Snoopy and Friends

The Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School theatre arts students will perform the fabulously funny You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown in their winter musical which opens next week at the Performing Arts Center. The show opens Thursday, Feb. 12 and runs through Saturday, Feb. 14. Curtain times are 7 p.m. on Thursday and Friday, and 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Saturday. The show is double cast, so come twice. Tickets are $7 for students and seniors and $10 for adults.

Galen Films will present the Vineyard premiere of their new film Rescuing Emmanuel on Monday and Tuesday, Feb. 9 and 10 at the Capawock Theatre on Main street, Vineyard Haven. The event will benefit Media Voices for Children, a nonprofit web-based news agency and media resource library for children’s rights.

As old as the Odyssey, the story of a man trying to fight his way back home is at the core of Dusty Pas’cal’s body of songs.

The 32-year-old singer songwriter from upstate New York released his second album, More, this past February, and performs tonight at the Katharine Cornell Theatre.

A plane landed in New York city today. The pilot chose the Hudson River as his landing strip. He believes that birds flew into his engines, thus disabling his aircraft. There were 155 people on board this plane, including the crew.

As I write this piece at 9:49 p.m., the day of the crash, millions of people throughout the world have seen images of the plane miraculously afloat in the river with everybody escaping from this near tragedy alive and mostly without injury.

Quansoo Forest

Spiraled, twisted, screwed and swirled,

Knobbed and gnarled, hunched and burled,

Oaken shapes grotesquely curled,

Ever-howling wind has whirled.

From the stump and toward the sky,

Aged sprouts for sunlight vie,

Grapplings limbs are arching high,

Arms of wooden octopi.

Briny gale the ocean blows,

COURAGE: A Novel of the Sea. By Alan Littell, Illustrated. St. Martin’s Press. 148 pages. $16.95.

It surely was not Vineyard Haven harbor waters lapping the beach near the Mary Guerin Inn in Eastville that inspiredthis thrilling sea tale. But its author, Alan Littell, spent childhood summers there. More likely, his later years as a merchant mariner provided the background for this story of the dangers of the enthralling sea.

Twenty-five years ago, the striped bass were on the verge of disappearing altogether from our waters. Federal scientists trying to pinpoint a cause listed pollution in the Chesapeake Bay spawning grounds as one probable reason — from residues of the banned pesticide DDT to the new phenomenon of acid rain. The other factor was clearly overfishing, and only this could be addressed immediately.

I felt a little left out when I saw the pictures in the Gazette a couple of weeks ago of Vineyarders together watching the Presidential inauguration. A world away in Westchester, N.Y., I had spent that morning moving my father into an Alzheimer’s lock-down unit, euphemistically known as an “assisted-living residence for the memory impaired.”

Guns and Suffrage

From the Gazette editions of February, 1909:

A s the bills of mortality overtake American writers of my generation, it is of John Updike I speak. In my retrospective mind’s-eye, I see him using a glacial boulder at Squibby as a backrest, concentrating over a manuscript. The time, the early 1970s. I see him and his Mary on the tennis courts of the Chilmark Community Center, their names and reserved time listed on the sign-up pad affixed to the perimeter wire fencing.