Singing for the Beauty of the World

When Melanie DeMore comes to the Island she doesn’t just perform. She gets us all to perform. No, this isn’t one of those uncomfortable moments when you attend a performance and are plucked from the crowd to go center stage. Melanie spends the week before her performance hosting singing classes around the Island. And, if so moved after attending a workshop, you are invited to display your chops at her official performance.

Don’t forget about Vineyard Haven. The town, hit by the one-two punch of the July 4, 2008 fire that destroyed Café Moxie and severely damaged the Bunch of Grapes Bookstore, and the recession, has struggled to match the crowded, bustling streets of Edgartown and Oak Bluffs.

Tonight, July 15, from 5 to 8 p.m. local business leaders hope to turn things around with an event billed as an art stroll but that in fact includes a variety of businesses along Main street.

Chelsea McCarthy’s house burned down when she was 24 years old. She had paid off her credit card debt earlier that month, mailed her rent payment on her Christiantown home that morning, and had no money in the bank. At the end of the day all she was left with was some jewelry, perfume, her birth certificate (somehow it survived the fire), the clothes she had on and one of her two cats.

So much for having her life sorted out.

A Little Bonsai Talk

Bonsai: Its History and Practice will be the presentation, by Island bonsai buff Don Sibley, at this month’s meeting of the Martha’s Vineyard Garden Club, scheduled for Tuesday, July 19, at 1 p.m. at the Old Mill in West Tisbury. A hospitality hour with refreshments will follow the program.

Anyone interested in horticulture, home gardening, flower arranging and preserving the best qualities of the Island environment is welcome.

Of all the ways to go, who would have thought the grocery store would become one of the prime unravelers of our mortal coil.

Sad but true says Nancy Deville in her book Death by Supermarket: The Fattening, Dumbing Down and Poisoning of America.

The problems are many. So many foods laden with high-fructose corn syrup, vegetable oil, endocrine disrupting soy, neurologically damaging aspartame, and all the rest of the maddening ingredients now commonplace in factory made food.

Ho, to the Fair!

Only about a month to go: The 150th Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society Fair and Livestock Show opens Thursday, August 18, at 9 a.m.

Fair fans can now follow the event on Facebook (Martha’s Vineyard Ag Fair) to get a steady stream of updates, information, photos and more.

By MARK ALAN LOVEWELL

It was showtime this week at Martha’s Vineyard Chowder Company, a new restaurant in the old Dreamland building in Oak Bluffs. The space is across the street from the Flying Horses. Diners will remember the spot as formerly the Ocean Club, formerly Balance and at one time Danny Quinn’s, at 9 Oak Bluffs avenue. As of Tuesday night, after much preparation and waiting, it is officially the Martha’s Vineyard Chowder Company.

The Slow Food movement and Martha’s Vineyard have a lot in common, and not just in our delight in eating locally grown plants and animals.

In the 1970s McDonald’s set its sights on the Island, targeting an area along the Vineyard Haven harbor. But the people said no. A grass roots campaign sent fast food packing.

Similarly, in Italy in 1986 the voracious appetite of McDonald’s spurred another movement that harkened back to a simpler and healthier time.

The sight of an old barn, a beacon of red in the midst of a green and yellow field, not unlike that of a lighthouse, often brings up visions of the past, and a more idyllic time when cows owned the earth and people, well, just milked them.

Artist Richard Dunbrack sees furniture.

Using recycled materials from old barns and antique oddities that have fallen from grace (he does not pillage), Mr. Dunbrack fashions whimsical yet functional furniture. Art you can take a nap in, if you will.

Transformed into what appears to be a room of curiosities, the Yard’s black-box theatre this week evokes a sense of wonder. A guitar leans against a funky metal chair, a streetlight stands in one corner, a piano is angled in the other and a lamp with no shade illuminates the stage.

But there’s a softness to the lighting that smooths what might be rougher edges of junk and turns it into a collection of life’s treasures.