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Boogsie
obliges
a fan after
performance in DeKalb,
Illinois |
How
many times has he heard the same review? He
overarranges. He plays too many notes. He’s too
jazzy. This is calypso—our music, they remind.
And who are “they” but a bunch of amateurs
strutting in his panyard a few nights before the
1987 North Zone steel
band finals,
running off at the mouth about
his musical style. “Ay, Boogsie, you know
what?,” they’d crow. “Maybe you could take this
part out, put this one in and,... blah, blah,
blah.” Such brass! Small wonder he escapes the
din by hanging out his pride in the shadows of
Phase II Pan Groove, his own big band of 100
players now rehearsing on gleaming chrome pans
with steely tones. Here, amid the cacophony, he
is secure. In the belly of the beast, Boogsie
Sharpe, the world’s best panist-composer-arranger
is home.
The beast would roar all night,
dancing with itself in a mad narcissistic
embrace and feeding the ego with bits of raw
culture and large helpings of its creator’s
“fast-food” orchestration. And a cult of
believers would drift in and out of this musical
consciousness well into the dawn.
This is the night life of Phase
II Pan Groove after finishing in seventh place
in the steel band preliminaries. The festival,
aptly called Panorama, is the parent beast that
annually burdens each of the nation’s 40-odd steelbands with a single 10-minute performance
of a calypso. (Few arrangers offer their own
original compositions.)
None of the other finalists is
undergoing such rite of madness. But then, no
other band is quite like Phase II. The Phase is
Boogsie, and Boogsie composes his own calypso
music. The nerve of him. Well, his music is
overarranged, say the judges of this marathon
event. And they aren’t amateurs.
Now he listens. He’s never won
this thing, and he needs a victory so bad the
security of the Western Hemisphere depends on
it. Ay, Carnival 1986 was in a funk when the
Phase missed the darn thing by a solitary point.
What to expect in ’87? Especially on the heels
of the judges’ commentary? Nine long hours
(we’re talking the graveyard shift here) of
rebuilding a fresh arrangement of Feelin’
Nice, that’s what. And what do you know!
Tonight, in the wake of the finals, the whole
country will party en masse. Feelin’ nice. And a
victorious Boogsie Sharpe would grow to be a big
fish in this small West Indian pond. What more
can they demand of him?
You
fly into Trinidad, this dreamy hot spot seven
miles east of Venezuela, this flashy pendant at
the end of the Caribbean chain, and, armed with
just a single, singular name, you begin to
ferret out the personality. But what you get
initially is only the legend: an early prodigy,
an extemporizer and all that jazz, an enigma,
and, though shy, an icon. A 34-year-old
musician/composer who neither reads nor writes
music. Where to find the reality? Deep into the
subculture of Pan? In the very womb itself?
“His greatest deficiency is that
he hardly listens to other kinds of music and
other musicians.”
Sisters Nasha and Hana Sharpe,
ages seven and six, respectively, wrap their
attention around the living room TV. Saturday
mornings bring playmates in Daffy Duck and Bugs
Bunny during the carnival season in February. In
a few weeks, though, when the mas’ hysteria is
over and the children’s father has spent the
last of his creative sense on Panoramania,
they’ll prod his responsibility with the cue:
“Daddy, it’s Saturday. When are we going to the
beach?” Only then, Janet, his wife of 8 years,
will be certain that “there is no more audience,
no more show, no more overseas tours, no more
Carnival, just me, the children, Boogsie, and
home. And I will be satisfied with that.”
For now, it’s see you later, baby. A man’s got
to do what he’s got to do, no matter what the
critics write in the newspapers. Boogsie will
arrange Panorama music for seven steel bands, a
feat unequalled in the 24-year history of the
contest. More than 600 players performing
eclectic harmonies on some 2,000 tuned oil
drums, before an audience of 40,000 at an
outdoor stage in the heart of the city. Wow! But
that’s not the perspective Boogsie sees. He
envisions all six of his conventional bands in
the final 12. Scoring music for more than one
band is a chore that few arrangers attempt,
although an elite few can command up to
(TT)
$25,000 ($7,000 US) for their
work. What is Boogsie’s motive? The challenge of
competing with himself? Some steel bands simply
want the best arranger. And, in 1987, Boogsie
Sharpe won the north, south and Tobago zones,
the old time steel band competition, and the
grand national finals. It is no surprise that
Potential Symphony has appealed to Boogsie for
help. Once violence-prone and a chronic loser,
the Malick steel band says community pride is at
stake.
