Arts & Entertainment
The Rap on Kid Critic Jonas Plaut
Name: Jonas Jacob Plaut
Age: 11
The dog days of summer take on a whole new meaning as New York artist Judith Gwyn Brown is now offering a portion of the proceeds of her commissioned pet portraits to P.A.W.S. of the Vineyard, the all-volunteer, nonprofit Pet Adoption and Welfare Service of Martha’s Vineyard.
Proceeds from Ms. Brown’s pet portraits can be designated to provide coupons to Vineyard pet owners to help alleviate the ever-rising cost of spaying or neutering.
The first time Leonard Bernstein laid his young fingers on the keys of a piano at the age of 10 he felt as though he had been touched by God.
He would sit at the piano, hour after hour, his father berating him to quit playing while his mother encouraged him to continue. Even growing up in a hostile environment with only his aunt’s piano as musical inspiration couldn’t stop him from becoming one of the most watched and listened to musicians in the world.
Perhaps even the greatest American musician, ever.
He never thought of the era when he wrote TV comedy as the Golden Age. For him that honorific was reserved for the earlier epoch of Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner. But Marty Nadler, staff writer and producer in the 70s and 80s of Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Chico and the Man, The Odd Couple, Perfect Strangers, Valerie, and Amen, was part of a time in Hollywood entertainment that, hands down, is considered Most Funny.
Every August I look forward to the Chicken Alley Sale at the Vineyard Haven Thrift Shop. For 10 years, Olga Hirshhorn has organized, supervised and advertised her pet Vineyard project and her hard work and imaginative impulses have been richly rewarded. The Chicken Alley Sale has made hundreds of thousands of dollars for Martha’s Vineyard Community Services and given hundreds of people a chance to snatch up a vast number of donated items, proving the theory once again, that one man’s junk is another man’s treasure.
LIPMAN PIKE: America’s First Home Run King . By Richard Michelson . Sleeping Bear Press. 32 pages, photographs. $16.95.
