Cynthia McGrath has always followed her heart — and at one point, the Grateful Dead. “I had started beading before college as a hobby,” Mrs. McGrath recalled in a telephone interview. “It was a way to make enough money follow the Dead around. That’s how it started in the very, very beginning. I was a little hippie and I would make these beaded necklaces I had made on a piece of velvet cloth. People would come and buy my stuff and then later on I’d get to see them dancing, wearing my stuff.

Acting is an endurance sport. Don’t believe it? Go to the Grange Hall any Thursday, Friday or Saturday night for the rest of the summer and see one man’s theatrical version of the Ironman Triathlon.

First, let it be said that on the evening this critic attended the Vineyard Playhouse’s outdoor performance of The Comedy of Errors, Friday, July 22, when the weather was so warm it felt as if the entire Island was holding a Bikrum hot yoga class (for those unfamiliar with the workout, the purpose is to reproduce a boiling afternoon in Calcutta), the heat itself became a starring character.

Eleven-year-old Sophie Donohue doesn’t have far to travel for the Community Sing each week. During the summer she lives with her family in the Oak Bluffs Camp Ground. Sophie’s Vineyard experience could be described as a time to swim, sail and, of course, sing.

On Wednesday, July 20, at the third Community Sing of the summer, Sophie mingled with the crowd. “I’m waiting for my friends,” she explained. “We come every week to sing together.”