The trip to Potential in Boogsie’s compact is
akin to a symphonic adventure. The ride from his
townhouse atop Dundonald Hill overlooking the
capital city to the panyard destination is
interwoven with variations on a market day
theme. Overloaded taxis rush shoppers to the
center of commerce, then speed them back home in
a blur. Calypso music booms from ubiquitous
ghetto blasters and reverberates from maxitaxis
that are really minibuses. Pedestrians affect a
soca (calypso) gait on the hot pavement. Some of
them recognize Boogsie, a beard covering his
chin and cheeks beneath smiling eyes. He is
wearing his trademark peakless royal blue
leather cap and a flowered shirt. “Bogsay!” they
hail. “Oi,” he shoots back, lighting a
cigarette. “Last Thursday,” he says while
dodging antsy traffic, “I worked all morning
with Scherzando (some musical terms are
enunciated the way local panists play music—by
ear. So, like everyone else here, he pronounces
the playful musical sobriquet of the Curepe
band, Scherzando, rather than Skertsando.) Then
I went down to San Fernando and arranged Skiffle
Bunch (old time steel band). Went home at 6,
shower, eat, and hit Starlift that same night.”
He waves to a passerby. “I could do a tune in an
hour, but I have to make sure the band gets each
part right before I move on. Each one, teach one
until the whole band in sync. All I do is lay
down the creativity, then it’s up to the band to
execute it.”
Squatting on a low hill, Potential’s practice
site has the country’s famed bird sanctuary in
its cross hair. It is a dichotomous view of
reality. To many youths, the community is but a
prison that politicians conveniently keep out of
focus. Who protects the teenagers, the nation’s
true wildlife? Trapped by indifference and
unemployment, this faceless, symbolic mass of
untapped energy relentlessly searches for the
tiniest crack of relief in society’s pressure
cooker. A few hundreds of this underclass are
released as vagrants. Some struggle but cope.
Some turn to drugs to “ease de tension.”
Potential Symphony offers an expedient outlet:
panyard vibes with Boogsie Sharpe.
Boogsie drives up to the
makeshift community center and parks facing a
dilapidated band shell. To the left is a “shoe
box” pan theater that serves as a storehouse for
instruments, assorted mobile racks, a tumba,
cartons of empty beer bottles, a box of black
cable wire, an old Potential flag, some 22
tenors or lead pans encased in protective vinyl
bags, parts of a drum set and several colored
drawings of Zulu warriors and lion hunters
advertising the band’s Carnival theme. “No
obscene language,” a sign warns. “Stag, the beer
of Potential,” says another. Twenty-one players
are rehearsing their parts as a man shouts above
the music: “Traps man (drummer), where de traps
man?” When Boogsie arrives, everything comes
together.
When
Boogsie alighted on this mortal earth on October
28, 1953, everything fell in place at the
Crossfire panyard in St. James. For this was
home to parents Randolph and Grace Sharpe. Len
Sharpe was conceived when his mother was in her
’40s, 16 years following the birth of his second
brother. Folks say he was born with pan in his
head, referring to the Crossfire steel band that
conducted nightly rehearsals below his bedroom
window. “Police used to come with horses to
control the overflow crowds,” Mrs. Sharpe
recalls- “My friends begged me to move, because
they thought the music would drive my son crazy.
But it never bothered Boogsie.” She had
christened him Len, but took to calling him
Boogsie when the moniker came to her “just like
that” while she was reading the bible. “That’s
why I believe he’s a special gift from God.”
One bright morning, God’s child
slipped out of his crib, crawled to the front
door, down the five steps leading to the big
yard where chickens scratched the dirt for
sustenance and steelpans lay idle and mute. “I
knew the yard was empty of people,” Mrs. Sharpe
is saying now, “but I was hearing pan sounds.”
She looked outside and saw Boogsie pounding an
old pan with a small stone. She was shocked. He
was only nine months old. From this seminal
experience would one day emerge the leghorn of
panyard birds. In the meantime, when he was
three years old, a precocious Boogsie,
restricted from playing Crossfire’s pans,
pounded on grapefruit juice cans his father
-
brought home. Young Sharpe employed mango stems
and pieces of road tar as surrogate sticks. His
thirst, however, was for the real thing.
“If I get a big contract,
sure, I’ll leave Trinidad. I’ll have to bear
with it. But right now Panorama is my lifeblood,
after my wife and children.”
