The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

Three cheers for the Commissioner of Police for his swift action to prevent a candle of entrepreneurship and innovation from being smothered in a sheet of “tin ferl”.

Not many people took notice in early March when three brave young pioneers launched a food truck catering business on the grounds of the now Dundas Centre for the Performing Arts.

Patrice Robinson, Branden Kemp and Kendrick Delaney, like the rest of us, could not have seen the gathering Covid-19 storm that was headed our way. And they could not have appreciated just how fortuitous their business plan would prove to be.

After sit-down restaurant dining was prohibited, establishments had to rejig their business for the sale of cooked food to take away. Robinson, Kemp and Delaney were in the right place, with the right product, at the right time.

The pop-up market attracted an assortment of vendors on-site a few days each week. Pop-up food sales are great in this time of social distancing and they are primed to continue after the pandemic is vanquished.

The Commissioner, health officials and inland revenue were right to allow them to continue their business. Kudos to the Dundas management for recognising that theatre goers get the munchies after a night of art and entertainment. Tin Ferl was originally intended to provide al fresco dining for patrons.

Tin Ferl (aluminum foil) is the very vernacular for taking food home.

What is egregious though is that 90 years after it was set up as a training school for domestic workers, we still call our premier studio for acting and improv by the name of the Colonial Secretary whose American wife had the unmitigated gall to compare it to the prestigious Tuskegee Institute in the US, co-founded by a former slave.

The Colonial Secretary, Sir Charles Dundas, was promoted to Government House as Governor and had the dubious distinction of being edged out of his job to make way for the abdicated King of England, Edward the Eighth. Lady Dundas was naïve to think that the former king’s American wife, Wallis Simpson, would find charity in promoting the cause of the nascent Dundas Civic Centre. She didn’t.

It is past time that we rename this premiere stage for homegrown thespians after one of our greatest incubators of young talent, the late Winston Vernon Saunders.

Nobody would have applauded the Tin Ferl pioneers more loudly than Saunders. Holding court perched on the low wall around the patio outside the theatre, Saunders was known to wax eloquent during intermission about the renaissance conservatory he dreamt the Dundas could become. In his almost 25 years as its Chairman he drove the transformation of the Dundas that we enjoy today.

Saunders was a teacher, a lawyer, a coroner, an actor himself, an accomplished playwright and a cultural director. He was the birth father of the National Youth Choir, the National Dance Company and the National Children’s Choir.

Acting companies like University Players, James Catalyn and Friends, Ringplay Productions and its spawn Shakespeare in Paradise became household names as a result. Extraordinary talent like Robert Bain, Phillip Burrows, Shirley Hall-Bass, Ian Strachan, Claudette Allens, legendary playwright Jeanne Thompson and countless others gained fresh curtain calls as the Dundas evolved introducing theatre to generations of new patrons from primary schoolers to great-grandparents.

So, it’s high time we dim the lights on the Dundas name and put up a new marquee for the Winston Saunders Performing Arts Centre.

An astute Tin Ferl vendor could create a fufu appetiser in his honour, perhaps the Winnie Saunders Chairman’s fritter. Served spicy and conchy with a tamarind glaze, of course.

THE GRADUATE

Nassau,

October 18, 2020