Friday, May 3, 2013
Get ready for summertime fun with "Vineyard Confidential" columnist Holly Nadler's new novel "Lady Slipper Farm and the Summer People." The homegrown serial makes its debut Monday with two installments every week on MV Patch.
How do four friends with an organic farm on Martha's Vineyard cope with a bevy of high-maintenance summer customers? We'll soon find out in Holly Nadler's upcoming novel, "Lady Slipper Farm and the Summer People," which makes its debut Monday on MV Patch. It's a comedy of manners about high-profile summer residents and the insanity they create for the Island locals working for and around them, says screenwriter, columnist, published novelist and Vineyard Gazette reporter Nadler, who is giving Patch exclusive serial rights to her new story. Nadler's Vineyard farmers are: Their challenging customers include: We'll meet all these characters and more in "Lady Slipper Farm and the Summer People." With installments coming twice a week, you might…
Monday, April 1, 2013
Old wives' tales are worth examining because, no surprise here!, we’re still plenty superstitious!
Back in the old days, there were more freaky little tricks and tics for keeping trouble at bay, as well as for crooking a coy finger at good luck, than you could shake a frog at. And while you were shaking that frog, you could rub it on your face to banish freckles. Did it work? Probably not, or we’d still be swabbing swamp crits over all our open pores. Old wives' tales are worth examining because, no surprise here!, we’re still plenty superstitious! It’s intriguing to see if any of these folkloric tidbits might continue to come in handy. For instance, are bushy brows on men an indication of wealth? I’m thinking we could go two ways with this one: Any man with gobs of money might be so enamored of himself, he could make braids of his nose…
Monday, March 25, 2013
Tales of woeful mismatches in the Vineyard social scene.
It may have started as far back as two thousand years ago when, let’s just say hypothetically, a Wampanoag sachem invited tribesmen to share roasted beached whale around the campfire. Later an assistant-sachem might have taken the honcho host aside and berated him, “Didn’t you know one of your tribesmen resented another tribesman for planting corn too close to his ancestor’s burial mound?” To which the sachem might have responded with the Wampanoag equivalent of “Yikes!” Another for-real sketchy Vineyard dinner, this one taking place in 1874, was organized by a Methodist minister in honor of sitting prez Ulysses S. Grant. Famously fond of brandy, Ulysses S. was aghast to find himself in the midst of a strenuously abstemious church society…
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Each week, we'll ask readers to submit their most interesting, humorous, and outlandish captions for some unforgettable images.
- THE NEIGHBORHOOD FILES
- Kat McCourt
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Saturday, December 15, 2012
Try your hand at captioning a photo - make it memorable! A photo is worth a thousand words, we want to get a few from you! Tell us in the Comment section. Image shown here is for sale as a limited-edition print from Martha’s Vineyard photographer and artist, Benjamin McCormick.
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
The new Vineyard classic will soon reach be available in bookstores around the world.
A familar title around the Island and beyond, "Hitchhiking with Larry David," by Paul Samuel Dolman has just been purchased by Gotham/Penguin Books and will be released in a hardcover edition in May 2013. M.V. Patch caught up with Paul a few days ago while he was bopping around in Southern California, on a mission to meet more people and catch more waves. A conversation with Paul is never short of entertaining and enlightening, and this five minute chat followed suit: M.V. Patch: Where did you grow up and where do you consider 'home' to be? P.S.D.: In South Florida, with summers on the Vineyard. I worked there in a variety of jobs, bike shop guy, taxi driver, and a lot of piano playing all over the place. ... M.V. Patch: Most of us here …
Monday, November 19, 2012
A guide to this town's glam past.
First you clap your eyes on those New Englandy church steeples as you sail into the harbor. It’s quaint. Lots of pretty stores, folks with two-and-three-seater strollers for their expensive broods of kids. And while the town’s restauranteurs have finally – finally! – been sanctioned to sell wine with their coq au vin– say, did the coq in earlier years need to be prepared without vin as in coq au Shirley Temple? Harder forms of booze are still verboten. That means no bars, no night life, no drunken sailors lurching onto shore to find damsels with high cleavage and low self-esteem. It’s . . . a trifle dull in Vineyard Haven which, for some cockamamie reason, is also-known-as Tisbury. Is it an evil twin thing? “I love Edgartown!” “There’s…
Monday, July 23, 2012
Minot’s Ledge off Cohasset
Yeah, yeah, we have great lighthouses right here on the Island, and they’ve got stories up their own Fresnelled wazoo: The Cape Poque light, built in 1802, that used to drive keepers nutso from isolation, the Gay Head, 1799, whose super, Ebenezer Skiff bilked the Treasury Department for the relentless chore of wiping red clay from the glass (and he deserved every penny), plus the gorgeous green lights of both Chops, East and West, and the Edgartown light where gooey-eyed romantics get engaged (abandon all hope, ye who enter here!). But Minot’s Ledge? Whoo-ey baby! It’s just northwest of us, some 70 miles if you sail over to Wood’s Hole, then zip through the Channel, and hang a left at Cape Cod Bay. It's better to picture Celtics shooter …
Louisa Hufstader
9:10 am on Friday, May 3, 2013
I'm more of a coffee-cup pig, myself. Can't wait for your story to start, Holly! more ›