HOLLY NADLER
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You can have your New Year’s Eve parties with champagne, pointy silver hats, Christmas trees still up and twinkling, women in décolletage that generally takes mad amounts of hardened foam to achieve; well, you get the picture. And if we’re going to be dead honest, a Vineyard New Year’s Eve bash will involve cases of Harpoon ale slurped from the bottle, dress attire (jeans and plaid), potato chips and dips with a cream cheese base, old Stones and Willie Nelson CDs, and a rented karaoke machine.
I’m not being nasty: If I didn’t love All Things Vineyard, I wouldn’t be here.
But what I and all other Islanders keeping farmers’ hours prefer is the wide-awake, T.G.I.O. (Thank God It’s Over, meaning the past year) New Year’s Day party, such as the one hosted each Jan. 1 by Oak Bluffs doyenne Olive Tomlinson at her home in the East Chop Highlands.
Olive packs enough wallops of energy that if we just located six or seven more like her, we could station them in Nantucket Sound and forget all about the wind turbine controversy.
First you swoop through Olive’s cozy kitchen and Olive, with arms opened wide, greets you like Capt. Shackleton encountering his first human after months in the Antarctic.
After that you’re drawn irresistibly to the dining room table to load up on sweet potatoes, pork, macaroni and cheese and Olive’s superb crab cakes.
You know almost all of the 30-plus guests, and the ones you don’t know you’ve seen around town at least a thousand times.
At a certain point in the festivities, Olive hops up on a chair and delivers her State of the Union address. This time on the chair, she had the steadying hand of tall, sturdy Alan Brigish around her waist. Olive expresses herself with so much enthusiasm that, were she a Rockette, she’d be the one to fall into the kettle drums.
Olive began with “A year ago today we were in big trouble and now we’re back from the brink. Unless you’re Tiger Woods.”
Our hostess then enumerated some of her friends/guests’ bulletins: Joyce Brigish is recuperating from two knee replacements and one hip. Susan Klein will be offering her popular Spice of Life memoir-writing workshop at the Tisbury Senior Center, and continuing for eight weeks. Someone shouted out that Olive give herself a pat on the back for volunteering at Meals on Wheels. Olive quipped, “I just do it for the free pot roast.”
Pam Benjamin won kudos for her Sense of Wonder Summer Camp. Alan Brigish has a newly released photographic book called Breathing in the Buddha and all profits go to Myanmar, Pakistan and other developing countries.
In what Olive termed the Department of Mazeltov, she mazeltoveted Russell Smith for his promotion to Duke’s County Manager, and Jack and I were congratulated for our whirlwind courtship and marriage, although I couldn’t help adding, “That gave us little time to live in sin.”
The best part of the New Year’s Day party is that we broke up around three o’clock, which gave us another five or six hours ‘till bedtime.
While we’re wishin’ and hopin’ as in that old song, our town could clearly use some more old cash on the barrel-head. On Thursday, Jan. 14 at 4 p.m. in the first floor meeting room of the Oak Bluffs Library, the O.B. finance and advisory committee will host a public session to hear town residents’ opinions about balancing the 2011 budget. I personally will be unable to attend — I’ll be home reading the new Lawrence Block mystery. So may I suggest in advance that we bring in some new dollars by inviting Obama to stay in O.B. next summer (how much is there to do in Chilmark?) and converting Ocean Park to a wildlife range replete with lions, zebras and giraffes.
On the nonagenarian birthday side, Oak Bluffster Richard C. Brown celebrated his 94th at home on Thursday, Dec. 31. Present family included wife, Carolyn, sons William Brown of O.B. and Walter LaBell of O.B. with wife, Linda, and son Jeff. Noel Labelle of Dayville, Conn., attended with wife, Carrie, and son Chris and great-grandchildren Anna, Matthew, Jonathan and Emily. Daughter Christine Clifford of Swansea arrived with her husband, Jay, and daughters Lynda and Laura. And there’s more! Daughter in law Cici Drouin of Oak Bluffs joined the band. The birthday boy is best known as the former owner of the Dairy Queen in Edgartown, plus he was a Little League umpire, a Boy Scout leader, a Whaling Church Monday Night soup supper worker and a wood carver.
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