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Friday, July 3, 2009

Nectar’s nightclub opened its doors last week to an exuberant, mainly local crowd with a kickoff show featuring the sounds and songs of Island musicians. Some of the multitude attended in tribute to the Hot Tin Roof, the storied Vineyard nightclub of the late seventies and early eighties that once thrived in that same space. A younger set came out to celebrate the survival of the largest live music venue on the Island.
» Full Story By Brittany Lyte

A beautiful, small painting of the Gay Head Cliffs has returned to the Vineyard for a short visit, possibly the first time since it was painted 125 years ago. The painting by John Noble Barlow depicts colorful cliffs and a turbulent dark sea. The waves are translucent in the late afternoon sun. It is an impressive oil painting that presents an opportunity for an amazing tale.
» Full Story By Mark Alan Lovewell

Tom DeMont, 68, has a quiet time in the morning when he sits and makes scrimshaw. It is a serene opening to the day. For 32 years, Mr. DeMont has sat in the quiet of the day to sketch scenes of the whaling era on a material similar to whale teeth. He is an Island-born artist, a craftsman, a folksinger, lyricist and gallery owner.
» Full Story By Mark Alan Lovewell

After a full month of bad weather, things got even worse yesterday, as a range of fast-moving thunderstorms brought downpours with lightning and in some places hail.
» Full Story

No doubt about it, David Kinney gets the Vineyard. His book, The Big One, shows that. But he could not live here, he reckons, without succumbing to the obsession which the book chronicles.
» Full Story By Mark Alan Lovewell

Feature Stories from the Vineyard Gazette Archives

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

What’s yellow, on wheels, and found carting paying (and non-paying) passengers all over Oak Bluffs? The answer is a new, open-air way to tour the Island’s pastel-painted town or bar hop along Circuit avenue: Vineyard Pedicab.
» Full Story By Brittany Lyte

The Vineyard sent three youth soccer teams to the annual Massachusetts Tournament of Champions this past weekend in Lancaster and each team represented the Island admirably. Both the under-12 team and the under-18 team advanced to the final four of the state tournament, while the under-16 team won a game and tied another before being eliminated.
» Full Story By Jim Hickey

Friday, June 26, 2009

Most people are familiar with the adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Stick to what works. Don’t take unnecessary risks. It’s a bit of advice that Nancy Shaw Cramer has chosen happily to ignore throughout her career.
» Full Story By Megan Dooley

A classic northeaster early this week on top of an unusually wet and gray June left Islanders wondering if they would ever see the sun again. From Monday through Wednesday an offshore ocean storm spun 200 miles southeast of Nantucket, bringing sustained wind, ruining outdoor events and keeping sailors on dry land.
» Full Story By Mark Alan Lovewell

In the past few decades, the only way to spiff up an antique captain’s house was to sell it to a millionaire and have the buyer’s workmen attack it with pick-axes and bulldozers. But something very different and refreshing is happening to the 1840 Captain Thomas Mellen house on Main street, Edgartown, designed by master builder Ariel Norton, and owned by the Keniston family for the past 80 years. The 2,900 square foot home is now being developed to benefit Habitat for Humanity, and its restoration, conceived as a showcase for Island designers, is beginning to take on fairy-tale qualities.
» Full Story By Holly Nadler

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Anybody listening to music anywhere on Martha’s Vineyard but at the Union Chapel in Oak Bluffs on Friday night was listening in the wrong place.
» Full Story By Mike Seccombe

Friday, June 19, 2009

On steamy summer afternoons, the aroma of chocolate fudge, peanut butter fudge or maybe caramel-smothered cashew brittle mingles in the seaside air in downtown Edgartown. It seeps out of 21 North Water street to sweeten the stale sidewalk air cocooning the VTA bus drop-off two blocks westward. Using the nose as a compass, vacationers and Islanders, like bloodhounds, sniff a path down Main street to meet the cause of the saliva swelling about their tongues: the mixing tables of Murdick’s Fudge shop, where fudge makers mold slabs of fudge and brittle crunch into melt-in-your-mouth morsels.
» Full Story By Brittany Lyte

