Arts & Entertainment

 

 

 

In the summer of 1992, a few friends from Connecticut College, Wesleyan University and Skidmore College who knew each other from high school had the idea to spend the summer on the Vineyard doing what they liked best: singing.

Jody Alford and friends each gathered a couple of members from their respective collegiate a cappella groups and headed to the Island, forming a group they called the Vineyard Sound.

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The benefit concert at the Tabernacle on Tuesday will be quite the sight to see. More importantly, it will be the one to hear.

David Crohan, celebrated pianist and former owner of David’s Island House in Oak Bluffs, is performing with several other musicians to benefit Freedom Guide Dogs breeding and training facility in New York and the Martha’s Vineyard Cancer Support Group.

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A member of the Moth’s general council recently checked in with the Gazette. She had a story to tell. But it wasn’t just any story. It was THE story. The Moth is coming to the Vineyard.

For those still basking in their chrysalis and unaware of the Moth, it is a storytelling series birthed about a decade ago in the bars of the lower East Side in New York city. True stories told live is their mantra, and now the Moth flies freely in many cities and on NPR as the Moth Radio Hour.

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Last Friday afternoon, three poets laureate of the Vineyard gathered around a table at the Gazette office to reflect on their growth as poets, from a solitary practice to reaching beyond those boundaries in their respective communities. Steve Ewing traveled from Chappaquiddick where he was working at his day job as a dock builder, and Justen Ahren and Dan Waters drove from West Tisbury and their other lives as a landscaper and owner of Indian Hill Press, respectively.

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I found the tendrils of your fingers

wound around mine like prayers

woven into the clothing of prayer.

and fled with you in my arms

along the highway of snakes,

concealing you from streetlights

and stars, from dogs barking in alleys.

Because nothing should speak of this

because no one would believe me—

they’d shut me away

in a room without views—

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(song lyrics)

Every year has only one July.

Careful! It may find a way to pass you by.

Flies come through the door;

Come November, watch it pour.

Summer, don’t you love me any more?

Looking for a wishbone on your plate,

Hoping for the kind of fish that likes your bait;

Working till you’re sore,

Scared of spending winter poor.

Summer, don’t you love me any more?

(Refrain:)

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