Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Ingenious Ways of Vamoosing From Martha’s Vineyard After The Ferries Have Shut Down
No way around it: Luscious as our rock happens to be, it triggers panic in people who haven’t learned to trust that this is where it’s at, never mind that it is surrounded by water, and the mainland is inaccessible from 9:30 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. When you evolve to the point where you regard the Atlantic Ocean as a precious moat, well, then you’ve arrived, and you never want to leave. But we learn in life that some people are more neurotic than others. Some visitors are alarmed that there’s nothing to do past two o’clock in the morning. After Cumby’s closes. True story: An old friend of mine, a beautiful and intelligent and surprisingly well-read actress (it happens!) from Manhattan, inherited the odd dab of money, and bought herself a cottage…
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
How Philip R. Craig Ate And Cooked His Way Through His Mysteries
We all miss him, God! How we MISS this man! Philip R. Craig (“Phil” to all who met him, even standing in line at the hot dog stand down by the Chappy wharf) died, after a brief battle with cancer, on May 8, 2007. He was “collected”, as the Aussies say, or “harvested” as Emily Dickinson once wrote, way too young. Young at heart, in any event; who knows how old he actually was?, although for you task-masters who need that extra bit of datum, he was 74. That sounds young these days, doesn’t it? At least to those of us who are 64. Phil must’ve grown ravenously hungry as he wrote his J.W. Jackson mysteries, all of them set on Martha’s Vineyard. When his hero wasn’t stepping over dead bodies strewn along isolated beaches, he reeled in big ole …
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
A fond backwards glance at the days when there was 1/2 an inch of dust on the family Mercedes and three out of four legs had to fall off the front parlor sofa before Grandmere replaced it
Yes, it's true: the so-called 1% has colonized Martha’s Vineyard, but once there existed an older, testier, less show-off-ier and, frankly, cheaper breed of elite that set the tone for the Island. And, by the way, this reporter cannot in truthiness (oh, we love that Steven Colbert, do we not?!) include herself in the “we” of the above title: She’s an outlier of a Valley Girl whose only pretensions to eastern gentility derived from the fact that she once received cast-off garments from an older cousin attending Radcliff. However, in the washashore category, I – can we switch to the first person singular now? – began visiting this rock in the late 70s, so I bore witness to an older lineage of Vineyard patrician, most of whom have sadly …
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
It’s hard to be the one catching the creep-out stories, old and new, of Martha’s Vineyard, but somebody’s gotta do it
I first became intrigued with the genre during a trip to London in June of 1983, when I noticed a ton of walking tours. Because I’m a tasteful, high-literary type of person, I signed up for two of them: “Follow in The Footsteps of Jack The Ripper,” and “Ghosts of London.” Even in the bright light of nearly-Nordic late afternoon, I quivered in my shoes. The most disquieting story was The Curse of Green Park. Nowadays this area sits in the heart of London but, back in the plague days -- let’s pin this one at the infamous 1666, grimly known as the Year of the Beast -- Green Park was a field at the periphery of the teeming town, where surplus dead bodies were carted out and slung into an open grave. You know the drill: lime scattered over the…
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Early Wild Autos On Martha’s Vineyard
The glam event couldn’t have happened on a glitzier date: In 1900 the first steam-engine auto rolled off the ferry in Vineyard Haven. It was driven by a man named Elmer J. Bliss. Islanders heralded the sight of the dazzling invention with a snappy new sobriquet: They called it a locomobile. There is no description on record of summer Edgartown resident, Elmer J. Bliss, but we can easily imagine him with goggles and a Snoopy / Red Baron scarf as he stomped on the accelerator to crank up his motor to a risqué 11 miles an hour. The media was opposed. The editor of the Vineyard Gazette wrote in high dudgeon, “Up-to-date autos are mere ugly, crawling machines, not an ounce of the artistic or poetic about them.” Well, yeah, but that hardly …
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
