Bring Your Own

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

If you would like a drink with your meal in a Vineyard Haven restaurant, you can do that now.

Why risk the possibility of losing control of the way our quiet, safe town develops by voting to serve beer and wine.

Once Tisbury is not dry, it is not dry forever.

After you vote on April 15 to keep Tisbury dry, you can take your beer or wine with you and go to dinner in many of our local restaurants.

Shirley Kennedy

Vineyard Haven

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Greetings to all of our readers. This week we have a variety of topics. As usual, there are lots of things on our minds. We have decided to show our readers a photograph about our bulletin board: Hope 2008. We made this board to show that we were going to take a stand for fairness. We wrote our own thoughts about making the world a better place and put them on the board and invited anyone else to do the same if they wanted to. Enjoy February vacation; we will too.

Dr. W’s Sophomores

Bulletin Board Of Hope

Hello, Rylie

Rylie Adele Mansfield, the daughter of Katy Mansfield and Rick Mansfield, formerly of Vineyard Haven, was born Dec. 12. She weighed 7 pounds, 9 ounces. Her grandmothers are Eileen Andrews of Vineyard Haven and Gloria Mansfield of St. Michaels, Md. Her late grandfathers are Roger Andrews of Vineyard Haven and Rick Mansfield of Maryland.

Courtesy Edgartown School.

Eighth grader Chris Pitt won the Edgartown School spelling bee on Feb. 20. The runner-up was sixth grader Alice Keenan.

Chris won by spelling the word neutral correctly. This makes Chris a two-time winner — he also took home the top prize two years ago as a sixth grader.

Chilmark’s Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival is seeking couches (no sleepers, please) for its eighth annual weekend movie March 14 to 16. If you have a couch in good condition that you’d let the organizers borrow, they will thank you with three film tickets and a festival gift bag. They will come and pick the couches up on Thursday, March 13, and return them on Monday, March 17. The couches will be covered during the event. Please call Brad Westcott at 508-645-9599, or e-mail him at bwestcott@mviff.org if you can help.

Touring musicians are supposed to say they like the venue they’re about to play.

John Cruz and the Island?

You can’t shut him up.

“Yeah, I was in Amherst at University of Massachusetts and a friend I gigged with always summered there and told me the Vineyard was perfect for my music,” the Hawaiian born performer songwriter said by phone this week from Oahu.

“Two things kept me there. One, I fell in love with the place and, two, the bonito, man. I fell hook, line and sinker for fishing bonito and the derby.

From backyard growers to full-fledged farmers, Island residents seem to have caught chicken fever.

The Island Grown Initiative hosted an all-day Vineyard workshop on the bird Saturday, which covered the ground from egg to plate.

It’s on! The writers’ strike is over, and glittering preparations are under way for Hollywood’s annual Academy Awards presentation — as well as for the Island’s very Vineyard version of the Vanity Fair party, the third annual Oscar Night Benefit with the Martha’s Vineyard Film Society.

A retaining wall estimated to weigh about 30 tons holding up a steeply sloping bank along Sea View avenue in Oak Bluffs collapsed suddenly Wednesday morning, sending town officials scrambling to repair the wall in time for the summer season and raising fresh questions about the structural integrity of certain parts of the town waterfront.

Faced with a budget deficit of as much as $2 million — the largest in town history — Oak Bluffs selectmen on Tuesday debated a wide range of painful cost-cutting measures, including eliminating salaries for elected officials, combining debt with other towns, restructuring town departments and eliminating positions.