mpeople2011_3_anya

Anya Ayoung Chee Exclusive:

On winning Project Runway and surviving the tapes

Bhagwansingh Exclusive:

Wedding of the decade

Trinidad Fashion An industry in crisis?

Boom time for Gold The time to invest is NOW!

issue 3 • Oct 2011 • us $2.95

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Editor’s Note

Contents

Something Old, Something New The Barbados Chattel House combines fine art photography with the history of Caribbean architecture.

This visual masterpiece is brought to life through the lens of internationally known photographer, Bob Kiss alongside Dr. Henry Fraser who crafts a beautiful narrative using his extensive knowledge of the history of Caribbean architecture.

Cost: $440.00 Available exclusively at Nigel R. Khan Bookseller

For your Coffee Table The MACO Caribbean Homes Coffee Table book is filled with some of the most magical homes in the region from Cuba to Curacao. This compilation of Caribbean architecture will not only make your coffee table a bit more attractive, but will also make a fab gift this season.

Cost: $150 Available at bookstores island wide

The page title above was designed by Paul Antonio Attong, Trinidadian born Master Scribe to royalty.

Featured inside

12 60

40

22

36 Publisher: Toute Bagai Publishing Limited Managing Editor: Nikola Lashley

48 Race To The Finish

Design & Layout: Daryl Nagil

12 Tale of a Master Scribe

52 Cupcake Revolution

Nikki Ashby-Mills, Adrian Pinheiro, Bekim Betoni Rauseo, Jaffari Saleem,

16 Gold Fever

54 Angostura’s Rum Festival

Photography: Christopher Daniel, Fotograe, Gary Jordan,

20 Embrace The Unexpected

56 Young Blood

Productions, Ash Design, camdoc3, egon, Eye Design Photo Team, Jani

22 Let Them Eat Cake

60 The Evolution Of Anya

SavchenkoJulia, 7io, ViktorLugovskoy), Lifetime TV, Andrea De Silva,

30 Read Freely

70 Editor Loves

MACO People Trinidad Issue 3 , 2011

32 Rosé Wine For Wimps?

72 Hideaway Boutiques

36 Swan Lake

76 YUM

38 Easy On The Eye

78 Meet The Joy of Rum

40 A Talk With Ty Batson

80 Harry D.P. Sooknarine

44 Trini Health Nut

84 Insurance SOE

8 Fashion Week or Fashion Weak

Writers: Shaun Gianetti, Zoe Knaggs, Nikola Lashley, Jeremy Matouk, Savannah West, Giselle Laronde-West.

sites

Books Mags &

Daryl Nagil, Antony Scully, istockphoto.com (A-Motion Media Bryson Studios, Inc., Lathuric, lidian, malerapaso, MentalArt, R.J.Lerich, Appleton Estate Jamaica Rum, Image Farctory Limited, Absolute, For Advertising Inquiries please contact: Nasma Mohammed-Chin-nasma2002@aol.com Michelle Hart-michelle@macomag.com P: 868.622.0519 F: 868.628.6909 Toute Bagai Publishing Limited 26 Kelly Kenny Street, Woodbrook, Port of Spain, Trinidad Tel (868) 622-0519 Fax (868) 628-6909, Email info@macomag.com Web www.macomag.com Printed by: The Office Authority Printing Division The cover and content of M People are fully protected by Toute Bagai Publishing Ltd and cannot be reproduced in any form without written permission.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in these pages are the views of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of MACO Magazines, Toute Bagai Publishing or any of its advertisers and collaborators.

Touch the Caribbean on iPad!!

If you are travelling this season, download your favourite MACO Magazine on your iPad and bon voyage! Flip through this gorgeous Caribbean magazine on your device, connect with advertisers on a whole new level and always have access to your favourite features.

Zinio.com

I’m having a bite to eat with my daughter at Caffé del Mare, Crews Inn and in walks...well, who I am absolutely convinced is a famous Hollywood actor. He smiles shyly and says, “Hi,’’ which somehow upholds my chief feeling and subsequent chain of thought.

He’s with a woman, who, in four seconds flat I convince myself could only be his publicist, obviously from New York. Under my breath I confer with my daughter… “I’m sure it’s… Oh, you know… him from that movie…he plays…”

Our bill arrives. I can no longer restrain my nosiness, I turn and utter words I never thought I’d hear leave my own lips, “Excuse me, are you... are you, that actor?’’

Before I can say another word the woman, pipes in and says brightly, in a bouncy American accent, “Who do you think he is?” She’s half laughing and smiles with exaggerated patience. “Well… uhmm, ahh, I think…uhmm, I’m not sure’’ comes my flubbing reply.

