The original art and music from a book about the true adventures of a little Vineyard girl who lived aboard her father’s whaling ship will be featured at a West Tisbury gallery opening in July.

Susan Convery Foltz, whose watercolors brought to life the story of Laura Jernegan in Thirty Dirty Sailors and the Little Girl Who Went a-Whaling, will host the opening Saturday, July 5, from 5 to 7:30 p.m., at M.M. Stone Gallery at 671 North Tisbury Road.

License Plate Auction

The online charitable auction for Cape and Islands license plate numbers 1 through 999 kicks off Tuesday, July 8 at capeandislandsplate.com. 

Bidding for the plates begins on Tuesday and continues through August 1, 2008.

Closing times will vary by plate, so bidders should note the ending time on the website.

The minimum bid for plate numbers 1-10 will be $10,000; the minimum bid for plate numbers 11 – 100 will be $1000; and the minimum bid for plates101 - 999 will be $100.

In this serialized novel set on the Vineyard in real time, a native Islander (“Call me Becca”) returns home after many years in Manhattan to help her eccentric Uncle Abe keep his landscaping business, Pequot, afloat. Through Mott (Pequot’s general manager) she’s met Quincas (a Brazilian laborer) and the rest of Pequot’s staff. Uncle Abe has an intense loathing of Richard Moby, the CEO of Broadway, an off-Island landscaping business.

The African Artists’ Community Development project will be selling crafts from Ghana, Niger, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe on Tuesday, July 8, at the Grange Hall in West Tisbury from 5 to 9 p.m. Items for sale include baskets, woven grass ceremonial cloth, Tuareg silver jewelry, malachite jewelry, carved wooden bowls and salad servers, animal and human sculpture, brilliant khanga printed cloth and more.

The Island Community Chorus will open the 2008 season of programs at the Tabernacle in Oak Bluffs with a concert at 8 p.m. this Saturday, July 5.

The chorus of more than 100 voices, under the direction of Peter Boak and accompanied by L. Garrett Brown at the Tabernacle’s nine-foot Steinway piano, will present a program of music designed for the holiday weekend, music whose variety pays tribute to the richness of the American experience.