Anyone who spent any time on the Vineyard before 1984, the year Lillian Hellman died (she was born in 1905), has a story to tell about the writer’s mean-spiritedness, from the number of nurses’ aides she fired in a single week, to her scowl at the Helio’s waitress who complimented Ms. Hellman on her mayonnaise, to the slightly ghastly sight of her shuffling down Main street, Vineyard Haven, leaning on the arm of a white-uniformed caregiver, a cigarette dangling from the famous writer’s grimacing lips.
The island could be any island. Anyone with connections to an island — such as those of us who live on or visit Martha’s Vineyard — will think it’s their island. The year is 1942, and although there’s a major war going on and hairstyles and clothes are vintage to our modern sensibilities, the scene of three teen males (provenance Brooklyn, Yonkers and New Jersey) slapping hands at the pier for the start of another season is interchangeable from the scene of all teen males regrouping at the start of all the summers in time.
It’s the sixties in the highest arc of the go go era. A boy and a girl meet in the lavatory of a 727. They’re there to flirt and to bargain. He, a self-described Fulbright scholar “gone bad,” needs her to sneak anesthetized birds sealed in hair rollers past customs. Also narcotized poisonous snakes, small ones, sewn into the lining of a lady’s undergarment.
On Sunday, July 19, a giant Mother Earth puppet together with accompany the Green Man — a 12-foot-tall spirit of vegetation — lead a wild menagerie of puppets down Main street in Vineyard Haven.
The parade marks the middle of the third annual Martha’s Vineyard Puppet Festival. Troupes from Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Maine join forces with four groups from the Vineyard to offer shows and tell stories from Africa, Asia, the forest and the sea.
A Singular Sensation
Friday and Saturday night at 7 p.m., campers and counselors from the Martha’s Vineyard Cerebral Palsy Camp, also known as Camp Jabberwocky, are offering a free performance of A Chorus Line on the camp’s studio stage on Greenwood avenue in Vineyard Haven.While Jabberwocky’s plays do not always stick to the script, they always improve upon the original material. For details, call 508-693-2339.
A man and a woman meet and sparks fly, but not necessarily sparks beneficial to the pair’s mental health; you might almost say the incendiary materials explode in a region of dry brush during a California August. We’ve all experienced volatile relationships, or have known people who’ve weathered them. When it’s someone else, we almost need to place our hands over our eyes.