Arts & Entertainment
Jump Rope for Hope
Students at the Tisbury School recently raised $4,147 to support the Red Cross Haiti relief efforts through a jump rope event, held for all grades.
Just after the earthquake hit Jan. 12, two fourth grade teachers, Pamela Herman and Veronika VanDe Geer, and their students saw the many children who now had lost everything, and initiated a jump rope for hope event. Children generated sponsors to support their jumping during each gym class. The $4,147 check was presented to the Red Cross just before school vacation.
Efforts to Help Haiti
Volunteers of the Martha’s Vineyard Fish Farm for Haiti Project are hosting a potluck supper, Saturday, March 6, at the common house of Cohousing in West Tisbury, to brainstorm and make plans for this summer’s fund raising events.
Past events have included three concerts at the Tabernacle, tennis tournaments, Haitian art sale benefits and numerous other events. The group hopes to make this summer’s fundraisers for Haiti the biggest and best yet.
It took the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival about three years to get into the casual character it has enjoyed for the past seven. In the first year, a black and white printout distributed the day before the Grange Hall screenings announced a one-day program consisting of a collection of shorts, a few features and some ethnic food. The next year, a move to the Katharine Cornell Theatre in Vineyard Haven eliminated the food; eating wasn’t allowed at the site, so the festival moved again.
For a week during the holidays this winter, Michelle Jasny left the Island for a camp in the Catskills. Armed with her accordion, she joined some 300 people at KlezKamp, a weeklong retreat for klezmer musicians. Though she’d been playing for nearly a year, and also has a background in piano and guitar, Ms. Jasny was blown away by the intensity of the repertoire, and the music. “Some of this is very fast,” she said of the traditional Yiddish music. “We were playing like nine, 10 hours a day, so it was very intense.”
The crowd at Che’s Lounge sang along Saturday night, as brothers Dave and Rob Myers brought a cornucopia of music and nostalgia to the underground coffee shop in the alley off Main street in Vineyard Haven.
Many of the Island’s seasoned musicians showed up at Che’s; for them, it was a step back to the 1990s and a time when the Island was home to a number of vibrant live bands that played regularly enough that audiences became fans, buying locally-produced albums and memorizing lyrics.
Library Reading Series
The Martha’s Vineyard Library Association in collaboration with the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, presents a free winter reading series featuring some of the center’s poetry and fiction fellows. The readings, held throughout the month on Thursdays at 5:30 p.m., begin March 4 at the West Tisbury library and continue at the Oak Bluffs library on March 11, at the Edgartown library on March 18 and finish at the Vineyard Haven library on March 25.