Some months ago I made a valiant effort; worked my best contacts to secure an exclusive interview with Dawn Gibbs, wife of the Commissioner of Police. She declined my request, citing security reasons and I moved on until that day in Crews Inn, when I found myself face to face with—not a New York publicist at all, but Dawn Gibbs herself. You see, I had mistaken her husband Dwayne for the Hollywood actor, William Defoe. My daughter snickered mirthfully at my social faux pas.

In retelling this story and by default, but with much resistance from my daughter, my version of events are: I got my exclusive interview with Dawn Gibbs (although it lasted only for five seconds and she asked all the questions) after all! And she was everything I thought she wouldn’t be: riotously funny, bright and super engaging and why wouldn’t she be, married to a guy that looks like William Defoe!

In this edition of MACO People, Trinidad our genuinely exclusive stories and interviews are sure to leave you totally star-struck!

I do hope you’re sitting down.

Comments, suggestions, feedback, criticisms­­­­­...get in touch. nik@ macomag.com or like us at facebook.com/macomagazines or follow us at twitter.com/macomagazines.

NIK LASHLEY Managing Editor

Toute Bagai Publishing Limited 26 Kelly Kenny Street, Woodbrook, Port of Spain, Trinidad. W.I. Tel (868) 622 0519 Fax (868) 628 6909 Email: info@macomag.com Website: www.macomag.com Facebook: www.facebook.com/MACOmagazines Mpeople 3 Twitter: www.twitter.com/MACOmagazines

Kudos to Ryan Morra from Radio Shack, The Falls at Westmall.

His superb customer service lead to the happy purchase of a discounted iTouch. Ryan Morra, MACO People, Trinidad salutes 3 you!

anya The Evolution of

Writer: Nikola Lashley Photography courtesy Lifetime TV

I kind of knew in the back of my head that something amazing is going to happen.

I just didn’t know what.

Anya Ayoung Chee worshipped three Jordan, her ballet teacher and Elsa Klensch .

Instead, she became a household name—first famously, then infamously, then famously again.

For the first, she devoted herself to basketball.

A die-hard Chicago Bull’s fan to this day, Anya continues to follow the play-offs. For the second, she contorted her body, tore her muscles and trained for 17 years as a classical ballerina. And, for the third, she soaked up everything the 90s TV show; Style with Elsa Klensch had to offer, getting her earliest taste for the glamorous world of fashion.

When the US hit TV show Project Runway came knocking, Anya donned her Aldo wedges, shaved half her head, spent 12 hours every day for four months receiving sewing lessons from a Tobagonian, created couture out of a cotton bed sheet—and stole the final show with a collection aptly named Tobago Love.

As

a child,

gods in equal measure—M ichael

A straight-A student at St Joseph’s Convent, Port of Spain, Anya studied earth sciences and was expected to follow her father and become a doctor.

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On the show, she is the caring one, a mediator, offering advice, smoothing ruffled feathers. The judges like her sense of style, her wizardry with patterns, and her taste.

Since returning to Trinidad following the filming

of Project Runway, she had been staying at an upscale hotel in Port of Spain. It took seven days for her to respond to the email requesting an interview. She apologised warmly for the delay. On the day of the interview she is running late; there’s a hairdresser’s appointment she can’t miss.

At 10.30 p.m., there she is. At last. At the roof top bar, Anya is with her brother (she has five in all) and a spattering of other guests. Wyatt Gallery, her boyfriend, sits quietly in the wings.

We dispense with the small talk and move straight on to the big question.

“Have you won Project Runway?”

“I can’t tell you.” She giggles.

“Why not?”

“Because I signed a huge contract.”

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“You can tell me, Anya, I won’t tell anyone.”

“If it’s leaked I get disqualified and I’ve put too much into it to get disqualified at this point. And I want people to watch.”

And she did. Well, nearly.

Meiling, leader of the fashion pack, friend, second mum and mentor, bestowed upon Anya the ability to turn chaos into couture.

“Well, we all know Tim Gunn was in Trinidad, so you must be through to the last round?” It’s a somewhat lame attempt at pretending to be in the know.

“The back was a complete mistake!” She laughs, referring to the cut detail at the back of the silk top she created from her bedtime kaftan in the first challenge. “I didn’t realise that when I laid the fabric on the table I cut the front and the back at the same time! I put it over the mannequin and thought uhmm, this doesn’t look so bad…it worked out and got me through.

“Really! I think the programme format changes every year,” she says with a laugh.

Her response smacks of subterfuge. Much to my annoyance, her self-edit button never malfunctions. Not a flutter of an eyelash gives away the secret that she had actually won the whole competition.

Meiling, leader of the fashion pack, friend, second mum and mentor, bestowed upon Anya the ability to turn chaos into couture.

