Belly Dance Revue

Come join in the fun when Edgartown Council on Aging presents Vineyard Belly Dance and Revue on Wednesday, Nov. 14 at 1:45 p.m. at the Anchors.

Group numbers, solos and duets will be performed by Pat Szucs, Betty Smith, Sheila Rayyan and Suzanna Nickerson. Special guest Jerri Wells will accompany the troupe. Jerri is a seasoned professional singer with a unique style and powerful voice.

Island artist and American Impressionist Ray Ellis launches his 15th book, called By the Light of the Moon: The Moonlight Paintings of Ray Ellis, with a talk tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the Bunch of Grapes Bookstore on Main street in Vineyard Haven. Art historian Valerie Ann Leeds, adjunct curator of American art at the Flint Institute of Arts, traces the artist’s development as a painter of the night in this edited version of the introductory essay.

Regrettably, a very brief summary will suffice for birds brought here by ex-hurricane Noel, which massaged the Vineyard with 60 mile-per-hour gusts and about two inches of rain last Saturday. Local birders were hopeful: tropical systems moving north along the East Coast can produce spectacular birding, blowing in anything from offshore migrants like phalaropes, to southern seabirds like sooty terns, to songbirds like blue grosbeaks diverted from their usual migration routes.

Veterans, merchant mariners, and others involved in past and present service will be honored at 5:30 p.m. today, Friday, Nov. 9 at the Shabbat service at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center on Centre street in Vineyard Haven.

An Oneg Shabbat with refreshments will follow the service honoring veterans. The Island community is invited to the service.

Aquinnah is double-timing its effort to bring wind power to the community.

Selectmen on Oct. 21 submitted an application for an analysis of Aquinnah’s existing wind power, conducted cost-free by the University of Massachusetts renewable energy research lab under the auspices of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MTC).

Since its creation over 30 years ago, the Martha’s Vineyard Commission has served as one the most unusual political bodies in the nation — a regional planning agency vested with exceptional powers and charged with protecting the Island’s unique environment and character.

The developers of the high-end Field Club recreation project in Katama have bought an adjoining housing subdivision for $12.35 million from a group of Island businessmen that includes Edgartown selectman Michael Donaroma.

The deal, which closed on Oct. 30, relates to land around the old Grant’s pit site off Katama Road, bought by Mr. Donaroma and his three partners for about $800,000 six years ago.

SAT scores at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School have dipped below the Massachusetts average, according to a report submitted to the high school committee this week by guidance director Michael McCarthy.

Backstage at the high school performing arts center, director and manager Jim Novack, 61, has assembled a horror show of mangled pianos. A gnarly Hammond, salvaged for $50 from a Vineyard basement some years ago, is crammed into the darkened corner, next to an upright from the 1950s, with a missing front rudely exposing the instrument’s strings and hammers. To its right stands an Everett piano, manufactured for institutional use. Its keys stick, sounding flat notes in perpetuity until physically pulled back in to place.

Vineyard commercial fishermen are coming out ahead in a price war over bay scallops.

Yesterday, Island commercial bay scallop fishermen received as much as $15 a pound, while their counterparts on Nantucket were paid only $11 a pound.

Consumers on both Islands yesterday were paying essentially the same price, around $18 a pound. In Orleans, the price was $29.99 a pound.

The Vineyard and Nantucket still have viable bay scallops fisheries, though Cape Cod does have pockets of success.