Art
Fifteen artists for fifteen years. That’s what Featherstone Center for the Arts in Oak Bluffs is planning this Spring. No word yet on whether each artist will have to tackle a certain year. And how would you represent 1997, for example, anyway? Clinton started his second term, scientists cloned Dolly the sheep, Princess Diana died in a car crash trying to evade paparazzi, the possibilities are endless.
If two is company and three is a crowd, it might follow that 10 is chaos.
But if the 10 in question are the group of artists behind the Night Heron Gallery, the newest addition to Vineyard Haven’s formidable Main street lineup, the more appropriate word would be “community.”
The road to Reuse, Renew, Recycle is always a good turn for the environment but often no more exciting than rinsing out the glass and plastic jars and dumping them in the blue bucket. Stomping down the cardboard boxes gives some measure of satisfaction, and a bit of exercise, but is still a solitary affair.
Leave it to Lani Carney, art teacher extraordinaire working primarily at Featherstone in Oak Bluffs, to raise the bar for all of us.
Student Theatre
A silly buffoon and a whiz kid saving the world will be the featured one-act plays performed by students from the charter school at the Vineyard Playhouse on Friday, April 1 and Saturday, April 2.
Daughter of super god Zeus and the Harvest goddess Demeter, young Persephone went out for a stroll one day and, as the story goes, was suddenly abducted by Hades, god of the underworld. The earth beneath her feet literally opened up and swallowed her.
Zeus, it turns out, was a bit of a laissez-faire father. He didn’t even notice his daughter had disappeared. Mom took up the fight alone visiting a drought upon the world until her daughter was returned.
The Hard Way Around , by Geoffrey Wolff. Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. 218 pages. Hardback, $25.95
A confession: I love sea stories, but until a few weeks ago, I had never read one of the great, true-life adventure books ever written — Sailing Alone Around the World, by Capt. Joshua Slocum, originally of Nova Scotia and at the end of his life from a farm he called Fag End in West Tisbury.