“I was a musician before I was a physician,” says Jay Segel, discussing the songwriting class he offers at Featherstone Center for the Arts. “My long-term goal is to create a place of creativity where songwriters have a chance to critique in a warmhearted way.”

Big Benton Exhibition

The Tisbury School will end its traveling art exhibitions with Thomas Hart Benton, the American muralist and seasonal Vineyarder who delved into the images of heroic everyday Americans during the era of the Great Depression.

The exhibition celebrates ordinary people who made America great. Given the artist’s strong Vineyard ties, his fans sometimes speculate that the faces of individual Island personalities can be found in his murals.

Filmmaker Janis Vogel really felt like a filmmaker — a real filmmaker, not just an Island girl done good — when her debut short, Drop, was selected for the international short film program that screened last Saturday as part of the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival.

Spaghetti Dinner

By LYNNE IRONS

The American oystercatchers and piping plovers are back on Island. These shorebirds are of concern wherever they are due to a combination of evils. The local Audubon Society in Martin County, Fla., asked me to help with a survey of piping plovers on a flat just inside the St. Lucie Inlet in Stuart, Fla. Unlike the Vineyard plovers, the Stuart piping plovers are not affected by over sand vehicles, skunks or raccoons. It is impossible for any of the above to ford the St. Lucie River. Instead the plovers are at risk of losing their habitat to winter residents who wish to augment their eroding beaches.

In this year-long serialized novel set on the Vineyard in real time, a native Islander (“Call me Becca”) returns home after two decades to help her eccentric Uncle Abe keep his landscaping business, Pequot, afloat. Abe fears and detests Richard Moby, the CEO of an off-Island wholesale nursery, Broadway. Convinced that Moby wants to destroy Abe personally, and all Island-based landscaping/nursery businesses generally, Abe is obsessed with “taking down” Moby.

The charms of up-Island are numerous, but I had my own reasons to take a Sunday drive up Middle Road last weekend. 

Topping my list of favorite up-Island things are Andy and Susie’s honey, fresh milk from Mermaid Farm, and a walk through the woodland wilds of Chilmark.

It is in these woods that one can find a plant not too often seen down-Island. 

Island Theatre Workshop’s One Act Play Festival this month serves up a full evening of theatre, with five one-act plays in a one-night program that travels through time and around the globe.

It beigns in L.A. with Frederick Stropel’s play Package Deal, directed by Kevin Ryan. This dark comedy invites the audience to sit in on lunch and the contract negotiations of Starla Simmons. An out-of-work actor, an out-of-touch casting agent, and an out-of-reach waiter make this luncheon delicious.

Martha’s Vineyard Magazine is a finalist for the 2009 National City and Regional Magazine Awards in two categories: General Excellence and, for its Home & Garden magazine.

Magazine professionals from around the country judged close to 800 entries from 59 magazines, this week naming five finalists in 29 categories. Winners will be announced at the CRMA annual conference June 1 in New Orleans.