Tak­ing time away from the press­ing so­cial, po­lit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic is­sues, it is a day to ac­claim the joy of read­ing. Read­ing re­al­ly pro­vides sus­te­nance for the soul. It can lead to nuggets of in­for­ma­tion that you nev­er knew ex­ist­ed. The Black Lives Mat­ter (BLM) move­ment has led to the re­moval of many sym­bols of black op­pres­sion, main­ly from the slav­ery era. It has al­so ex­tend­ed to the use of cer­tain names.

In my dai­ly jour­ney through the in­ter­net search­ing for things of in­ter­est, I en­coun­tered a British dance mu­sic DJ, Joey Ne­gro. What a strange name. Fur­ther read­ing, led to the dis­cov­ery that the re­al name of Joey Ne­gro was Dave Lee. From Lee to Ne­gro was cer­tain­ly quite a leap in the imag­i­na­tion.

Joey Ne­gro it turns out, was al­so deep af­fect­ed by the BLM move­ment which prompt­ed him to re­vert to his giv­en name.

Ac­cord­ing to Face­book, Joey ad­mit­ted that he grew in­creas­ing­ly un­com­fort­able with the name “ es­pe­cial­ly as I’ve got old­er…Out of place in 2020”. Quite frankly, I would have thought it would be out of place in any era.

What fired my imag­i­na­tion with the sto­ry, was the method with which Joey Ne­gro ar­rived at the name. Ac­cord­ing to Lee, he ini­tial­ly came up with the name by merg­ing two of his favourite artists at the time, Pal Joey and J Wal­ter Ne­gro. This in­for­ma­tion sent my imag­i­na­tion soar­ing in­to the stratos­phere. Can you imag­ine, that the name was cho­sen be­cause of Pal Joey Lewis. For the young­sters, there was no bet­ter “horn” than one from Pal Joey Lewis, the leader of per­haps the great­est or­ches­tra in the his­to­ry of T&T.

Joey Lewis led the longest-run­ning, and the last of Trinidad’s pop­u­lar dance or­ches­tras.

As a young boy in the 1970s, I would stand out­side of the Fyz­abad Sports Club (not be­ing of age or even able to pay to en­ter), where al­though I could not di­rect­ly ex­pe­ri­ence “a horn”, I at least got the “echo”.

My ex­cite­ment swift­ly dis­si­pat­ed on fur­ther read­ing, when I dis­cov­ered that Pal Joey was a 1957 Amer­i­can mu­si­cal film that starred Ri­ta Hay­worth. This in­for­ma­tion sent me on a mis­sion to ex­plore the life of Pal Joey Lewis. It was fit­ting­ly on a Car­ni­val Mon­day on Feb­ru­ary 8, 2016, at the age of 78, that the man who en­livened many Car­ni­val fetes, took his mu­si­cal tal­ents up to the hall of St. Pe­ter.

A trib­ute to Joey Lewis re­vealed that he start­ed play­ing mu­sic when he was 10 and formed his own band in 1954 called Joey Lewis and the Teenagers. He got the nick­name ‘Pal Joey’ af­ter the 1957 Amer­i­can movie, Pal Joey. So there it was, the ten­u­ous link be­tween Joey Ne­gro and our own, Pal Joey Lewis.

But more was to come. In re­search­ing Pal Joey, the mu­si­cal, I dis­cov­ered that the singing voice of Ri­ta Hay­worth was a young singer name Jo Ann Greer. This singer had pre­vi­ous­ly pro­vid­ed the singing voice for Ri­ta Hay­worth (and here comes the source of my ex­cite­ment) in a film called Af­fair in Trinidad.

I had ab­solute­ly nev­er heard of this film and as­sumed it was per­haps based in Trinidad, a sea­side city lo­cat­ed on the Pa­cif­ic Ocean, in Cal­i­for­nia, famed for its spec­tac­u­lar coast­line.

A quick look to dis­pel any idea that the ref­er­ence was to T&T, re­vealed that Af­fair in Trinidad, was a 1952 Amer­i­can film star­ring Ri­ta Hay­worth and Glenn Ford. It was tout­ed as a come­back film for Ri­ta Hay­worth and scored over $7 mil­lion at the box of­fice, a prince­ly sum back then.

Ex­cite­ment height­ened when I learnt that the film was set in T&T. Ri­ta Hay­worth played a night­club singer and dancer, even per­form­ing a dance to the sweet rhythm of our ca­lyp­so mu­sic. The plot re­volved around the ap­par­ent sui­cide death of her hus­band which lat­er turned out to be mur­der.

Glen Ford played the broth­er of Ri­ta who came to T&T to in­ves­ti­gate the mat­ter on his own.

While the plot was quite sim­ple, the stun­ning fact was that Glen Ford and Ri­ta Hay­worth came to T&T to make a movie. In 1958, Ford was ranked the num­ber one box-of­fice star in Amer­i­ca. Glen Ford was most promi­nent dur­ing Hol­ly­wood’s Gold­en Age as one of the biggest box-of­fice draws of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s and had a ca­reer that spanned more than 50 years. Ri­ta Hay­worth achieved fame dur­ing the 1940s as one of the era’s top stars, and was de­scribed as “The Love God­dess.”

Ri­ta Hay­worth was list­ed as one of the top 25 fe­male mo­tion pic­ture stars of all time in the Amer­i­can Film In­sti­tute’s sur­vey.

So to lat­er gen­er­a­tions, Ri­ta Hay­worth and Glen Ford mak­ing a movie in T&T is akin to Leonar­do Di Caprio and An­geli­na Jolie film­ing a movie on our shores.

But in land where the mur­der rate per capi­ta is 1 in 2800, and ac­cord­ing to the World Pop­u­la­tion Re­view for 2019, T&T is ranked 6th in terms of the high­est crime rate (crime rate is cal­cu­lat­ed by di­vid­ing the num­ber of re­port­ed crimes by the to­tal pop­u­la­tion, and then the re­sult is mul­ti­plied by 100,000), there is no like­li­hood of a re­peat of an af­fair in Trinidad.

Pro­fes­sor Ra­jen­dra Ram­lo­gan, Com­mer­cial and En­vi­ron­ment Law, The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies. The views ex­pressed are en­tire­ly his own.