Newspaper – Trinidad Guardian
Date Published – Dec. 1st 2013
Writer – Barbara Jenkins
One Wednesday afternoon in 1957, when I was a 15-year-old Form Five student, Mother Helen, choir mistress, St Joseph’s Convent, Port-of-Spain, expelled me from the senior choir. I had repeatedly disobeyed this rule: After school, go home, bathe and change into ordinary clothes and return to choir practice. I didn’t go home. At home ordinary clothes were outgrown school overalls and pipe borne water, a rarity. A situation beyond the boundary of the Convent imagination at that time. On a Monday night, 40 years later, I entered Bishop Anstey High School Hall and the choir mistress asked my name. When I gave it, Pat Bishop said, “You sound like a soprano.” Then: “Joanne, share your music. Show her what to do.” I became a Lydian on the strength of my walking into a Lydians rehearsal, perhaps to sing.
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