Monday, November 26, 2012
Yet Neither of Us Gives A Hoot In Hell
The Islands are twins separated at birth. That was a long time ago; ten thousand years ago, to be precise, when the Laurentide Ice Sheet started slip-sliding away. Clueless travelers assume the two Islands have everything in common. Whaling captains! Pirates out the ying-yang! Cedar-shingles! Quaint little $59-million cottages! Frosty winters! Pop-up shops! Alcoholism! Jobless rates! Rich twits in summer! (Theirs are Republican, ours Democrat.) But in spite of being twins – well, fraternal, our squirt of a bro across the channel is only 14 miles long, we’re 26 miles tall – and in spite of being tagged in every guidebook in the whole freakin’ universe as The Islands, as in The Cape And Islands, our response to one another across a mere 12 …
Monday, November 12, 2012
The Dock Street Coffee Shop in Edgartown
You want to sit right behind Darren Patrick at the grill because what he’s doing with eggs and batter and toast and every kind of breakfast meat is surely as skilled as anything Nadia Comaneci ever performed on the tumbling mat. Your devoted correspondent is there on a November Sunday at 8 a.m. when one of the many morning rushes was taking place (the diner opens at 6:30). Darren has two salami-studded omelets spread out on the giant fry slab. They're the shape and size of deflated beach balls, and when he flips them once-twice-thrice into the classic burrito-bulked omelet, you realize that if only you could prepare something like that yourself at home, you’d be pestered with half-a-dozen proposals of marriage per week. To the left of …
Monday, November 5, 2012
Along With Everybody Else Being Mean to Everybody Else in the First Half of the 20th Century on The Vineyard (It Doesn’t Happen Anymore, Right?)
Here’s the way it works: Mostly, human beings prefer to be in the company of people who are so identical to themselves, you wonder why we don’t simply clone our friends from our own DNA. Nowadays, of course, and particularly here on the Island, we’ve learned how fun and cool it is to know all varieties of humankind. Back in the day that wasn’t so practical because: Everybody here was Anglo-Saxon! Sounds kinda scary, doesn’t it?! Most of the Native population had been killed off, not by spears or guns but by those other scourges of white invasion: germs, alcohol, deprival of land and self-sustenance. In the first sixty years of white invasion, the Indian population declined by two-thirds. That’s before 1700! The 33% remaining got pushed to …
Monday, October 29, 2012
How To Build Up Old Yankee Coastal Cred in Rough Weather
As I put pen to paper – I mean fingertips to keyboard – sweet punkin pine! This change in our ozone is making me write odd things (even odder than usual) – it’s Sunday morning, October 28, and some kinda monster storm is gustily, wetly and determinedly barreling down on us. The hurricane’s nome de blow is Sandy, but the media has re-labeled her Frankenstorm, evoking a correlation to, of course, Frankenstein, and the Perfect Storm of late October, 1991, when a minor hurricane spinning up from the tropics got yanked into a nor’easter whooshing down from Canada. Some other, I don’t know, conversion layer or El Nino got sucked in from LA (I'm just hoofing it here), causing the weather to bunch up and go all hormonal on us, and to drag itself …
Monday, October 22, 2012
Halloween 2012
This is the time of year when people take an interest in me. As Halloween approaches, it occurs to organizers of late October events that the dingbat Nadler woman, author of three collections of ghost tales, two of them Vineyard-related (and all of them true! true! true!), the third a really scary book about Boston hauntings (it’s a project that forced me, many nights, to sleep with the light on, after receiving emails about hideous metropolitan beasties and ghoulies), that I, the Ghost Lady – just as Vernon Laux is the Bird Guy (the first time we met we introduced ourselves to each other that way and then we shook hands), that I could be called upon to relate a fresh, untold creepy tale. Cue Bela Lugosi demented laugh track. So I will! I…
Monday, October 15, 2012
An Island Specialty
Two big events occurred in the 1960s that would weigh heavily on Island culture. The first was that a lot of Greatest Generation-ers and their kids, la boomers, began to come here in the summer. The second was that, thanks to the general freak out and back-to-nature quality of the social revolution taking place, a lotta lotta lotta us went barefoot. All the time. From the minute we hopped out of bed in the morning (or, er, at 2 in the afternoon), and plied on our jeans, fringe vest and love beds, till the moment we crashed amid guttering candles, with a cauldron of peyote tea still simmering on the stove, and under the poster of the Electric Prune. First, you’re probably disbelieving about the GG demographic ever going barefoot. Certainly …
Monday, October 8, 2012
How Nutty Are We Vineyarders? – And How Nutty Have We Always Been?
I’m telling you, Lewis Carroll in his creation of looney-tunes Wonderland, had nothing on us. Here’s a typical Island day in the life of my ex-hubby, comedy-writer Marty Nadler: He’s running for O.B. Planning Board back in 2000, driving east on the airport road, and he stops to pick up a hitch-hiking local character whom we’ll call Zoombah. Zoombah is a confused white guy with Rasta coils of dark blond hair. He speaks with the Jamaican accent he picked up in his high school in Columbus, Ohio. “Oh, man!” cries Zoombah as he slides into the passenger seat of Marty’s beat-up Honda. “You’re my hero! Swing by my house, and I’ll prove it to you!” Not many people would accept that challenge, but Nadler, crazy in his own way (which he’s channeled…
Monday, October 1, 2012
Come Spend a Healing Day on Martha’s Vineyard!
What could be better therapy for a modern-day Joan of Arc who has recently endured some 24 years under house arrest in her native Myanmar—the country formerly known as Prince, I mean Burma – than a fun day trip to our island? Having just spent her past week addressing students at Harvard and Yale (and, by the way, why do those schools always get the coolest speakers?), Ms. Suu Kyi may still be in this vicinity, so I’m going to be among the first, as one of her countless admirers, to invite her to our shores. Here is my proposed one-day dream itinerary, but I do invite Patch readers to send in their own suggestions: I’m imagining that Ms. Suu Kyi is traveling under the protection of our state department; so I’d like to request that those …
Monday, September 24, 2012
Vanishing Species on Martha’s Vineyard?
Cross my heart: This is not going to come across as a partisan article. I promise to be so neutral about politics, and so gracious to BOTH our leading political parties, that people who’ve known me for years as the old lefty crunchy that I’ve always been, will douse me with smelling salts, slap both cheeks, and ask me if I’m okay. Here’s the simple, wholesome, entirely blameless subject under scrutiny: Way more Democrats live on -- or visit -- this Island than Republicans do, and that leads to occasional awkward situations which I’ll point out momentarily. But first let’s take a sociological moment to ask, Why so few Republicans? After all, the Vineyard is internationally known as a playground for the rich. I don’t need to remind you about…
Monday, September 17, 2012
Our Unfortunate Cousin To The Northwest, Penikese and Its Jinxed History
The first soul to appear in the history of this little island shaped like a ladybug was none other than the Wampanoag god, Moshup, that none-too-gentle giant with the hair-trigger temper. This was way back in the day (even before when the Clintons began vacationing here), when the Indians on Cape Cod called on Moshup for backup. Ten-inch-tall demons called Pukwudgees were harassing them. Don’t you hate it when Pukwudgees do that? These vicious little thugs stomped on the Indians’ arrows, poked holes in their canoes, and scattered sharp objects on the hunting paths. Not acceptable. Hero-sized Moshup gathered up his five buff sons and tracked the nasty ‘wudgees through the wetlands. But the mean little buggers still had tricks up their tiny…
Holly Nadler
7:50 am on Saturday, December 1, 2012
Hugh, you rock! You should definitely spend more chill time on the Vineyard! more ›