The Trustees of Reservations’ three-acre garden Mytoi on Chappaquiddick is the inspiration for an art exhibit in Oak Bluffs that opens today and continues through the coming two weeks. Two artists, Don Sibley of West Tisbury and Robert Baart of Brookline, have stories to tell about Mytoi. They tell it through words, in ink and paint.
» Full Story By Mark Alan Lovewell

There is plenty of evidence already on the waterfront: Vineyard sailors are getting ready for summer.
» Full Story By Mark Alan Lovewell

If there was one word to describe the weather the Vineyard has been experiencing now for weeks, it is Seattle — that northwest city that has a reputation for its gray, rainy weather.
» Full Story By Mark Alan Lovewell

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

The class of 2009 shared the Oak Bluffs Tabernacle with another special group of graduates at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High school graduation ceremony Sunday. In honor of the 50th graduating class, the high school invited members of the first representatives from the class of 1960—to join in the ceremony. The former students led the class procession through the crowd of spectators that filled the Tabernacle and spilled out onto the surrounding lawn on a sunny afternoon.
» Full Story By Megan Dooley

Friday, June 12, 2009

Originally commissioned by the Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education in New York city, Fly tells the historical and emotional tale of the nation’s first African-American aviation combat unit, formed during World War II when the nation’s armed forces were segregated.
» Full Story By Mimi Wells

In the history of the hawkers, hucksters and visionaries who knew how to turn a buck off of the middle-class mania for leisure and travel that emerged at the tail end of the American 19th century, Joseph Chamberlain has a firm, if overlooked place.
» Full Story By Sofi Thanhauser

The group of children sat whittling pieces of wood that had been split from a log. Hot coals had been used to burn a hollow into each block, and the children were paring away the excess wood to turn the block into a spoon. Squatting in front of them was Saskia Vanderhoop, who runs this remarkable program called Sassafras. She had brought in a bag of bright green boiled leaves, and passed it around for everyone to taste some. I couldn’t believe it when she told us it was milkweed! Boiled in two changes of water, it was mild as spinach but almost meaty in texture and flavor.
» Full Story By Maia Smith

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

David Foster is no ordinary forester. To begin with, there’s his professional moniker: paleoecologist. It means that he is an environmental historian; he studies ecology in the context of history. Long-range history. Very long-range history. He can tell you (for example) what was happening in the Manuel F. Correllus State Forest about 15,000 years ago — and also 60 years ago.
» Full Story By Nicole Galland

Friday, June 5, 2009

Is the Vineyard poised to become the launch point for the next American Great Awakening? Ask Squire Rushnell and Louise DuArt, the celebrity entertainers and authors who are the masterminds behind Inspiration Weekend 2009, which runs this weekend at the Tabernacle in Oak Bluffs, and they’ll tell you it just might be.
» Full Story By Sofi Thanhauser

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Elio Silva has no more regard for credit card companies than most of us — probably less, in fact. But unlike most people, he has a plan to do something about them, and all those other financial forces which conspire to eat away at our money, percentage point by percentage point.
» Full Story By Mike Seccombe

After the long, cold winter we spent indoors, spring has arrived to push us outside to collect new green leaves and dig up fat roots. This is the time, according to tradition, for spring cleaning – and we don’t mean the house. We’re referring to an ancient folk belief about cleaning the blood, renewing the spirit, and energizing the body.
» Full Story By Holly Bellebuono And Catherine Walthers

Friday, May 29, 2009

When an actor is nominated for an Oscar, the studio handles the marketing, with expensive lobbying campaigns planned over months. When Kate Murray and her drama department at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School found out they’d been nominated for a comparable reward - a spot representing American student theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival - they had one day to turn around their own campaign.
» Full Story By Liz Weiss

There is no underestimating the power of the supernatural in events slated for the great outdoors. On Sunday, May 24, Featherstone Center for the Arts prepared for a formal dedication of a newly designed garden in memory of Chilmark artist Dawn Greeley, who died in May 2008. The ceremony was timed to begin at 1 p.m., but as noon approached and Ms. Greeley’s widower, Roger, and this reporter strode across the Featherstone lawn, we were perturbed by a rising wind and a seriously overcast sky with intimations of drizzle.
» Full Story By Holly Nadler