Jeanie Mathis has never been to Martha’s Vineyard or any part of the East Coast. She lives in Reevesville, Illinois, population 50. Yet she knows about the Island because she reads every issue of the Gazette . . . twice. “I read it at the shop [a hair salon in her home] and then I reread it at night,” she said.

Remember that old Dylan song, “Somethin’ is happenin’, but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?” In the opening first scene of the two-person play, coming2terms, at the Vineyard Playhouse, we’re all Mr. Joneses as we try to figure out what a particular attractive couple is up to. They’re coming across with everything long-term couples tend to do. Bickering? Check! Avoiding larger issues? Check! Sharing their day? Check!

“Never put anyone out of your heart,” the late Hindu holy man Neem Karoli Baba told his disciples, among them writer, lecturer, and holy man in his own right, Ram Dass, and his friend, regular travel buddy, writer and photographer, Rameshwar Das. These two men share many affinities, among them a decades-long passion for Eastern philosophy coupled with an ability to purvey these ideas to a similarly fascinated American public.

Why would an Islander choose to ride our VTA bus system to circumnavigate the whole Island? Well, why did David Niven take a hot air balloon as part of his Around the World in 80 Days tour? Because there would have been no story if he hadn’t.

But there’s more to it than that, as far as riding the bus around the Island is concerned.

The Greatest Game Ever Pitched: Juan Marichal, Warren Spahn and the Pitching Dual of the Century, by Jim Kaplan, Triumph Books, Chicago, IL, 2011, 203 pages $24.95.

Candlestick Park, San Francisco, California, July 2,1963. Two future Hall of Fame pitchers, one at the end of a stunning career, the other at the beginning. Giants versus Braves. Sixteen innings. No relievers.

The Vineyard Playhouse’s current production of Tape, opens on a set that itself poses a plot twist and a conundrum at the same time: Lights bear down on a typical off-highway motel room with twin beds, a banal color scheme of beige, gold and brown, a sink on one side rimmed by overhead white globes. Over in the right-hand corner, a vague charcoal-hued stain hints that a repaint of the unadorned walls is long overdue.

It’s a three-person play and a two-bed motel room. Something’s already intriguingly off-kilter.