señor' Gomez

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Staff Article
Interview Recorded: May 15, 2005
Posted: June 12, 2005

After leaving Boys Town

After leaving Boys Town I started to play with Tokyo because I would be hanging out up there, and my teacher, was a member from Tokyo. My teacher was Albert who was Black James brother. Those fellas were the trouble people in those days. People were afraid to play with Destination Tokyo because the men who played with them were the ones who killed cattle in the Abattoir. And according to the old saying, "If you could kill cow, who is man?" I got to know them from skipping school. In those days they used to bring the cows from Venezuela. Sometimes the cows would get away and go up Frederick Street where people are shopping, and the people would run. These people used to go in the van with a couple guys and they would lasso the cows.

Tokyo of course would get the name of their portrayals from movies. I started playing mas' there with them, and in those days we played Ju Ju, and you know they are wild. They appeared so real; they would have a snake wrapped around them. I do not know where they got the snake, but it wasn't the bad snake, it was the Macauel (Boa Constrictor), and people would either run or stay and watch.

I played one year with Tokyo and then I came and played with Frank Smith and Roger. Given that I was living on Nelson Street, I already had my experience of playing the Ju Ju mas', and that we played football together, we decided to stay there with Frank Smith for a while.

I did go back to Tokyo and we started playing Sailors Ashore, Military mas'. I heard someone on a radio programme sometime ago say how serious people used to take mas', which is really true. We had to march every night; you had to perform because long time you had to portray real officers and sailors, a piece of Minshall. In those days when you go on stage, the pilots together in one area and the sailors together in one area, or however the production was. We did well.

The first band to leave Destination Tokyo was called 'Crusaders of the East', which is now called 'City Symphony'. They just played an ordinary sailor thing, though we were better than them, but I think we had the wrong name. We sent a guy to register the band, and we called the band SS Oregon, but 'S.S. Oregon' is just a ship. If only he had said the United Nations, we would have had French and German, many nationalities, all the powers that we could have portrayed.

We left Tokyo, and we opened a little band by Pam Ottley at Twenty-nine St. Joseph Road. From there we decided to play Fancy Sailor.

There was a man who is dead now, whom I more or less got all my skills from by the name of Buree Thomas. Buree was a cabinet-maker. In those days you had to be a real arts man because of the type of workmanship that used to go into a cabinet. I used see him making horses and moldings with the mud and the paper, and then he would glue some parts like the leg, which he would carve out of the wood and the body part he would make out of the mud. He would see me coming around and watching, and I wouldn't say anything. He would say to me, "Like you like the thing or what?" I would tell him yes. I used to draw a lot in school because I had always liked art. When the teacher had to write something on the board, she would call me because my wrist moved freely. Buree asked me if I wanted to play mas', but I did not get the permission as yet, because my father was a seaman and he used to be going and coming. I had already left school, but still, in the evening time you had to go below the bed and put on your sister dress in order to sneak out. They used to call us 'fowl' because when you see five o' clock reach, we were already snoring, and that was because of my Venezuelan parentage.

From there, we started to play this sailor mas'. Things went nice all the time and as I improved Buree would give me things to do and things to cut out. At that time I had a schoolmate and friend by the name of Alan Motley, which was Buree's brother-in-law. Though I was there, Alan made my first mas' because of our friendship in school. Alan would say, "Ah boy, I see you by Buree," and I would tell him, "Yes, ah by Buree, but you have to make my mas'." I remember the mas' in those days was ship nose. During that time the match factory was right by the river close to the police, and we would go and get the match box to make the deck and so on. That went on until I started to make my own mas'.

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