Clouds over Rainorama

Clouds over Rainorama
By Keith Smith, Trinidad Express, Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

When we parted company on Friday I had gone back some 26 years to what must have been my last lime at Rainorama Palace, Lord Kitchener's sumptuous house that his great '73 road march had built. Kitch was the beaming host and proud father at the christening of his son, Christian Jason, none of us knowing that, a decade or so later, not only that son but the rest of his children as well as Valerie Green, their mother, would be on the way out of the house if not entirely out of the Grandmaster's life, the old man having fallen for a young ting, the Roberts family, almost literally out in the rain.

I had touched, too, on Friday, on how Mr Roberts had, quite deliberately, robbed his children of their heritage a judge, a couple weeks ago, finding that Valerie, Kernel and the rest of the brood had no legal claim to either the house or the land, the deal between Kitch and his Betsy, his now deceased darling, legal in law, whatever the immoral ploy "Kitch" used to pull the rug, again almost literally, from under the feet of the young girl he had taken out of school, genius as I held then and now, not to be confused with honourable behaviour or even niceness.

But, that Sunday in '79, not a cloud threatened the Roberts horizon, not with Kitch's calypso friends reminiscing on hilarious calypso times Robin, dead even before Kitch, "reminiscing about the time when one man "bawl down" Smiley from singing on the stage by screaming simply:

"No ..ah say NO!"

Talk flowing the 30's and the 40s a seamy time easy to romanticise, however, here in Kitch's sprawling "palace," where to use the pink-toned toilet to pee seems a perversity.

Calypso footnotes how Valentino used to call himself Robin until Kitch deciding that there couldn't be two "robins" in the tent and sighting the "sheik" hairstyle which "Val" then sported, dubbing him "Valentino".... how Brynner began singing as the Lord Fire .Merchant as SwaIIow about Holly Betaudier who, according to Pretender, "so, lucky he could go a swimming race with a shark and win".

...About Rose coming from Tobago "thin like a broomstick,"...about Viper who, long time, used to pray for no microphone at the venue because they couldn't beat him when it came to "power voice".

Some bards too Creole singing: "Don't Jealous Them" for six years Arrow, says Pretender, who ent have no sense because "if he open a jam factory he bound to become rich-every year he singing 'jam'"...And, inevitably, calling up the ghost of Spoiler, Pretender paints the picture the long hands "hypnotising" the audience, Spoiler, cool, cool, singing that even today none, no not Funny... not anybody has even come near his comic genius Spoiler singing about the "Dumb Concert" and getting standing encores for a chorus that was a chorus of silence (bet that there is NOT such a thing, nuh?)...

A suitable pause, not out of respect for the dead, but in awe of an astonishing talent and finally, ending it all, Smiley (dead too) singing some of Spoiler's best, Spitfire (dead too) delivering a rousing rendition of "Post, Post Another Letter for Thelma" Pretender (now dead too) doing for the christening crowd one of his 1943 numbers. "Nobody in the World Better than Us", early black protest, and "Lock and Key" and "Gone with the Wind" and....and..." yes it was that kind of Sunday morning at Kitch's palace of a place when Kitch and Valerie were christening their son, when neither Betsy nor her sister, that stranger, who was to inherit the "Palace", that a "soupaped" Kitch had willed to Betsy, were anywhere on the scene.

Look here, the house scene now grimmer than grim for Kitchener's children unless, that is, the Government decides to buy back the "Palace" place from Betsy's inheriting sister as a museum monument and let the fruit of Kitch's loins reside there as long as they live, which is the same deal that Betsy had with Kitch, "the young ting" dying before the "old man", however, leading up to this current kakada, a slew of entertainer I hear, gathering in Diego on Saturday, to see if they could right a wrong committed years and years ago but the question that remains, for me, is this: How is the Culture Minister, Marlene McDonald, attorney though she be, going to argue a case for using public funds to clear up private confusion?