Sam Bungey
When Michael Valentino, owner of Chappy clothing store on Main street Edgartown, addressed selectmen this week he was careful to preface his comments with pleasantries about his fellow merchant at Number Two Main street.
“Gerry has been very cooperative,” he said, referring to Gerret C. Conover, of the Boathouse private club and the Atlantic, previously known as the Navigator restaurant. The building, which is next door to Chappy, has been undergoing extensive renovation since September 2007.
Then Mr. Valentino launched into it.
Surfwise is only a surfing film in the same way that its central character Dorian (Doc) Paskowitz is, as he puts it, a “Jewish surfer.”
In fact Mr. Paskowitz is a Stanford-educated doctor who refused to send any of his nine children to school; an individualist who led his children each morning in a rendition of Chairman Mao’s March of the Volunteers; and a professed good husband and good father, who pursued his own dream with his family in tow. He also happens to surf.
Anthony Benton Gude was 21 before he realized he could paint for a living. He was working construction jobs at the time and in retrospect there were already hints. “If we had to re-plaster I always mixed the paints,” he said, “and if we needed a rendering, I did that.”
But it wasn’t until his mother suggested art college that it occurred to him he could do the same job as his grandfather, Thomas Hart Benton.
Between heats at Nancy’s Snack Bar in Oak Bluffs on Saturday Jon Holden, last year’s winner of the Martha’s Vineyard annual oyster shucking contest, inspected his knife doubtfully.
“I hate this knife,” he said, peering through his aviator shades at the black-handled Oxo brand shucker, “I wish I never bought it.”
At the Edgartown town hall the third-floor ceiling may be falling down. Staff have decamped to the ground and second floors as a precaution against falling plaster and any dust that will be produced by inevitable repair work.
“If the lights are off you can see a load of hairline cracks up there,” pointed out Karen M. Fuller, assistant to town administrator Pamela M. Dolby, yesterday.
If hurling a flat cap skyward is the final act of a student, many members of the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School class of 2008 were especially quick to graduate this Sunday. Even in the shade of the Oak Bluffs Tabernacle, dozens of gowned students had taken their hats in hand early, to flap against the sweltering air on an unseasonably hot day. The moment that principal Margaret (Peg) Regan signaled the end of the ceremony, all 198 were in the air.