His mother remembers when he was
five. “He could play every tune the band
played,” she says, “so we allowed him to play
bass during the Carnival
—
propped up on a drum.” At eight, Boogsie was
teaching melodies to adult tenor panists well
past his bedtime. After the celebrations, his
father would take him on a road show of sorts.
And Boogsie would play the pan in schools, at
concerts, and talent shows. Audiences were awed.
Was this the Mozart of the steelpan, as American
composer David del Tredeci would rechristen him
22 years later? “We wanted him to learn music on
the piano,” Mrs. Sharpe says, “but we couldn’t
afford the lessons. I was a domestic and my
husband was a male nurse with the Police Force.
Besides, we couldn’t keep him away from the
pans. He picked up everything he knew just from
listening. Nobody ever taught him anything.”
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Monty Alexander, the
outstanding jazz keyboardist with whom
Boogsie has performed, has expressed a
preference for having “the baddest
panist” around permanently. |
Young
boys amble into Potential’s panyard propelling
discarded bicycle rims with pieces of wood.
Stray dogs pan the area for food. Boogsie is
laying down a passage of
This Party Is It,
beginning with the tenor, and, in
turn, double tenor, double seconds, triple
seconds, guitar pans, quadrophonics, cellos and
finally bass. He is like a symphony in motion as
he moves from one section of the band to the
next, showing key players new bars, with
particular emphasis on phrasing. In a few
minutes, the entire band is playing this short
section repeatedly. A newcomer grabs an iron
(brake drum) and spices the riff. “After I put
down the verse and chorus,” Boogsie says during
a break, “I sit down and listen to the band.
Then I get an idea and I rush to teach them the
part. They run that, I sit, get another idea,
and, bam, I fly back in, ‘come, take this one
time, fellas.’ ” He springs up, suddenly, and
dashes to the quads section to admonish an
errant player. “He wasn’t phrasing it right,” he
says. “I think for everybody, so I can hear when
a player makes a mistake.” Boogsie admits the
new quads are difficult to play. They require
good coordination skills because one pair of
pans sits on waist-high racks, and another pair
is suspended at eye level. “I like the range and
tone of the quads,” he says. “You could put a
whole different dimension of music on them to
enhance the tune itself Some arrangers use them
to fatten the melody. I use them for voicing and
color. Music is color, too, like Carnival.”
Finally, in this, his fifth
two-hour session, Boogsie completes the band’s
orchestration. “Among the seven, Potential is
special to me,” he says on the drive east to
Curepe. “They respond to my ideas. I’m sure
they’ll win their zone (finals).” He exults in
the moment, but his demeanor is calm, like a
leisure fisherman expecting a bite. How much
satisfaction does he need? If he matched last
year’s output of four victories, would he retire
from Panorama and settle abroad? How much longer
must the rest of the world hold its breath for
the inimitable panist to break into the big
time? What’s the catch? “If I get a big
contract, sure, I’ll leave Trinidad,” he says.
“I’ll have to bear with it. But right now,
Panorama is my lifeblood, after my wife and
children (Boogsie is father to two other
children— son Din, 11, and daughter Adana,
eight).”
“He doesn’t see down the road far
enough.”
Like
the country’s steelpan tuners, every panyard has
a distinctive ambience. Scherzando occupies
Curepe’s old market on Evans Street adjoining a
“shirt factory.” Curepe sits in the lap of a
mountain range and the scenic hills provide
psychological relief for the bustling,
predominantly East Indian town. In the
marketplace where hagglers once fought to save a
penny, a community of panists now strives to
save a steel band. A Scherzando split in 1975
produced Sforzata Steel Band but no gains
thereafter for either orchestra. A band’s got to
do what a band’s got to do. Enter Boogsie
Sharpe. “Now that we’re reunited, our ambition,”
says Captain Keith Thomas, “is to emulate Phase
II and win the big prize as an unsponsored band.
We can do it with Boogsie.”
Indeed, inspirational slogans
greet the visitor at every turn. “We, not I,”
and “Let’s mind our own business—music,” clearly
reflect the band’s revamped competitive edge.
