Arts a la Carte, a new children’s arts discussion series at the Featherstone Center for the Arts, will kick off this Thursday with a bang: a Molly Bang, that is.

Tashmoo Benefit

The second annual Tastes of Tashmoo fundraiser to benefit the restoration of the historic 1887 pumping station at the head of Lake Tashmoo will be held on July 17 from 5:30 to 8 p.m. at the waterfront home of Denys and Marilyn Wortman. The event will include a silent auction as well as music by Christine Box, Ray Frazio and Tristan Israel. More information and tickets are available by calling 508-696-4202 or e-mailing JJL@gis.net.

Environmental artist Terry Bastian will be on Island July 8 to install the Blue Wave Project, his temporary public art installation about global climate change. Mr. Bastian’s artwork is a Cristo-like piece of blue fabric arranged to look like a wave, marking where the sea may be in these communities 100 years from now if nothing is done about global warming today. He is marking cultural treasures in each community that may be lost, challenging the people to imagine how to save them.

Island readers anticipated Philip Craig’s annual mystery novels like their first summer swim. The author died this year, leaving one last novel finished. Here is an exclusive excerpt from that book, Vineyard Chill, printed with permission from Scribner.

It was a bright, snowless mid-January day, chilly but not cold, Just right for a drive on the Chappy beaches. We could enjoy the ride and bring back several big, industrial-strength trash bags full of seaweed for the garden. Two good reasons to go. So we went.

Can you imagine explaining the contemporary garment known as a T-shirt to George Washington? Picture the guy dressed in layers of scratchy underwear, breeches, dress shirt, heavy jacket, tights, boots and a hat like a complicated folded napkin.

Alan M. Dershowitz will speak about his latest book, Is There a Right to Remain Silent? Coercive Interrogation and the Fifth Amendment After 9/11, at the Chilmark Public Library on Wednesday, July 9, at 5:30 p.m.

In this serialized novel set on the Vineyard in real time, a native Islander (“Call me Becca”) returns home after many years in Manhattan to help her eccentric Uncle Abe keep his landscaping business, Pequot, afloat. Through Mott (Pequot’s general manager) she’s met Quincas (a Brazilian laborer) and the rest of Pequot’s staff. Uncle Abe has an intense loathing of Richard Moby, the CEO of Broadway, an off-Island landscaping business.

The folk trio of Cindy Kallet, Ellen Epstein and Michael Cicone have emerged after a 15-year recording hiatus to release Heartwalk, a collection of original songs and folk favorites. While the three may have spent the past decade and a half on other projects, the warmth and sincerity on Heartwalk demonstrates they’ve lost none of the chemistry that earned them accolades on the New England folk circuit for their previous albums Angels in Daring (1988) and Only Human (1993).

The internationally acclaimed St. Petersburg Quartet opens the 38th summer season of the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society with performances at 8 p.m. on July 7 and 8 — Monday at the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown, Tuesday at the Chilmark Community Center.

The concert program includes Alexander Glazunov’s Three Novelettes, opus 15; the String Quartet in E-flat Major by Antonin Dvorák, and with the chamber society’s artistic director, Delores Stevens, joining the group on stage, the Piano Quintet by Dmitri Shostakovich.

Kim Nye bought an old hardware store on Uncas avenue in Oak Bluffs back in 2000, with an eye to opening an art gallery. She renovated it the following year but waited until now, a likely recession period, to open the gallery.