By Mike Adler, Scarborough Mirror

D’Regulars among 11 of 12 festival mas camps based in Scarborough

Having shaped it with pliers and masking tape, Clyde Bascombe dabs contact cement on the wire frame of what will soon be a face.

He learned the art of wire bending as a young man, and over 30 years since has experimented to improve it.

“It is generally believed that the art is dying,” said Bascombe, who was about to drape the frame with gold-sequined fabric at the D’Regulars Arts and Cultural Club in Scarborough.

“Kids now don’t really care to do it.”

Volunteers with Bascombe’s particular skills are rare, but anyone who can sew, glue, cut, cook or do anything else is welcome at a masquerader band camp.

“Those who are not experts we make experts of them by the end of the season,” said Sandra Davis, in charge of costumes at the D’Regulars storefront camp at Lawrence and Morningside avenues.

“Everyone brings their chairs and their tables and their glue sticks. No one’s paid; it’s a labour of love,” Davis said.

“You have to be passionate to be able to put up with that.”

In Scarborough each year, hundreds do, whether they get intensely involved in a mas camp for weeks on end or just drop by with food or coffee.

The grandest events of the Toronto Caribbean Carnival are held elsewhere, but mas is pretty much made in Scarborough.

This year, the area was home to 11 of the 12 festival bands, including all of the largest.

“This is the pulse (of the Toronto carnival). This is where the money is spent,” said Davis, adding planning for next year’s carnival begins just after the current one ends.

Costume ideas are argued over and materials found. Carnival in Trinidad, the island where most band leaders are from, is watched carefully to spot trends which, like fashions on runways in Milan, turn up in Toronto soon after.

“It’s actually a very fierce competition, a lot of bragging rights,” said Davis, who has been with D’Regulars for three years.

“Every time we come to a point where we’re almost there, we look at (a design) and say there’s a change necessary.”

Around the May long weekend, bands start staging launches to show their costumes. People are picky about the feathers: if one package is bad, “the talk spreads really fast,” Davis said.

D’Regulars is a category C band which will be at the back of the Aug. 3 Grand Parade. Instead of four gigantic costumes, it will send one female individual costume – the one Bascombe was working on – to the King and Queen competition and, since the camp has no loading dock, it must be assembled in the parking lot.

The band, always looking for donations and volunteers, hopes a proper presentation in the parade will convince the judges to move them to the B category in 2014.

Williams has been the band’s leader for 35 years (for some, D’Regulars appeared as a guest band or teamed up with others) and involved in Toronto’s carnival since 1970.

“It’s something that has been in my blood and has stayed in my blood,” he said, adding the festival’s great success is due to the costumes of the mas makers, the Toronto Mas Bands Association, which produces the spectacle tourists come to see.

This year, the D’Regulars camp was also home to young people from Danzig Street, scene of a mass shooting last July at a Toronto Community Housing townhouse complex a few blocks away.

The youths were shown how to make every part of the band’s hand-made costumes. “They may even design their own costumes and wear them in 2014,” said Davis.

“In order to heal the community people have to believe in themselves, and they have to know from whence they came.”

Carnival in most of the Caribbean islands started with colonization and the slave trade, Davis said, when slaves free to enjoy themselves for a day painted their faces white and wore long dresses to make a mockery of their owners.

“There’s a history behind it and a very strong history too.”

Williams said most mas camps are in Scarborough because most Trinidadians in Greater Toronto, almost 80 per cent, live in Scarborough.

On Wednesday, Chris Alexander, CAO of the festival, said another reason for the concentration is camps need to close and move each year, and industrial leases in Scarborough are very reasonable.

Volunteers come from many places to be part of a mas camp and its atmosphere, added Alexander, who said he had visited two large camps on Howden Road, near Birchmont Road and Lawrence Avenue, the night before.

“It reminds you of what you’ve missed in the Caribbean.”

Costume for D’Regulars’ eight parade sections – including one in camoflage clothes geared to male masqueraders and known in Trinidad as “war mas” – are still on sale, and Davis said no one needs an invitation to purchase one and join the parade.

“We’re all one on that day.”

The band hosts a costume presentation in front of Walmart at Scarborough Town Centre from noon to 2 p.m. this Saturday, July 27, as well as a barbecue at the Howard Johnson Inn at Warden Avenue and Hwy. 401 from 6 p.m. that evening, at which Scarborough residents will get a 50-per-cent discount on costumes.

PHOTOS: Photo/MANNY RODRIGUES

For more on this story go to:

http://www.insidetoronto.com/news-story/3908520-caribbean-carnival-mas-made-in-scarborough/