There are plenty "vibes" involved in playing a minstrel - white top hat, white shirt, black bow tie, stripe shirt with a scissors tail, green waist band, white gloves, a handbag, a wooden clapper and a silver waiter to collect money.

Morilla Theresa Montano knows all about it. She has been playing the mas almost half her life. When people see Montano on Carnival Mondays and Tuesdays they ask incredulously: "That lady still playing mas?"

Ask her to disclose her age, though, and she replies with a chuckle: "I'm not old but I was born a long time ago."

She is 80. Montano's older sister Magdalene, 85, portrayed minstrels for Carnival long before she did, sand she admits she used to trail behind them all over town in the days before she was allowed to play mas.

"We never played together. She played with five men, so I get the vibes. She stop playing long years ago. She get social."

But a minstrel is nothing without the face painted. Montano uses vaseline to keep the white zinc powder most.

It is the singing that appeals to Montano most. She vows to sing until she dies.'

"I don't know if singing like me, but I like singing, since I was seven years old," she says. "It's not an easy mas to play, you have to be singing all the time."

Singing comes naturally to her. To keep her voice sweet she abstains from drinking cold liquids for as long as five weeks before the Carnival season starts. Cold drinks weaken the voice and make her hoarse.

Montano lives in Maraval with her husband, Joseph. They have been married for 56 years.

Montano learned patois from her parents, Emma "Baby" and Dedier Pierre.

"My mother used to speak it plenty," she says.

These days, as she recalls her glory days as a masquerader, Montano laments the slow death of patois, the disappearance of her minstrel friends and the lack of real ole mas as she portrayed it in her time.

"They don't have ole mas. They does dress up too much for ole mas "too social."

Her mother, a market vendor, used to take her "load" - chive, thyme, and parsley - from Paramin to sell at the market on Charlotte Street, now East Side plaza.

Her father played blue devil, Wild Indian and jab jab on the Saddle Road, Maraval. In those days a Roman Catholic could not play mas until he or she had their first communion.

"After first communion, the road was open for me. I made mas," she recalled.

As Montano explains it, the minstrel is derived from those Negroes who worked in the potato fields in America and France. They made up songs of freedom, she says.

"The Americans sold negroes to the small islands," Montano says, by way of explaining the evolution of the minstrel presence in these parts.

There are many minstrel songs. Montano has composed three of her own. She offers a taste of one:

She launches into another song, choosing a well-known number:

Montano, Margaret Sucre and her husband Augustus, who plays the guitar, make up the Minstrel Boys. That trio, the Minstrel Playboys and Sebastian Huggins from Maraval are traditional fixtures at the Queen's Park Savannah and other venues on Carnival days.

In the early days minstrel players painted their faces black, but to be modern, Montano says masqueraders changed to painting themselves white.

Where does Montano get the spirit, the energy, year after year, to play this mas? The spirit is all hers but the energy, she says, comes from eating well when she was young. In those days her mother bought beef at six cents a pound and put it to boil in a pitchoil tin on a fireside made with three stones.

She relished the taste of her mother's sweet hand. Fish used to go for six and ten cents a pound; tripe for a penny; a cent fat pork; cow heel ten cents.

"When the market closing and you hear the second bell, we used to go in and say, "I want a cent lard mixed with butter and biscuit to eat it with". Everybody running for freeness. It had no storage," she says.

The days of one-cent fat pork are long gone, but Montano promises to be around for some time. If age makes her unable to walk she vows to sing the minstrel songs - even if it's from a pram.

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