By Marty Levine
“Same old noise!” Verna Crichlow laughs, her hands quick around the steel-drum pan, trilling the notes.
If it’s noise, it’s the kind of noise that can’t help making the crowds smile. At 75, Crichlow hobbles a bit getting over to her instrument, sitting on its stand in her art-crowded Edgewood home.
But her Caribbean Vibes Steelband has hardly slowed down. It’s still playing Regent Square’s Run Around the Square and elsewhere, and it’s been featured through the years at everything from Bloomfield’s Columbus Day parade to a casket manufacturers’ convention in Erie. It even gigged at a bar mitzvah, for which Crichlow rehearsed an island version of “Hava Nagila.”
“But they didn’t even want it!” she says.
Crichlow came to America 50 years ago from Trinidad and Tobago, and raised her five kids mostly on her own. She retired as a math teacher from the Woodland Hills district in 2004 with multiple myeloma, now in remission.
Replies