From the Vineyard Gazette edition of Feb. 24, 1961 by Colbert Smith:

Parties are different on the Island in February. There’s an almost imperceptible clouding of the atmosphere; a tincture of desperation underlies the natural sociability of man during this monstrous month, February, which, as usual, seems to have cornered the market on winter’s discontent.

Parties given this month seldom really celebrate anything. Of course there may be a polite bow to Lincoln or Washington or St. Valentine, but these are only tokens, if not indeed just plain excuses. Instead of honoring occasions, most February parties are given to provide release of the spirit tormented by the ills and chills of a winter that has already overstayed its welcome, at a time when spring is still too far away for hopeful anticipation.

As a rule, February parties contribute mightily to the saving of sundry sanities, those of the newcomers who simply can’t believe that the pall of an Island winter can be as baleful as it obviously is, and those of the old timers who knew what was coming but are bored with it anyway.

Roughly, parties are of two kinds. They are either small or big. Small parties can be distinguished readily from the fact that the guests are all sitting down and are talking in pleasantly modulated voices. At big ones, everybody stands up and unabashedly screams at his neighbor.

There are advantages to both. At the small party, there is usually comfort, accompanied by gentility. At the large, there is the opportunity to utter devastating remarks about everybody present, including the person you are talking to or even yourself, with no fear of being heard, much less understood. At a large party, there’s an unwritten rule against listening, even if it were possible to hear, to what anybody else is saying.

You can attend a big party of Republicans (on the Island, you can’t find a big party of anything else), and announce to the person nearest you that you are an anarchist, a Communist, the member of a fertility cult or even a Democrat, and meet with the same response: a wide grin showing lots of teeth and an inaudible torrent of words that you cannot distinguish from the rest of the babble. Big parties have their advantages, too, but also a major disadvantage: their thorough-going predictability. They simply go on until they are over, and when they are over, the scene is one of devastation. The small party, on the other hand, has a better chance to become a classic. There is room for the bizarre, and now and then you will encounter at a small party such a winsome disregard for the mundane that the whole experience will suddenly take on the character of a dream — especially when the party-goers have been afflicted with a bad case of February.

A single case in point should suffice to illustrate the unreality that can develop at a gathering of a few Island souls on a February afternoon. Here is a true story:

“I love the smell of wood smoke don’t you?” said a lady guest.

Everyone looked at the fire appreciatively and inhaled, thus committing themselves irrevocably to a policy of social behavior for this particular occasion, which was a Sunday afternoon musicale.

Presently the conversation levelled off, and the singer and the pianist went to one side of the room, and the rest seated themselves on the other. The program, the first half of which was made up of songs from Shakespeare and the second half of Bach arias, got off to a delightful start, with the ancient melodies dancing pleasantly in the mind on the quiet February Sunday afternoon. During O Mistress Mine, the performers were only slightly obscured from the audience by the gray plumes of smoke coming out of the fireplace.

When the last song from the Shakespeare cycle had been sung, the singer’s voice announced from the other side of the vaporous curtain that at this point there would be an intermission to allow time for glasses to be refilled.

“It’s a bit smoky in here, isn’t it?” came the voice of the hostess, who suggested casually that if someone would move the log to the very rear of the fireplace, the smoke would perhaps go up the chimney. With almost too much alacrity, two lovers of the smell of wood smoke jumped up from their chairs and sized fire tongs and a poker, and shifted the blazing log to the back.

And then the Bach arias were begun, charmingly sung and charmingly played, and slowly the artists began to emerge like characters out of Wuthering Heights.

Anyone now sitting firmly on reality’s craggy rocks will naturally ask the question, why in the world did everybody at the musicale just sit around and watch the room fill up with smoke? It’s a cinch that any one of them, if he had been alone, would have done something about it immediately, even if it meant calling out the fire department. The only conceivable answer is that nothing, or almost nothing, can spoil a party in February.

Compiled by Hilary Wall
library@mvgazette.com