AS TOLD TO BC PIRES
My name is Louris Martin Lee-Sing and, after two years of sucking extreme salt, we have a little lights, camera, action back in show business.
I'm from Carenage. A beautiful, scary, and interesting place. So I grew up by the beach and down the islands.
My DDI was not luxurious. My grandfather had a water taxi service. We, his grandchildren, would spend days, sometimes weeks, at his small caretaker house on Monos.
He worked for Mr Massy, who had the traditional palatial DDI house just a few metres away. We were not allowed there but we snuck in constantly anyway. Driving the boat, getting black-black in the sun, away from our parents and anything looking like supervision. He barely fed us. We ate Crix and cheese every meal.
[caption id="attachment_930477" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Louris Martin-Lee Sing says things in showbiz were going great before covid. She had just convinced herself and some parts of the world that she was now a stand-up comedian. - Mark Lyndersay[/caption]
It was the best!
I live 200 metres from the house I was born in.
My dad, the first of five, still lives there. My mom is the first of 12.
I'm the first of three, a brother and a sister.
My mother passed in 2014. I really miss her. I have full conversations with her in my mind at times. Lots of times.
She asked questions that made me reflect and led me to what I really wanted.
I never expected to get married and have children, but I met Wayne and his cooking was so good, I get hook.
Our girls, Kem and Iris, are 14 and seven.
It feels like the older they get, the more I realise how much madness being a parent is. Who takes on this much responsibility?
At UWI, my mother wanted law for me, I wanted theatre.
(Our compromise was) a BA in psychology. I did as many arts electives as I could and a post-grad diploma in mediation skills.
I've really integrated both into my film and theatre production consultancy. I also integrated theatrical role-play working for different mediation companies.
I grew up Roman Catholic but was over it by my teens. Wayne and I are heathens.
No, BC Pires, I don’t believe in a god you can pray to for good weather for the cricket.
Unless I'm in big trouble. Then I'll definitely give the old white man a shout in case!
On second thought, what's going on with West Indies these days might qualify.
Mucurapo Girls’ Primary School in St James was next to the library and they let me borrow new books every morning. And I would change them after school.
I read quickly everything I could get my hands on. Especially things I shouldn't be reading, like Mills & Boon.
In secondary school, I read comic books and sci-fi and fantasy novels. Asimov and Herbert and Dick. I would pretend to beg outside the tuck shop and ask the other students for weird items like lint and their dreams. I was very, very bored, I think.
Then in form five I saw a theatre performance of Wole Soyinka’s The Swamp Dwellers and joined the theatre company. The theatre people became my famil
