The fourth grade theatre project, an unusual creative drama enrichment program for Island school children led by the Vineyard Playhouse for the past 17 years, will be suspended this year, playhouse director MJ Bruder Munafo said this week.
Ms. Bruder Munafo said she was surprised and baffled to learn that the Vineyard elementary schools had decided not to participate in the project, which through the years has given some 2,000 fourth graders the hands-on experience of writing, producing, directing, staging and performing an original play.
Whippoorwill Farm, home of the first Community Supported Agriculture program on the Vineyard, will move its operation from Thimble Farm in Oak Bluffs back to Old County Road, farm owner Andrew Woodruff said this week.
The Massachusetts Appeals Court has solidly backed the town of West Tisbury in its ongoing effort to keep Rogers Path, an ancient way that leads to a Civil War-era cemetery in the North Tisbury section of town, open for public use.
A large brigade of Island firefighters, wearing their dress blues and standing straight and true, flanked the steps of the Old Whaling Church last Saturday afternoon, a fine May day flecked with sunshine and breezes. Joe Cressy would have called it a sailor’s day and he would have been right. Joe was right about everything — on this point there was general agreement amid laughter and tears, poetry and music at his memorial service on Saturday.
A pair who robbed a well-known elderly Oak Bluffs man of his life savings last month have been arrested, although Oak Bluffs police said they have not recovered all the money. Police said $85,000 was stolen from the man, whose name is being withheld, but only about $37,000 has been recovered.
The robbery occurred on March 19, when the man reported to police that his safe had been stolen from his home while he was off-Island visiting family for two days. It contained his life savings of about $85,000, police said.
A divided gathering of West Tisbury voters agreed on Tuesday night to take the first step toward allowing the sale of beer and wine in restaurants in this historically dry town in the rural agricultural heart of the Vineyard. And while the measure still needs another year of approvals, including at the state legislature and in the ballot box by voters, what was seen as a sleeper article on the annual town meeting warrant woke up with a start near the end of a long meeting that had its share of bumps and peppery debates on matters both fiscal and philosophical.
The Vineyard Nursing Association, the Island’s only home nursing provider, announced this week that it will expand its services onto Nantucket, where currently there are none.
VNA chief executive officer Robert Tonti said he expects to open a Nantucket office by early May at the latest. The Nantucket Cottage Hospital will provide $350,000 in startup money for the service, paid out over three years, Mr. Tonti said.
“We are helping their community and we’re happy to do it,” Mr. Tonti said in an interview.
She was an Oak Bluffs selectman and I was a cub reporter for the New Bedford Standard Times. The year was 1973. Geraldyne DeBettencourt had recently been elected as the first woman selectman on the Vineyard. It was quite a milestone when you think about it now, especially placed in the context of nearly four decades ago when Island government was a dyed-in-the-wool, old-boy network. My professional world too was heavily populated by men, most of them kindly, small-town newspapermen who were willing to take me under their wing.
Acting well out of the public eye, Dukes County sheriff Michael McCormack quietly agreed last month to allow Kelly McCarron, the young woman who was drunk and driving the car the night 18-year-old Jena Pothier was killed in June 2009, to leave a Barnstable correctional facility for women less than seven months into a one-year term. Ms. McCarron has returned to the Vineyard to serve out the remainder of her sentence at home under electronic surveillance.
