Sam Bungey
The opening montage of What Would Jesus Buy? — a documentary based on evangelizing performance artist Reverend Billy — is of shrieking shoppers jockeying for place at the doors of strip malls, and sprinting with reckless abandon towards aisles of product.
Two days before a special town meeting, Aquinnah selectmen are sharply divided over whether a pioneering energy bylaw should go to a vote, leaving the future uncertain for the Island’s first set of regulations on energy use.
A 16-page document, the energy bylaw remains largely unchanged from when it failed to achieve a needed two-thirds majority at the final session of the annual town meeting in June. A series of amendments to the bylaw were still being worked on at press time yesterday and were due in at the selectmen’s office this morning.
For Mitchell Posin, who runs the Allen Sheep and Wool Company with his wife Clarissa Allen, the most exciting thing on the farm right now is compost.
“This compost tea has really got my juices flowing,” said the farmer, a stone-hard hand resting on the 50-gallon plastic drum he uses in his barn to brew the solution. One barrel is enough to fertilize an acre of land.
“In the space of a single period at the end of a sentence, there are 500,000 bacteria in this. You’re talking little critters,” Mr. Posin enthused.
In previous years at the annual Martha’s Vineyard Community Services Possible Dreams auction, the final dream was Art Buchwald’s straw hat. This year it happened to be a round of golf for three with Vernon Jordan, though winner Barbara Walsh would likely have bid on anything.
“I just wanted to win something,” said Mrs. Walsh last night. “I told my husband I’m going to spend so much this year, next year I’ll have to volunteer at the event.”
The pencilina is like an instrument from Dr. Seuss’s The Butter Battle Book. It’s got bass and treble necks with movable bridges and open strings which can be plucked, played with a bow and manipulated with drumsticks. It is mounted with four bells: a fire bell, a doorbell, and two brass telephone ringers.
Chilmark selectmen signed an agreement Tuesday to purchase the Home Port restaurant, along with two neighboring waterfront lots, for a dramatically reduced price of $2 million.
The agreement, negotiated by selectman J.B. Riggs Parker on behalf of the board of selectmen with owners Will and Madeline Holtham, is almost half the price of a $3.9 million sale agreement rejected by Chilmark voters in 2005, though it does not include a lot with a dock currently used for restaurant parking.