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At the interview stage of the show, within minutes of her revelation that she could not sew Twitter was on fire with comments about her monumental handicap. Brand Anya was in full swing and had just gone international.

“The cameras stayed for however long it took me to thread the machine, waiting for me to curse or shout, but I refused to give them that.

It’s not me and it’s just not how I was raised by my parents. I’ve also learned how to really centre myself. Whatever I was dealing with I was dealing with it internally and I don’t want anybody to get it. But, on the inside I was totally freaking out.”

“Walking into that room with Heidi and Michael and Nina and Tim, I really told myself, well okay.

“These are four people that really know their stuff in each of their own industries. I could have really psyched myself out, but I was really just able to know, with due respect, yes they are who they are, but they’re still just people. And I really just approached it in that way.”

Really? Who would have guessed watching her on TV. “Yes! I know.” She laughs. “I’m very competitive.”

Her cool demeanour under pressure can be unwittingly accredited to her training as a beauty queen (She represented Trinidad and Tobago at Miss Universe 2008), but Anya offers up other, less obvious reasons.

She held her nerve when many others may have lost it.

“It certainly doesn’t look as dramatic on TV as it is in real life,” she says and shakes her head, still in disbelief. “Sitting waiting to hear if you’re through, Heidi paused, realistically for a minute and a half, it was torture. I really felt I was going home, to be honest. There was a part of me that thought it would be better if I went home, because what if I get on and I can’t manage with the sewing, it will look terrible.”

“We all had a very Caribbean, but British upbringing and culture and way of being—that you don’t wear frustration or anger or fear on your sleeve. My mom raised us to have great table manners, elbows off the table and then that prim and properness of St Joseph’s Convent— it’s all compounded. I did ballet for 16-17 years and that has influenced my composure tremendously.”

She had only ever sewn on one machine. At Parsons School of Design, she had studied graphic design, not fashion.

Perhaps she is a product of Amy Chua’s style of parenting—where strict rules and high expectations are prescribed in Chua’s new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother: Raising Children the Chinese Way.

“Honestly, the cameras sat there in front of me waiting for me to give something, but I was very determined not to give anything away.

Especially because I knew they were waiting for me to mess up.”

“Absolutely! Yeah, I read about it in Vogue. It’s considered very controversial but I haven’t suffered. But Oliver who’s on the show left Taiwan at 16 because of a similar sort of upbringing. Not being academically inclined, he

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Paranoia is a strange thing. You can be paranoid about no one caring and you can be paranoid about everybody caring. I had a very solid sense of what I had done versus what everybody else thought I had done.

I was really much more shattered because of my parents and my brothers than by anything else. It really solidified what was important in my life.

took the brunt of it and said he couldn’t take it anymore and left. It can go totally haywire.”

A suited waiter passes by and spots us sitting at the bar, doubles back and mumbles something about the bar being closed. “Oh, I know,” Anya says, and orders two glasses of house white.

In a short, loose, patterned dress, she cuts a striking well-put-together figure—girlish and boyish at the same time—elegant and relaxed. Her long Mohawk hairstyle is shiny and accentuates her cheekbones. Without makeup, 29-year-old Anya looks to be having the time of her life.

She sips wine and chats freely about the apparent air of confidence she exudes in the first episode of Project Runway as her lack of sewing skills come to light. She says she was never really as confident as she appeared.

“I’m just naturally very driven, very focused and I’m very apt to please. I always wanted to be the perfect daughter, the perfect child, the perfect dancer, the perfect everything.

Then, she adds, “After the tapes I let go of that.’’

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We are sitting alone in the shadows at an empty bar on the first floor of the hotel.

Why had she not pursued some sort of court action over the leaking of the sex tapes?

“I don’t believe in negative energy,” she says, evenly. “I look back now and know that I made the right choice. I could have spent the next decade in court, but I thought it’s just not worth it. It is what it is. Instead, I designed Anya De Rogue”! A lingerie line for women “who dare to be themselves on the inside and out’’.

She has no desire for vengeance, only for the recovery of her career. And she’s prepared to fight for it.

“I just entered into warrior mode and I knew instantly, okay, I’m going to have to fight a battle. I knew how serious this was in a small country like Trinidad that’s so conservative. It was a huge watershed moment.”

There are many strands to Anya’s “good girl gone bad” persona—vulnerable and invincible, part submissive and masochistic and by her own admission, exploration, sexual or otherwise, is in her nature.

Just over 18 months ago a sex tape surfaced and within hours went viral. Filmed at her apartment in New York, “prior to the Miss Universe pageant” it captured intimate scenes, in graphic detail between Anya, her boyfriend, Wyatt, and another woman.

Today, Anya is at a stage in her life where she can, and is willing to handle the difficult questions.

“It was very hard dealing with the tapes with my mom and my brothers, really very hard. ‘’ She pauses.

