Derby Days

Here are some things to like about September:

KEY PATH PROTECTION

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

By Leonard M. Robinson, longtime Tisbury resident and sometime contributor to the Vineyard Gazette. From the Vineyard Gazette editions of May, 1951:

I live on Frog Alley. I often wish that the town had kept the name. It is now known as Owen Little Way, whatever that means, but when I was a boy everybody knew it as Frog Alley, and that had a meaning.

An Oak Bluffs contractor and former town official who assaulted the administrator to the Oak Bluffs conservation commission in March while she was performing a site walk, was placed on probation for three years in Edgartown district court on Friday.

Lucinda Childs, a pioneer of post-modern dance and a Vineyard resident, is the subject of a documentary screening free at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 11 at the Capawock Theatre on Main street in Vineyard Haven.

The 53-minute documentary was made in 2006 by Patrick Bensard of the Cinematheque de la Danse in Paris. It includes rehearsals, performances and interviews in London, New York and Paris with Mikhail Baryshnikov, Philip Glass, Anna Kisselgoff, Yvonne Rainer, Susan Sontag and Robert Wilson.

A Florida man and former chief of staff for a U.S. senator who allegedly crashed a Chilmark fundraiser for Presidential candidate John Edwards last month and stole several campaign documents appeared in Edgartown district court on Friday for a brief pretrial conference.

Michael Duga, 31, is charged with breaking and entering during the daytime, a felony, two charges of trespassing, one charge of larceny from a building and one charge of possession of a class D drug (marijuana).

Classical Class

Love concert music but hate compositions written in the 20th century? Perhaps you’ve listened to the wrong pieces. Experience the best of the 20th century in a six-week course with musicologist Charles Blank, open to all ages. It begins Sept. 17 at the Tisbury Senior Center.

Correction

A column about trophy houses that appeared on the Commentary Page in Friday’s Gazette contained a historical inaccuracy. The chateau Chenonceaux was acquired by Henri II in 1526 in payment for back taxes and was immediately turned over to Dianne de Poitiers, who would be his mistress for 23 years. The Gazette regrets the error.

Whoa, where do I start? This long weekend brought several goodies for the Vineyard birders. It all started on Thursday, August 30, when Dick Jennings, who runs the Cape Pogue trips for The Trustees of Reservations, called in the morning to say he had spotted a marbled godwit at Cape Pogue the day before and was able to get a photo of the bird the next day. Great excitement resulted.

Few people ever see the raw notes - the raw thoughts - of a writer they admire. They don't know the handwriting of a favorite novelist or journalist, or what kind of notebook, grade of paper or color of ink the writer prefers. But every writer has a process of transmitting thoughts into printed words. It's an unselfconscious process, since only the finished product will ever be seen.

That is, in part, why the new body of work by nationally acclaimed Island-based painter Cindy Kane is so bewitching.