Sam Bungey
Editors note: In the summer of 2008, a tough turkey named Tom was terrorizing a Vineyard Haven neighborhood.
Mohammad (Reza) Ahmadi didn’t go down without a fight. The middle-aged Londoner is stocky enough to occasionally assume bouncer duties outside his small cocktail lounge in Ealing, which is where he was positioned last Monday night, standing guard against a mob who were trying to light a trash can on fire and roll it into his place of business.
Writer Ben Greenman so craves human contact as part of his routine that he edits the front section of The New Yorker.
His fiction, including his latest novel, Please Step Back, he boxes off in the mornings and evenings at his Brooklyn home, between raising his five and eight year-old sons. Then he takes the subway into Manhattan and begins to put together the listings and features that make up Goings On, the weekly events guide of the globally-renowned magazine. It’s a job he has held for 10 years.
Under financial pressure on all sides, the Oak Bluffs School will cut three faculty positions, slash general supplies and professional development funds and dip into school choice savings to help pay for a town budget shortfall, it was decided this week.
And while the school is doing its share to help the town, the town will not return the favor, and is set to pocket nearly $3,000 in compensation for the use of the school last week as a briefing area by the White House and media center for the press corps during the presidential visit.
There is a burst of activity inside the White House press bus on Lobsterville Road in Aquinnah, a little before noon last Thursday, at the prospect of capturing footage of members of the First Family on bicycles. From a tiny vantage point halfway up the bus, Associated Press and Reuters photographers and a camera operator from Fox News crouch low and point their lenses at the corner of Lighthouse Road, some 100 yards off in the distance.
At 4:23 p.m. on Sunday, the helicopters took off from the Martha’s Vineyard Airport, bringing to an end President Obama’s week-long first vacation since winning office, spent on the Island.
As Mr. Obama, his family and entourage took off, the clouds which had dumped some four inches of rain over the previous two days finally broke, and they left in watery sunshine.