Renowned storyteller Susan Klein will tell a selection of her beloved Island-based stories at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School’s Performing Arts Center on Saturday, July 9 from 7 to 8:30 p.m. as a benefit for Habitat for Humanity of Martha’s Vineyard.

Sharks in Tune

This weekend it’s not just about baseball for the Martha’s Vineyard Sharks. Then again, every Sharks game brings with it far more than mere sport. Between innings trivia contests, frozen shirt races (you have to see it to believe it), bouncy house, great food, access to friendly players and a chance to kick back while the kids run free and wild, well, semiwild; each game is a true community event.

And on Sunday and Monday they are kicking it another notch.

Parade and Fireworks

Get your boom-boom on this July 4 in Edgartown. The annual fireworks display begins at sundown by the Edgartown harbor.

“Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too, great enough to give frame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration.

Carole Simpson became a broadcast news reporter to make a difference.

In her work — she was the first black woman to work in the Washington, D.C., bureau for NBC and later moved to ABC as a weekend anchor — Ms. Simpson sought to use the power of her position not just to report the facts, but to make Americans see the injustices that plagued both their country and the world.

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens....Whether you sang the song in high school chorus, learned Do Re Mi from Julie Andrews or were introduced to the musical via a Gwen Stefani remix, the Sound of Music is fixed in the collective memory.

The horror of the Civil War was the graphic and powerful subject of the 1989 Academy Award-winning film Glory, screened at the Katharine Cornell Theatre on Monday night. The event kicked off the Civil War Film Series, jointly sponsored by the Martha’s Vineyard Film Society and the Martha’s Vineyard Museum to commemorate the country’s most deadly war through movies, talks and exhibitions. The museum recently launched an exhibit titled We Are Marching Along: Martha’s Vineyard and the Civil War which continues until April 2012.

“Never put anyone out of your heart,” the late Hindu holy man Neem Karoli Baba told his disciples, among them writer, lecturer, and holy man in his own right, Ram Dass, and his friend, regular travel buddy, writer and photographer, Rameshwar Das. These two men share many affinities, among them a decades-long passion for Eastern philosophy coupled with an ability to purvey these ideas to a similarly fascinated American public.

Dancefloor Fireworks Just as Hot

“There have to be music festivals and someone has to do [organize] it. And I guess it has to be me.”

So says Rob Myers, also known as Deejay Jellybone Rivers, talking about his compulsion to provide the rest of us couch potatoes with a reason to get out of the house and get in the groove.

Reading Is Fundamental

The Martha’s Vineyard Library Association kicks off its summer reading series for kids with a big bash on Saturday, July 2 at the Agricultural Hall in West Tisbury. And because the library association understands that although reading is serious business and best cultivated when kids are young (electronics free vacation anyone?) the party will not be solely word-driven. Face painting begins at 10 a.m. and clown Bill Ross performs beginning at 11 a.m.

Admission to the event is $3. Face painting is $1 per face.