Vineyard Voices is a book of oral histories compiled by Linsey Lee. Each story is, at first glance, a snapshot of a person’s life, just a page long. However, the effect one takes away from reading each entry is so much fuller, as if an entire life has been captured and immortalized.

To do this in just a few paragraphs takes a lot of skill and craftsmanship.

Reform Judaism

The third in a series of new Shabbat services led by Rabbi Caryn Broitman and designed to meet the needs of those raised in a Classical Reform Jewish tradition is being held Friday, March 25 from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. at the Hebrew Center at 130 Centre street in Vineyard Haven.

During this service Rabbi Broitman will speak to the history of Reform Judaism in the U.S. and also discuss the changing practices in the traditional Friday night observance.

Congregation members and nonmembers are welcome.

Love, Set, Match for Cambodia

In 2004, while traveling through Cambodia, Todd Alexander and his wife, Kara Gelinas, were taken with a charming 14 year-old girl selling postcards to tourists. The girl did not attend school, although she wished she could. Her family couldn’t afford it.

What began as a chance encounter led Mr. Alexander and Ms. Gelinas to create a nonprofit called Family to Family Cambodia to help children of Cambodia attend school and, ultimately, to actually build three schools in Cambodia.

For more than a century on Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod, the words of the Wampanoag were not their own.

“It was prophesied that language would go away from here for a time,” Jessie Little Doe Baird intones at the opening of filmmaker Anne Makepeace’s documentary We Still Live Here. “When the appointed time came, if the people here decided that they wanted to welcome language home then there would be a way made for that to happen.”

You could summarize the plot of Laura Israel’s movie Windfall to make it sound like a David-beats-Goliath, feel-good enviroflick.

A nasty power company intent on a big, new development has the leaders of a picturesque small town in its thrall. Local activists organize the good citizens and pull off an electoral coup, voting out the acquiescent town government and driving the corporate bad guys out of town.

Fudging It

Murdick’s Fudge is again sponsoring the Run the Chop Challenge, a five-mile road race benefiting Big Brothers Big Sisters of Martha’s Vineyard. The race is on July 4, starting at the Tisbury School on Spring street in Vineyard Haven at 8:30 a.m.

The story of the building of the schooner Charlotte is a true Vineyard tale. Tonight at 7 p.m. the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival will open the weekend’s festivities with a documentary about the building of this wooden boat.

The film is called Charlotte. But the title feels too narrow for it is far more than a story about one big sailboat or one beloved boatyard. It is the story of a people and a community with a love of the sea.

With three first place champions — Patrick Best, Tucker Cosgrove and Zach Lamie — and a host of other impressive placings, the YMCA of Martha’s Vineyard Makos Swim Club made its mark with five other teams in the SEMSL Championship swim meet last weekend, competing against Marshfield, Nantucket, Sandwich, Eastham and Plymouth.

March 14 was the magical day when several signs of spring flew in, even though they were accompanied by a tad of snow in the afternoon. Fortunately, the snow did not stick around, but the signs of spring will.

I accept most of the responsibility for the typographical errors in this column. My editors are willing to pick up my hand written ramblings at my house weekly