Tom Dresser
Each winter Featherstone Center for the Arts, the Vineyard’s only year-round art center, undergoes a rebirth.
While students register for art classes, the gallery is refurbished. This year a new track has been installed around the perimeter of the gallery to better display works of art. And the gallery floor has been sanded down to bare wood and sealed for a gleaming new surface.
I turned 21 in 1968, the first year I had the chance to vote. With an anti-Roosevelt Republican father and a liberal leaning Democratic mother, I tread a torturous political path. And 1968 was a year when caution was thrown to the wind, early and often. No one imagined the year would turn out to be a most tumultuous political experience.
It began with the Tet offensive at the end of January, 1968, a Viet Cong onslaught on American troops. People in the United States had been led to believe we were on the verge of victory, so the enemy uprising was amazing.
What would Christmas be without the annual hospice concert? If we are lucky, we never will have to find out.
Once again Our Lady Star of the Sea Catholic Church in Oak Bluffs was decked out profusely in candles and greens, setting the stage for a varied and moving concert on Dec. 19.
Judy Williamson and Terre Young offered brief introductions on the importance of hospice, which offers a support system to people at the end of life when they and their loved ones need it most.
Storyteller par excellence Susan Klein captured the imagination of more than 40 people Saturday night at the Unitarian-Universalist Society of Martha’s Vineyard on Main street in Vineyard Haven, with her program entitled Silent Night, An Evening of Christmas Stories.
The raconteuse from Oak Bluffs opened with a sound check: “We’re recording all live performances from here on — just because.” Because, Ms. Klein explained, when she was old and gray she wanted to sit back and listen to us laugh again.
Years ago, Daniel Cuff was cast in the role of a tree in his sixth grade play. Now Mr. Cuff, as a high school junior, has blossomed with an accomplished performance as Clay-Boy Spencer, a role which bonds the vast cast of characters together in The Homecoming, in production at the Vineyard Playhouse through Dec. 22.
Mr. Cuff plays the dual role of narrator and eldest child of the family. Clay-Boy wistfully recalls that poignant, long ago Christmas Eve when he, yet a child, struggled to know and be known by his father.
If it weren’t for the war.
Fifty years ago this winter, in February, 1958, I began my journalistic career as editor of a fledgling monthly newspaper, the Springdale News. I had just turned eleven.
A key ingredient to increasing readership is a crackerjack staff. We engaged correspondents from New York, California and Scotland. And that’s where this story starts.
How does one find a pen pal from Scotland?