Welcome Emilly

Michelle and Marcos Aiolff announced the birth of a baby girl, Emilly Barbosa Aiolff, on April 7 at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. Emilly weighed 6 pounds 8.2 ounces at birth.

On April 4, the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School Minnesingers performed at the Massachusetts Instrumental and Choral Conductors Association Festival, and despite this being their first return to the festival in ten years and singing pieces of the highest-rated level of difficulty, they excelled, and were awarded by the association a bronze medal. Congratulations go out to the Minnesingers; their director, Janis Wightman and their accompianist, Melanie Sroka.

In his 1841 essay Circles, the transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrated the moment when a visionary rises up amongst us. “By a flash of his eye,” wrote Emerson, the artist “burns up the veil which shrouded all things, and the meaning of the very furniture, of cup and saucer, of chair and clock and tester, is manifest.”

Springtime’s probably my favorite season for biking on the Vineyard. The colors and sounds and smells are just the antidote to a long, gray winter; or, if you’re a seasonal resident like myself, it’s a great time to get reacquainted with New England. The weather’s cool enough to pedal fast without overheating, you don’t have to carry as much water, and the traffic is still relatively light. Of course, you do have the drawback that, of the vehicles that are on the road, most of them are landscaping trucks.

In this year-long serialized novel set on the Vineyard in real time, a native Islander (“Call me Becca”) returns home after two decades to help her eccentric Uncle Abe keep his landscaping business, Pequot, afloat. Abe fears and detests Richard Moby, the CEO of an off-Island wholesale nursery, Broadway. Convinced that Moby wants to destroy Abe personally, and all Island-based landscaping/nursery businesses generally, Abe has been obsessed with “taking down” Moby.

By LYNNE IRONS

Roseanne Roseannadanna had it right. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. I am grateful to own a couple of vehicles, but wouldn’t you know, two were on the blink in the same day. Everyone should have such problems! The good news was, however, it forced me to stay home and tend my own garden.

To see a new species of bird is always fun but particularly if it is in a place where you have birded frequently. Flip and I have been traveling to and birding in Costa Rica since our hair was brown, not gray. Thirty years of bird-watching in Costa Rica should have netted us close to all the 878 species known to this Central American country. No such luck, but we haven’t been there every month of the year.

An artist since the 1950s, Jack Greene recently reached into his archives to retrieve a number of airbrush drawings and paintings he created 30 years ago, and will present a small revival of the retro-artistic style for an exhibition opening at Featherstone Center for the Arts in Oak Bluffs this weekend.

“Look up, it’s a bird, it’s a plane”

No, it’s not Superman, but it is super-natural. The superheroes of the sky this week will be the Lyrid meteors, showering the night sky with a light show from April 16 to 22.

Plymouth Rock Studios, a $500-million film and television studio complex scheduled to open in 2010 in Plymouth, has selected Hurd Publishing of Oak Bluffs to produce the company’s quarterly publication, Plymouth Rock Studios Magazine. The publication will report on studio plans and events and on Massachusetts as an up-and-coming film venue. The first issue is due out in June. It will be distributed to members of Hollywood’s Producers Guild of America and to major East Coast hotels.