John Travolta On Island, 1977
He needed not a guru, not a girl friend, not a dance partner, but a nanny, and he hired one to look after him at his beach house in Malibu, but we’ll get to that presently. In the summer of ’77, just as John Travolta was preparing (or actually not preparing) for his leap from TV stardom in Welcome Back, Kotter to wild movie star frenzy with the release of Saturday Night Fever –- are you conjuring him up now in his white polyester suit, arm pointing to the next galaxy, hips swiveling with an oomph that would have made Elvis jealous (does that rhyme?!) – the shy young actor stayed with Carly Simon and James Taylor in their 27-acre homestead off Lambert’s Cove Rd, with pond, pool, tennis, and over 5K square feet in the main house. Now, …
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Yet another sign of spring - Dairy Queen opened for the season today
Okay, so maybe Pinkletinks are not the veritable sign of spring for EVERYONE on the Island. For the kids on Martha's Vineyard, and even for the young at heart, the opening day at Dairy Queen in Edgartown is the day when it all begins. So much so that Island kids have been known to ditch school to make it to opening day. Thankfully, the folks at Dairy Queen got hip to this and have taken to opening their doors on the day in March when Island schools have a half-day scheduled for teacher development. Today the lines were around the corner from the moment the doors opened until late in the afternoon. And with the sun shining and a Blizzard in your hand, well, it really was just like spring. We asked some of the folks patiently waiting in line…
41.39331
-70.52539
Dairy Queen
242 Upper Main St, Edgartown, MA
/articles/photo-gallery-opening-day-at-dairy-queen
1015446
/locations/6589295
Known by many names, the pinkletink is the Island’s very own caller of spring
Often called the harbinger of spring, the pinkletink is only called the pinkletink here on Martha’s Vineyard. This little, tiny frog is one of the smallest known frogs and is not much bigger than a paperclip. However, it is to a Martha’s Vineyard spring what the robin is to the rest of the country. Never mind the snowdrops, the crocuses or even the extended daylight. Until we hear our first pinkletink, there is no convincing us that spring is actually coming. Even though this has hardly been a long, hard winter by any standard, the sound of the first pinkletink is a joyous one. I heard them for the first time last night. Because something about their sound accompanying the thick Chilmark fog is so familiar and right, I almost didn’t notice…
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Now In 2012 And Counting
Snap on your green accounting shades: We're talkin' 10,574 Island sheep and over 300 head of cattle. We’ll hafta crunch some numbers before we furnish a figure but, let’s just say, if those stinkin’ English had come up with the cheddar way back when, this would never be necessary. Only thing is, if the Chancellor of the Exchequer does square the account with Martha’s Vineyard for its old vig from the Revolutionary War, WITH INTEREST, well then, the good ol’ U.K. will be the New Greece. President Clinton could have sorted this stuff out. Not while he was in office, but a couple of years back when he played golf with Prince Andrew at Farm Neck. First, the original event: It’s early September 1778, and American Rebels are striving to work …
Sunday, March 11, 2012
"Snow," by Tracey Leigh Devine
- ARTS
-
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Snow When you really think about it, Life is just a snowstorm waiting to happen, with thousands upon thousands of souls drifting past each other, far from lost. Sometimes they connect to others, but not always. In a white wonder world where they press fast forward on time and just sit, watching it go by in seconds, falling till they reach the ground. Like people, no two snowflakes are alike, yet, they are all one in the end, drifting together to make one of the same, perpetually falling, forever loving, One. Something so beautiful will eventually melt. It's only fair that our frozen children find their place, dropping out of the clouds and into our little piece of heaven. Snow is a fading memory. Holding hands with someone special, walking…
Holly Nadler
5:18 pm on Thursday, May 3, 2012
Deborah & Michael, we should really really do this. Who's a great organizer? (Not I!) Maybe this is another glitzy event for Ocean Park? 1000s of people used to turn up for the Renaissance Faires in California. Not that we need 1000s more coming here . . . more ›