Holly Nadler

A Room of Their Own, Vineyard Retreats Helps Writers Develop

They come from all over the country, staying for one or two weeks or up to a full month. They explore Edgartown from their home base at the former Point Way Inn. Some of them work in their rooms, others find a nesting spot in one of the many elegant downstairs parlors. For dinner they might bring home scallops from the Net Result, ingredients for a pasta Siciliana, and share the meal pot-luck style in the formal dining room, which is two stories high and lit up like a stage set.

 

 

 

Creative drama teacher Phyllis Vecchia has an innovative way to get history across to sixth graders: Rather than talking about suffragettes Amelia Bloomer and Susan B. Anthony, and the abolitionist Henry Stanton, she has them BE Amelia Bloomer and Susan B. Anthony and Henry Stanton. In a rousing half-hour in Amy Reece’s sixth grade class at the Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School on Thursday of last week, Ms. Vecchia guided the entire class through improvised paces of the women’s rights movement from 1840 to 1860.

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The major repercussion for you, the audience member, of attending a production, anywhere, anytime, of Broadway’s great classic The Music Man, is your own zany behavior the morning after. The moment you open your eyes, you’ll begin a whispered verse, “What can I do, my dear, to make it clear?

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The scent of mothballs had no chance to cling to Chris Abbot. Last year he retired from his teaching job, which included directing the annual school play at the Tisbury School. But only a few weeks ago, school principal Richie Smith inveigled him to return to the boards for Mr. Abbot’s third pass, rolled out this past weekend, of the musical Bye Bye Birdie.

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To us Islanders Linda Fairstein is, first and foremost, one of our best known summer Chilmark residents. To the rest of the world, she’s the best-selling author of the Alexander Cooper series, featuring Assistant D.A. Cooper of the Special Victims Unit in Manhattan.

In actual life Ms. Fairstein served as the Assistant D.A. in the Special Victims Unit in Manhattan. So when her fictional character files a particular brief or points out that it’s a point of law that the public is entitled to attend a court hearing she knows whereof she speaks.

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The program for last weekend’s high school production of Willy Wonka included this director’s note: What could be more apropos in February than a musical about becoming the owner of the most magical chocolate factory on earth? Yes, the perfect antidote for cabin fever on the Island, extra helpings of dessert.

And there was a voluptuousness to every aspect of the play. There was a cast of thousands, or so it seemed, as the high school drama department all pitched in ladling out chocolaty goodness in every scene.

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The shocker of the TV series Mad Men, about a Manhattan advertising agency in the early 1960s, is the freedom, the elan, the absolute je ne sais quoi with which people smoked. And not just some people — everyone.

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