Arts & Entertainment
CPR Teacher Training
The American Red Cross, Cape Cod and Islands Chapter is looking to train CPR and first aid instructors to teach classes on the Vineyard. Instructor training courses will be held at the Chapter House at 286 South street in Hyannis on Dec. 5 and 8 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The cost of the course is $145.
It’s a rock doc like you’ve never seen before: The average age of the singers is 81, and the group is a choir, not a clapped-out band of has-beens busting guitars on stage. The film Young at Heart follows the eponymous chorus from Northampton who belt out Sonic Youth and James Brown tunes, punk, pop, disco — even singing Dylan’s Forever Young at a penitentiary gig.
Chamber Music Concert
Island music lovers always have packed calendars between now and Christmas, and here is another date to set aside: on Nov. 29, the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society has planned an extraordinary concert for Islanders. That’s on the Saturday evening of Thanksgiving weekend, at 7:30 in the Old Whaling Church.
Radio Play Auditions
The Vineyard Playhouse is holding open auditions today, Friday, Nov. 21 from 4 to 6 p.m. for the supporting roles in Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life–The Radio Play by Philip Grecian. Auditions are at the playhouse, 24 Church street in Vineyard Haven, for older teens, men and women, plus children ages 11-14. The show runs two weekends from Dec. 12 to 21. For details, call 508-693-6450, extension 18.
In this year-long serialized novel set on the Vineyard in real time, a native Islander (“Call me Becca”) returns home after two decades to help her eccentric Uncle Abe keep his landscaping business, Pequot, afloat. Abe has a paranoid hatred of Richard Moby, the chief executive of an off-Island wholesale nursery, Broadway. Convinced that Moby wants to destroy Abe personally, and all Island-based landscaping/nursery businesses generally, Abe is obsessed with “taking down” Moby.
In many ways, autumn is the same as it ever was: the result of our Island, our region — this hemisphere — turning slowly away from the sun. Days still shrink as the nights grow longer. Temperatures gradually drop towards winter’s frigid lows, although perhaps not as low as they used to go. The trees still turn dramatic shades of yellow and red. And the indefinable qualities of the deepening blue sky, the brightening of the stars at night and the scent of leaves returning to the damp soil still stir feelings which defy description.