“A lot of it is a blur to be honest. I fought against it and fought against having to look at myself so closely, but I had to do it, until I could see everything I needed to see, until I saw everything there was to see.”

Her words are carefully measured. “Going that deep into myself to feel that much pain was why I think I grew so much. I had to face what my choices were and the ramifications of them.”

“How did your mum’s reaction to you make you feel after the tapes came out?

“It wasn’t so much her hurt and disappointment

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that I remember but her constant commitment to me.

“We constantly had arguments, regardless of how much energy it took, just her never letting go of me, never giving up on me, never shutting the door, as much as she was upset. I don’t mean never shutting the door—not to never eventually become compassionate. Even though she was angry she never prevented me from knowing she was angry—she could have stopped that too, but she never gave up on me and I know she never will.”

“Who was to blame for leaking tapes? Were you betrayed by someone close to you?”

“I would never divulge fully how it happened, but it had absolutely nothing to do with Wyatt.

I just want to clear that up.”

I’m not sure if at this point I was silent or rather that I had been silenced. It was an important point that Anya was intent on making.

“I never doubted Wyatt because I always knew the circumstances. It would have been a waste of my time to place blame there. The biggest difficulty was when it came to my family and what he represented to them”.

“And, how was he portrayed?”

“I got a lot of hatred,” she says, flatly. “But he, he was very much cast as the villain. Which I think was very unfair. But, I learned very fast that people will have their opinions no matter what you say to them.”

Did you ever feel paranoid?”

“Paranoia is a strange thing. You can be paranoid about no one caring and you can be paranoid about everybody caring. I had a very solid sense of what I had done versus what everybody else thought I had done. I was really much more shattered because of my parents and my brothers than by anything else. It really solidified what was important in my life.

“So how do you continue to function in a country that judged you so harshly for what you did?”

“I think everything in life is a reaction to something else—so Trinidad in all of its

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judgement, which I’ve very much lived through on many, many levels has created me. I am the sum total of Trinidad and everything it is.”

“Did you ever want to leave and never come back?”

“Oh, my God! I don’t know where I would be without Trinidad. I think even if I wasn’t born here and didn’t have any connections here, like Wyatt, I would be very drawn to it. I don’t know where in the world, even with all the travelling I’ve done, anywhere that is remotely like this place.”

Before I can turn our conversation back to Project Runway she adds, with profound humility.

“I think a lot of people who have had genuinely full lives die when they’ve learned what they came to learn and the leaking of the tapes really pushed me to know that.”

This chapter of her life is now closed and she’s already moved on.

Drive and passion are two things Anya has in bucket loads.

“I was in Toronto when I filled out the application on the day it was due. I don’t know the city very well, so I thought the FedEX office was right downstairs from where I was staying. It wasn’t!

It was still really cold at the time and I had to run like 15 blocks to get to the right place. When I got there it was closing, the guy was like ‘Okay, Okay.’ He put it in—my application to Project Runway wouldn’t have gone if it weren’t for him.

It was just one of the moments. I kind of knew in the back of my head that something amazing is going to happen. I just didn’t know what.”

I couldn’t help at this point but to go off topic slightly to ask Anya about this quiet sense of spiritual balance that I had detected since our meeting.

“I grew up Catholic…this is such a bone of contention for my poor mother because she’s still very devoted, but I’ve chosen right now a more… although not practising, Buddhist path, just in terms of meditation.’’

Ahhh, I see.

“I’ve learnt very much about how to connect to things deeper within me and operate from

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The Gallery, Long Circular Mall, St. James, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago Phone: 1868 684 7450 Email: thorpesheena@yahoo.com

a more universal level rather than a religious level. At this point in my life I fully believe in transition and the evolution in myself,” she says, paying obeisance to something higher.

“I think the whole point of life is to learn. I’m committed to my growth, I’m committed to learning— and I think that is the only real reason to be here.”

Anya has been in a five-year relationship with Wyatt, a US photographer, but her parents strong marriage is yet to shape her own plans for the future.

“I’m not the settling down type,” she offers, slightly alarmed. “It’s not my style, but we do have a great thing. I love children, but I’m doing so much right now I can’t even imagine kids.”

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There’s a boutique in the offing due to open early next year and maybe even a section in a Carnival band for 2012.

“Now is a good time for me, in conjunction with the show.

My designs are very much in demand, based on what I’ve been showing. Project Runway has given me international exposure and it’s just a matter of building on it. Reality TV doesn’t have the best reputation in the real fashion world, so it’s going to take some work, but I love what I do and I’m very committed to it on a very real level. ”Trinidad is where I’d like to begin, but I have very big plans and very big dreams.”

To Shop at PILAR by Anya visit anyaayoungchee.com.

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