Welders are building new racks; painters are
masking the burnt exteriors of newly-tuned
drums; cooks are preparing I-tal (salt-free and
meatless) meals; and the remainder of the band
is coasting along in a babel of sounds. Boogsie
calls everyone's’ attention by knocking the
sides of a tenor pan with his sticks. He is
about to begin his final workout of Scherzando’s
calypso, a Boogsie composition called Hard
Times. It is a paean to domestic strife in
the twin republic. “I’m trying to give the
effect of hard times with a jam,” he was saying
earlier. “Like you go home and there’s no food,
so you come down to the panyard and you’re just
jammin’,” he says, an edge of rancor in his
voice.
Screaming a riff on the tenor, he
draws not only learners but also a knot of
admirers. Soon, he’s on the four-pan belting out
a melody line. In time, he imbues each family of
pans with his wizardry. When the complete band
achieves his satisfaction, it begins to emulate
Phase II. And the captain is pleased.
“Each one
teach one until the whole band in sync.
All I do is to lay down the creativity,
then it’s up to the band to execute it.”
Boogsie then trots off to the
john. He returns with a tenor salvo that
portends a nation in the throes of riotous
conditions. The music now becomes ambivalent,
with its mixture of joy and sorrow. “Each
of my bands sounds differently,” he says “I’m
conscious of it. I can’t relax, because of my
pride.” And if a band such as Scherzando beats
out his own Phase II for the national
championship? “I wouldn’t feel as bad as how the
fellas would feel.” Is he overextending himself
as a prolific arranger? “III turn down any band,
they get upset. They don’t want
any
arranger. They want my work. I
have no pension coming, no gratitude. Panorama
to me is like a sport, like horseracing. I’m
like a trainer taking care of seven horses. I
never approach anybody. They come to me. So it’s
all jealousy on the part of my critics.”
When
Boogsie first arranged music for a steel band,
his peers couldn’t fathom the depth of his
genius. He was 10 years old and he had organized
his own group with leftover pans from his
defunct alma mater. Crossfire’s legacy of quaint
themes (including a 1956 Carnival performance of
the standard, On
Another Night Like This)
spurred Boogsie to orchestrate
The Theme from The Sons
of Katie Elder. In a
sense, it was an auspicious moment when he
presented the work at his school’s Christmas
concert in 1963. If his teachers at Woodbrook
Presbyterian Elementary School felt he was
lagging in his school work, they found his
excuse on the stage
—
properly orchestrated. In truth, Boogsie had
graduated and they had nothing to do with his
education. Neither had Progressive, the high
school where he played a scoring role on the
soccer team. Instead, the Starlift panyard in
Woodbrook held the keys to Boogsie’s advanced
training. It was here that he would hone his
dexterity and composing skills under another
young, astute panist/composer in Ray Holman.
Boogsie joined Starlift at 14,
but he played for the avant-garde Holman. “He
was very supportive of me and what I was doing
with the music,” recalls Holman, a Spanish
instructor at Port of Spain’s Fatima College.
“When everyone was criticizing me for writing
music for the instrument rather than copying
calypsonians, Boogsie and a few others were
backing me. I relied on him. I never taught him
anything twice. He was very careful, always
making sure what he was playing was what I
wanted.”
Despite Boogsie’s prodigious
talent and computer memory, Holman shrank from
bestowing superstar status on his protégé.
Holman, though, advised him to approach the art
form as a professional, because of “his
tremendous potential, his gift of the
instrument, his special sense of knowing all the
notes on any style pan no matter where they are
placed.” Hyperbole? Consider Boogsie Sharpe at
17, performing with Starlift’s stage ensemble.
He is late for the band’s appearance at a public
dance. Rushing on stage a moment before the
music plays, he finds that the drums of his
six-piece bass are woefully out of sequence. A
predicament? Not to Boogsie Sharpe. In a flash,
he adjusts mentally and saves the night. “I had
conditioned myself to do that kind of thing,” he
says, as level as a steel beam.
By age 20, Boogsie believed that
he could compose music like his mentor.
Moreover, he was convinced that he was prepared
for the next step in his development. In 1973,
he was mature enough to help found Phase II Pan
Groove with a nucleus of Starlift players.
Strangely, at Starlift’s request, he would
return 15 years later to arrange a Ray Holman
composition for the 1988 Panorama.
