Arts & Entertainment
Vineyard Sound celebrates the end of summer with a two-hour concert at the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown on Saturday, August 24, at 8 p.m.
Each week the folks at Cinema Circus show a series of short films on Wednesday evening at the Chilmark Community center. The films begin at 6 p.m. but the circus — complete with jugglers, face painters, stilt walkers, food and music — gets underway at 5 p.m.
Fact and fiction sat across from each other over coffee one morning this week. They also happened to be brother and sister.
“I write history and was jealous of the freedom that you had,” Paul Schneider said to his sister, Bethany (Bee) Ridgway.
“With fiction, you can do whatever you want,” she agreed. “As an academic, I’m so pencil-licky about things. I just busted free.
When Tonya Lewis Lee became a mother 17 years ago she could not find many picture books featuring children of color as everyday kids. So years later she and her husband Spike Lee wrote their own book, Please, Baby, Please, about a mischievous toddler.
Forty years ago Dr. Karl Skoreki trained in nephrology in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. During his time there, he noticed that many members of the same family were contracting kidney disease, a condition that was poorly understood at the time. During his career Dr. Skorecki continued to study genetic predisposition to the disease. He and other researchers have since determined that the illness, which can devolve into kidney failure, disproportionately affects African Americans, who are four to five times more likely to contract the disease and to die from its effects.

