Monday, October 29, 2012
How To Build Up Old Yankee Coastal Cred in Rough Weather
As I put pen to paper – I mean fingertips to keyboard – sweet punkin pine! This change in our ozone is making me write odd things (even odder than usual) – it’s Sunday morning, October 28, and some kinda monster storm is gustily, wetly and determinedly barreling down on us. The hurricane’s nome de blow is Sandy, but the media has re-labeled her Frankenstorm, evoking a correlation to, of course, Frankenstein, and the Perfect Storm of late October, 1991, when a minor hurricane spinning up from the tropics got yanked into a nor’easter whooshing down from Canada. Some other, I don’t know, conversion layer or El Nino got sucked in from LA (I'm just hoofing it here), causing the weather to bunch up and go all hormonal on us, and to drag itself …
Monday, October 22, 2012
Halloween 2012
This is the time of year when people take an interest in me. As Halloween approaches, it occurs to organizers of late October events that the dingbat Nadler woman, author of three collections of ghost tales, two of them Vineyard-related (and all of them true! true! true!), the third a really scary book about Boston hauntings (it’s a project that forced me, many nights, to sleep with the light on, after receiving emails about hideous metropolitan beasties and ghoulies), that I, the Ghost Lady – just as Vernon Laux is the Bird Guy (the first time we met we introduced ourselves to each other that way and then we shook hands), that I could be called upon to relate a fresh, untold creepy tale. Cue Bela Lugosi demented laugh track. So I will! I…
Monday, October 15, 2012
An Island Specialty
Two big events occurred in the 1960s that would weigh heavily on Island culture. The first was that a lot of Greatest Generation-ers and their kids, la boomers, began to come here in the summer. The second was that, thanks to the general freak out and back-to-nature quality of the social revolution taking place, a lotta lotta lotta us went barefoot. All the time. From the minute we hopped out of bed in the morning (or, er, at 2 in the afternoon), and plied on our jeans, fringe vest and love beds, till the moment we crashed amid guttering candles, with a cauldron of peyote tea still simmering on the stove, and under the poster of the Electric Prune. First, you’re probably disbelieving about the GG demographic ever going barefoot. Certainly …
Monday, October 8, 2012
How Nutty Are We Vineyarders? – And How Nutty Have We Always Been?
I’m telling you, Lewis Carroll in his creation of looney-tunes Wonderland, had nothing on us. Here’s a typical Island day in the life of my ex-hubby, comedy-writer Marty Nadler: He’s running for O.B. Planning Board back in 2000, driving east on the airport road, and he stops to pick up a hitch-hiking local character whom we’ll call Zoombah. Zoombah is a confused white guy with Rasta coils of dark blond hair. He speaks with the Jamaican accent he picked up in his high school in Columbus, Ohio. “Oh, man!” cries Zoombah as he slides into the passenger seat of Marty’s beat-up Honda. “You’re my hero! Swing by my house, and I’ll prove it to you!” Not many people would accept that challenge, but Nadler, crazy in his own way (which he’s channeled…
Monday, October 1, 2012
Come Spend a Healing Day on Martha’s Vineyard!
What could be better therapy for a modern-day Joan of Arc who has recently endured some 24 years under house arrest in her native Myanmar—the country formerly known as Prince, I mean Burma – than a fun day trip to our island? Having just spent her past week addressing students at Harvard and Yale (and, by the way, why do those schools always get the coolest speakers?), Ms. Suu Kyi may still be in this vicinity, so I’m going to be among the first, as one of her countless admirers, to invite her to our shores. Here is my proposed one-day dream itinerary, but I do invite Patch readers to send in their own suggestions: I’m imagining that Ms. Suu Kyi is traveling under the protection of our state department; so I’d like to request that those …
Monday, September 24, 2012
Vanishing Species on Martha’s Vineyard?
Cross my heart: This is not going to come across as a partisan article. I promise to be so neutral about politics, and so gracious to BOTH our leading political parties, that people who’ve known me for years as the old lefty crunchy that I’ve always been, will douse me with smelling salts, slap both cheeks, and ask me if I’m okay. Here’s the simple, wholesome, entirely blameless subject under scrutiny: Way more Democrats live on -- or visit -- this Island than Republicans do, and that leads to occasional awkward situations which I’ll point out momentarily. But first let’s take a sociological moment to ask, Why so few Republicans? After all, the Vineyard is internationally known as a playground for the rich. I don’t need to remind you about…
Monday, September 17, 2012
Our Unfortunate Cousin To The Northwest, Penikese and Its Jinxed History
The first soul to appear in the history of this little island shaped like a ladybug was none other than the Wampanoag god, Moshup, that none-too-gentle giant with the hair-trigger temper. This was way back in the day (even before when the Clintons began vacationing here), when the Indians on Cape Cod called on Moshup for backup. Ten-inch-tall demons called Pukwudgees were harassing them. Don’t you hate it when Pukwudgees do that? These vicious little thugs stomped on the Indians’ arrows, poked holes in their canoes, and scattered sharp objects on the hunting paths. Not acceptable. Hero-sized Moshup gathered up his five buff sons and tracked the nasty ‘wudgees through the wetlands. But the mean little buggers still had tricks up their tiny…
Monday, September 10, 2012
The pets who've made this home for us.
It doesn’t matter how many whaling captains are stacked up in your Island lineage, nor if your surname dots our ancient cemeteries. What makes us real Islanders, or real Vineyarders (frankly, I have no clue what difference exists between those two sub-genres; someone else can write a blog about that), are the departed pets whom we have planted along the way in this blessed plot, this earth, this Vineyard. For the three Nadlers, it started in 1991 when we moved here year-round from LA to our summer cottage in East Chop. Our cats Hershey and Gismo (mother & daughter) were very much along for the ride, which wasn’t to say they appreciated said ride (for starters both of them pooped in their crates during the airplane haul). Big black sleek …
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
How The Days of Trophy Homes May Be Numbered
Remember how all through recorded history, women AND men liked to dress up in fur garments? Then back in the 1970s, certain people developed the odd notion of not liking to hurt what is now trendily known as “sentient beings.” These folks took offense to animals being held in cages to get ‘em sleek and furry enough to kill ‘em and skin ‘em and make jackets out of ‘em. These protesting freakazoids started throwing red paint – and not even latex paint, mind you; it was oil-based! -- on fur coat wearers. And remember what happened? (And if you're too young to remember, I'll tell you.) Although many people thought that spewing paint on anyone was rude in the extreme, a paradigm shift arrived, seemingly overnight. More people started to believe…
Monday, August 27, 2012
Our Year-Round Town In The Seriously Good Old Days
In the 1600s, the chummy little port of Holmes Hole, known to us today as Vineyard Haven and sometimes as Tisbury (yes, this town has identity issues), bars were all over the map. Yes, bars, back in the day called “ordinaries”, served as the ATM machines of human thirst. This fact might cause a grim chuckle when we recall how throat-parchingly DRY this town has been for decades, only recently coming around to allow tightly-controlled wine and beer licensing in restaurants. But back in the rockin’ ages, vessels touched down from St. Kitt’s, Barbados, and Jamaica, bearing rum and acqua vitae. Sailors sang “Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum”, and crammed into pubs for boiler-makers. Our pioneering Holmes Holers already had their brewskies at hand…
ALISA ROMAN
9:15 am on Thursday, November 1, 2012
All things considered, I would rather be here , than on the Jersey Shore...That is sheer devastation. For some their lives will be forever changed..I know that there will be an exodus of men with carpentry skills, heading in that direction, That was the scenario, in the past..Is their an organized Drive to raise funds ? If not why not !!! lets do something to help... more ›