Save the date, next Saturday, April 28 beginning at 10:30 a.m. the 2012 Little League baseball season officially opens with a parade down Circuit avenue in Oak Bluffs.

Bring some apple pie, mamas and papas. This is small town living at its best.

Teams gather at 9:30 a.m. at the Oak Bluffs police station. The parade route rolls up Circuit Ave to Veira Park, where an opening day ceremony awaits.

Batter Up!

West Tisbury selectmen voted Wednesday to pass regulations for the sale of beer and wine, the final step in turning the historically dry town wet.

The move comes less than one week after voters at the town election overwhelmingly approved permitting the sale of beer and wine at restaurants with more than 50 seats and issuing one-day beer and wine licenses for special events.

Martha’s Vineyard Museum and Featherstone Center for the Arts need your help to determine the People’s Choice winner of the Island Faces Portrait Competition. The artist whose portrait of an Island character best captures the voters’ attention will have his or her work displayed at Featherstone in fall 2012. To see the submissions and cast your ballot go to http://ifcontest.wordpress.com/.

Chilmark selectmen will ask the U.S. Coast Guard to reconsider its denial of town insurance claims from the Menemsha boathouse fire. On advice of their town counsel, the selectmen decided not to pursue an appeal through the U.S. District Court, at least for now.

New Bedford civic leaders this week doubled down on their push to have the Steamship Authority begin summer freight service between their city and the Vineyard, despite a detailed analysis from SSA senior managers that shows the service would be both impractical and prohibitively expensive.

At the monthly boat line meeting held in New Bedford Tuesday, SSA governor and board chairman John Tierney led the charge for freight service between the Whaling City and the Island.