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Carnival
Costume Designers |
Copyright 2004-2006 Zina Saunders All rights reserved |
Earl,
age 37, caused quite a stir in 1995, when his band danced in the
parade dressed in T shirts and nothing much else.My father, Norman Huggins, he brings a float out in Florida, and I brought one out in New York the first time in '95. We had lost touch with each other for many years; there was a big gap, and we didn't know we was both designing costumes for our separate Carnival parades. But then someone put us in touch with each other, in '96, and we were talking on the phone, and he said he didn't have time to talk, he got to work on his King for Carnival. The King is one of the big costume characters. And I said, “What! You're doing carnival costumes in Miami, and I'm doing carnival costumes in New York!” I like mas (mas is the costumes, short for masquerade). I'm a mas parader. Back home in Trinidad, my Moms couldn't afford to buy a pay costume, so in 1979, when I was in Junior High School, I kind of begged her to play in this band called Ervin Mac Williams, that's a large band in Trinidad. One of my third cousins, she's a mas parader, she always play mas, and she said, “Oh I'm gonna play Mac Williams, you want to?” And I didn't know nobody to play in that band. If you want to play mas, you got to know somebody, otherwise you gonna be jumping up by yourself. You want to have some friends in it, you know? So Moms said, “Well you don't know nobody in the band!” But I said, “But I'm not gonna be alone in that section! My cousin is gonna be in it!” So I got to go! So the last time when I played mas was in 1979, until I came to New York. In '94, I was on the Parkway, watching the Carnival, me and my sister Julie, and I said, “You know what? I want to bring out a band. We gonna be on the Parkway next year!” And she said, “How we gonna do it” And I said, “Don't worry! I have no idea how, but we do it. We're gonna be on the Parkway in '95!” I wanted to put my name up in front of the market, and in Hollywood they say, “Sex sells.” So what I do is have a T shirt band, and I went X rated. So we came down the block, and the girls were wearing T shirts and sometimes nothing else! It was a shock to the cops! They didn't even pull me off the road. Those guys in white shirts, the captains, they were so amazed, they were like, “Is he doing that?” So that's how I got my name up in the market very fast, in '95: I came down the block X rated! And then they wouldn't let me come down the block in '96. Then my Pops and I started working together on the costumes in '97, after we got back in touch. We came in second place as a small band, in '97. And since then we've won a lot of prizes. And my Moms helps with the sewing: she's got the sewing machine. But I'm having more fun doing other shows. This last year my schedule was heavy: I was in the Long Island Carnival, my band came in third, and my King came in first. I went from Long Island to Harlem Festival, from Harlem I open for the Chinese parade, and then I open for the Halloween parade. And the Labor Day parade. And the Thanksgiving Day parade. And the Puerto Rican Day parade. Now, I'm trying...no, I'm doing other parades besides the Labor Day parade. The Labor Day parade, I been there, done that. My band, after 9 years in the Labor Day parade, I came in third, second and first. I got all the trophies in a room, so you know I'm telling the truth! |