When Charles McGrath wrote about the annual Island Cup game between the Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket football teams for the New Yorker in 1984, he likened it to a fierce sibling rivalry. What mainland team could hope to drum up a rivalry as poignant with either of the Island squads? For all that the Vineyarders can’t stand about the Whalers, they also know that the only football team in the entire country that could possibly understand what it means to be an Islander is that of their brother-in-isolation, Nantucket.

For one artist, the term all-Island art is literal. Amid the paintings, pastels and photographs, the seaweed collages by Kathy Poehler hung on the wire fence at the Tabernacle yesterday for the 54th All-Island Art Show.

In the winter of 1973 Joe Alves, production director for Jaws, began his quest to find the perfect setting for Amity Island.

From Montauk to Marblehead, Martha’s Vineyard was the place that met Mr. Alves’s criteria.

“Edgartown was so pristine with the white picket fences and white buildings,” he said. “It was a wonderful place to be terrified by a shark. Then when I got to Menemsha it was a great fishing village with all the little shacks. It was absolutely perfect.”

Vineyard filmmaker Bob Nixon can’t escape great white sharks. Fresh from months of shooting the apex predators in the Pacific for a Discovery Channel special, last Tuesday afternoon he again encountered the animal, this time 100 feet off the Menemsha jetty. While the veracity of recent great white sightings on the Vineyard has been the subject of some debate, Mr. Nixon is fairly confident he saw the real deal. On board with him at the time was Dr. Sylvia Earle, one of the world’s preeminent oceanographers.

The Pit Stop is located inside an inconspicuous garage across the street from Tony’s Market in Oak Bluffs and is hard to find even when you’re looking right at it. A small marquee out front advertises the night’s musical entertainment and a white hand-painted sign directs visitors around an old trailer to the entrance at the back of the building.

Each week the folks at Cinema Circus show a series of short films on Wednesday evenings at the Chilmark Community Center. The films begin at 6 p.m. but at 5 p.m. the circus — complete with jugglers, face painters, stilt walkers, food and music — gets under way.

An advanced screening of the films was arranged. In a world with few certainties, the kid critic is the critic to trust. This week’s reviewer is Will LaFarge

The Story Tree (Dir. Stephanie Sim / Canada / 2006 / 3 min.)