By the time Boogsie exits
Scherzando’s marketplace, an orange sun is
laying down an arrangement of color in a
quadrant of the western sky. It is nightfall
already when he comes “home” to the Phase II
panyard. The players have gone home save for key
“family” members, with whom he shares an hour
discussing the band’s Carnival direction. His
real family, whom he refers to as “my greatest
achievements,” won’t see him until 8:10 p.m. His
wife greets him at the door. “Boogsie,” she asks
in a low voice, not unlike Scherzando’s humming
bass, “is this the hour you’ve come home to take
me out like you promised?” The adulation he has
garnered all day long, the wealth of talent that
he carries, the creativity that he shoulders—it
behooves him to doff the accoutrements of his
craft at the door. And, why not? What is the
name of the Phase’s 1988 Panorama theme?
Woman is Boss? Yes, woman is boss.
“He is too quiet and unassuming.
They take advantage
of him.”
For lo these many years, calypso,
more often than not, has denigrated women,
treating them as repositories of sex, as
philanderers and nymphomaniacs. A woman’s place
was no longer in the home, but in calypso. Phase
II would change all that. “We don’t give women
the recognition they deserve,” Boogsie admits.
“And I believe that woman is boss because of the
important roles they play in our lives. That’s
why I composed the music.”
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Jamming with a small
group during a New York gig |
The
Phase II panyard is wedged among a row of
middle-class homes, an apartment complex, Roxy
Theater and the Starlift panyard. Neighbors
don’t raise noisy complaints with authorities as
they used to
—
with good reason. The band was widely acclaimed
as the country’s best leading up to 1987, when
it finally won a Panorama contest as an
unsponsored band—the first such steel band to do
so. Phase II is confident of replicating the
feat. Indeed, the band is on a mission to avenge
more than a decade of blighted Panorama
decisions. In the past, whenever it has failed
to score with the judges, Boogsie amply filled
the breach. He participated in pan “shootouts”
with ace panists Robert Greenidge and Earl
Rodney. At one performance, he raised eyebrows
when he turned the tenor pan over and
extemporized on its belly. Then he brought the
audience to its feet after playing a popular
calypso by sequentially feeding a line at a time
to four different instruments, and without
missing a beat. In 1985, American panist Andy
Narell joined Boogsie in an “international
shootout” that later prompted this Narell
comment: “Boogsie has his own musical vision
that makes his music sound very distinct from
everybody else’s. He plays harmonies right out
of Tchaikovsky and you hear real jazzy elements
in his songs and arrangements.”
When Narell returned to Trinidad
in 1986 and 1987 to join Phase II in the
Panorama, the experience was to help him later
in the production of his now popular “Hammer”
album. “Before then, I never played some of the
instruments Boogsie had in his band, like the
quads, for example. Now I use them, but I love
the roles he assigns the instrument.”
During Phase II’s lean years,
Boogsie toured extensively as a solo artist and
with his own pan/jazz group. A Who’s Who list of
artistes he’s gigged with includes Randy Weston,
Grover Washington, Ralph MacDonald, Gary Burton,
Wynton Marsalis, and Monty Alexander. Boogsie
left impressions at jazz festivals in Berlin,
Barbados, Montreux (Switzerland), Holland,
Hamburg, Tokyo, and Vienne (France). Says
Scofield Pilgrim, Caribbean representative of
the National Jazz Foundation: “Boogsie is
phenomenal because music is really sounds, not
notation. Notation is a way of recording sounds.
Boogsie may not know what he’s doing in the
language of music, but he knows what he’s
doing.” Clive Nunez, a cultural activist in
Trinidad says he’s convinced that Boogsie is
nourished by “a master brain” that other
geniuses tap into. Harvard University researcher
Dr. David N. Perkins is more down-to-earth: “In
a broad sense, we shouldn’t see him (Boogsie) as
uneducated. We need to make a distinction
between the academic culture of music and the
informal culture of music,” he says. “There has
always been a thriving informal or non-academic
music culture. Jazz has been an important
contributor to that culture. But it takes a
decade of deep involvement, no matter how
talented you are, to become a really masterful
performer or composer or whatever.”
Boogsie’s decade was winding down
by 1987. After his Panorama victory that year,
Chief Judge Marjorie Wooding said: “He’s full of
imagination, and I feel he has led the steel
band into a new era. I said years ago that one
of these days, we, as judges, would have to deal
with this man, because I was able to appreciate
his change of style. I was seeing an emerging
jazz style coming through, which I admired. It
was different—the chording, the rhythm,
everything; and I don’t like stagnancy.”
“He’s the best tenor player, the
best double second player, the best quads
player...shoot, he’s the best panist in the
world.”
