The evening easily could have been confused with a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. The grill staff at P.J.'s Café sang along to Love Train and Don't Stop Believin' as they flipped mini burgers, pressed them in between golden buns and handed them off to hungry, fashionably clad patrons. Across the way, the pastry chef at Soigne wore a wide smile as she piled a cake rack high with mini cupcakes. "I noticed some of the restaurant people dancing in their booths," Christopher Scott, executive director of the Martha's Vineyard Preservation Trust said yesterday.

Following the discovery of a defective engine part, Cape Air grounded its entire fleet of Cessna 402 planes this week, disrupting travel plans for thousands of passengers and costing the respected commuter airline hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

Mariners beware.

Walking along the shore of Black Point Pond in Chilmark, Richard Johnson of Sheriff's Meadow Foundation is nearly dwarfed by a thick stand of 12-foot high reeds.

Also called phragmites, the reeds are an invasive species that have formed a dense monoculture over what was once an open diverse habitat of native pondshore plants. Dead reeds crunch beneath his boots, covering the ground so virtually nothing else can grow through.

School Lunches Not All Healthy

With Child Obesity Epidemic as a Backdrop, Island Schools Begin Paying More Attention to Lunchroom Nutrition

By IAN FEIN

On any given school day, students at the Martha's Vineyard Public Charter School are likely to eat a rather sophisticated lunch - featuring Japanese seaweed salad with tofu and rice wine vinegar, for instance, or Island-grown butternut squash soup. The healthy meals are made almost entirely from scratch by a professional chef who trained at Le Cordon Bleu in London and Paris.

What seemed like a simple, homespun plan to improve and expand the baseball field at Veira Park in Oak Bluffs has evolved into an acrimonious bureaucratic tangle pitting a group of Little Leaguers against a group of neighbors worried about noise and traffic.