Ray (Scott) Santinello was five years old when he got his first haircut. It took place on the third floor of his family’s home in Springfield, and the barber was a young friend of the family. It was the 1950s and the barber, Benito Mancinone, had recently immigrated to the city from Molise, a small town located on a mountain in Italy.
Mr. Santinello is 61 now and Benny the Barber, long a mainstay of Circuit avenue in Oak Bluffs, is still cutting his hair.
“He’s my barber. I just don’t change,” Mr. Santinello said on a recent Tuesday morning.

Amid growing negative public sentiment over a telephone pole replacement project on the Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road, the Tisbury selectmen have referred the project to the Martha’s Vineyard Commission for possible review.
Meeting in emergency session last Friday, the selectmen voted to refer the NStar project to the MVC as a development of regional impact (DRI). The height and size of the poles is at issue.
The move to refer the matter to the commission was recommended by town administrator John (Jay) Grande after consulting with town clerk Marion Mudge.

Except for the baroque chirping from the rafters, the Tabernacle is empty and quiet enough to make one want to whisper. It is 40 minutes before the Island Community Chorus begins to rehearse for its July 6 summer concert. Music director Peter Boak arrives carrying a collapsible stepstool and music stand. He climbs to the stage to arrange and consider.

It’s been 180 years since the Vineyard Playhouse building was first built on Church street in Tisbury. For the past three years, the playhouse staff and board of directors have been hard at work ensuring that it stands another two centuries. Construction is scheduled to wrap this week on the downstairs portion of the two-story building, allowing the playhouse to invite people in for the first time since 2011.

The Martha’s Vineyard Commission has an important role to play when it comes to planning and protection of the Vineyard environment, a majority of people polled by the Vineyard Gazette Harris Interactive survey said.

The commission was singled out for special questioning in the survey which polled more than 500 seasonal and permanent residents on issues ranging from quality of life to cell phone service.

The Vineyard was a different place 25 years ago.
The Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank was barely two years old. The Martha’s Vineyard Commission, a unique regional planning agency founded by an act of the Massachusetts legislature with special powers to plan and regulate development, was a little more than a decade old. These were the late Reagan years and the national economy was booming, as the U.S. had entered one of the longest periods of sustained economic growth since World War II.

In the late 1980s, with real estate prices on the rise and new building starts at an all-time high on Martha’s Vineyard, the Gazette commissioned a poll of seasonal and permanent residents to gauge public sentiment around development. The results revealed a deep and widely-held concern about the fast pace of growth and its implications for the Island environment and quality of life, a concern that cut across every demographic category, part-time and full-time residents alike.

On Wednesday for her last day of
preschool, my daughter Pickle and I discuss what music to play on the drive from West Tisbury to Chilmark. The drive takes about 15 minutes and over the last two years we have enjoyed a long musical journey together. It is just the two of us and so I have had no censors or suggestions of what is appropriate or even good.

Pickle fell in step with my groove early on, leaning heavily toward men of the late 1970s. In our hermetically-sealed musical education chamber, a Honda Fit, one could say she had no choice.

My wife is from Tennessee and before serendipitously landing on the island where we met, to her a boat trip was something you took on two aluminum pontoons, a platform covered with indoor/outdoor carpet, a small outboard engine, frilly canopy and a few cases of beer on a flat, calm pond on Sundays somewhere out in the country, maybe rafting up with a few other families for a party. Once on Cuttyhunk, her assumption was that if anything ever happened to our boat, we would each take two kids in life jackets and swim for shore.

O beautiful for spacious skies

is broken, angry, out of work.

Our alabaster cities clang

with voices split and shrill.

Lobbied, pledged, our leaders strut

they shame the patriots’ dream.

Election more than country love

they poke the public wound.

Where are courage, statesmanship

a majesty worth sacrifice

a reason we should live with less

and strive for something more?

Show us the strength of compromise

that differences can mend.

Relinquish stubborn rhetoric