It
is Carnival Saturday night. The national finals
are on. Boogsie is by no means stagnant. He is
on a roll, really. A few nights earlier, he won
the East Zone finals (a tie between Potential
Symphony and Scherzando); the South contest with
Deltones, and the North with Phase II. In
addition, he was victorious with Skiffle Bunch
in the old time steel band category. Now, he’s
got Potential, Scherzando, Starlift and Phase II
competing against each other in the final 12.
The competition is keen and by the time Phase II
appears last at 4:15 a.m., it has become
airtight. In its homage to womanhood, Phase II
cuts loose with a performance flushed with
conflicting moods. Now the band exalts the
better half, then it articulates her
vulnerability. Here - the joy in her smile,
there - the sorrow in her tears.
In short, the music brings out
the Scorpio in Boogsie. And the classical ending
reminds Phase II fanatics of Moods in the
First Movement, a classical work composed by
their hero in 1984. Afterward, Boogsie and his
wife immediately head home. They follow the
results on the car radio. The arena is in an
uproar. Phase II repeats as champions. Janet
hugs Boogsie. She, more than anyone else,
believes that it is time for him to take his own
show on the international stage. Boogsie,
however, doesn’t even have his own manager.
“Boogsie is a very nice person,
but he’s not a businessman,” says Pilgrim. “He
tends to be unreliable at times. Once, I
arranged for him to perform at a concert, and,
when it was too late, he tells me he’s already
committed. It’s very difficult to pin him down.
He’d say yes to anybody, then one day you’d hear
he’s out of the country.”
Once, the story goes, a group of
French promoters was rebuffed by Phase II
management. They had come to Trinidad to hammer
out a contract with Boogsie and his group for a
recording contract as well as performances in
Europe and French Africa. Then the promoters
heard that Boogsie wouldn’t talk about an
agreement until after the Carnival, a few months
hence. “He has security in the panyard,” says
Pilgrim, who believes Boogsie can become a jazz
star of international renown. “He takes pride in
being on tour, but he seems to thrive in the
panyard. Phase II is his anchor, and he’s so
concerned about Panorama, it’s unbelievable.”
Pianist Monty Alexander is
unconcerned about all that. His working
relationship with Boogsie transcends
psychoanalysis. In 1986, he had taken Boogsie to
jazz festivals across Europe. And, last
November, he showcased Boogsie as a guest
artiste at the Blue Note in New York. “I’ve
asked him to consider joining my group because
he’s unique and we work well together,” says
Alexander, “but I agree with him that his family
comes first
— in
a way. He should do whatever is necessary for
him, though.” Cliff Alexis,
tuner-composer-arranger for the Northern
Illinois University steel band in DeKalb,
Illinois, notes Boogsie’s dilemma and says:
“Sure, he wants to make it big abroad, but you
can’t blame him for looking forward to something
like Panorama, because that is the mentality the
festival has placed on arrangers like Boogsie.
He was born into it.”
“That may be so,” says his wife,
Janet, who holds a university degree and is a
credit officer at a local bank. “Panorama is his
home, his culture, it’s how he established
himself. It is important for him to be in
Trinidad. But I’d like to see him do more with
jazz musicians outside. I don’t want to stand
between him and his career. But he’s adamant. He
doesn't want to leave his family.” And Phase II?
April
1988. Boogsie Sharpe is appearing with the NIU
steel band in DeKalb, west of Chicago. Life can
be heavenly. Last December his country awarded
him a medal for his contribution to native
culture. In a few weeks, he’ll be performing in
Barbados, Jamaica, San Francisco, New York and
Australia. Now, G. Allan O’Connor, NIU’s musical
director, is introducing the man everybody came
to hear. “What can I say about this man?” he
begins. “Boogsie Sharpe is like the Chicago Cubs
(baseball), the Chicago Black Hawks (ice
hockey), the Chicago Bulls (basketball) and the
Chicago Bears (football), all winning their
respective championships in the same year.”
Unlike the audience, Boogsie is unmoved. He
can’t wait to get home. He sees himself trapped
between reason and reality.
“Daddy, it’s Saturday. When are
you going to take us to the beach?”
Boogsie’s got to do what he’s got
to do. Is life a bitch, or what?
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----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Republished from - PAN
- Summer 1988 - Vol.3 No.1
contact author
Dalton Narine at:
narine67@bellsouth.net
PAN Magazine
Editor-in-Chief:
Leslie Slater
Executive Editor:
Dalton Narine
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