Holly Nadler

A Room of Their Own, Vineyard Retreats Helps Writers Develop

Holly Nadler |

They come from all over the country, staying for one or two weeks or up to a full month. They explore Edgartown from their home base at the former Point Way Inn. Some of them work in their rooms, others find a nesting spot in one of the many elegant downstairs parlors. For dinner they might bring home scallops from the Net Result, ingredients for a pasta Siciliana, and share the meal pot-luck style in the formal dining room, which is two stories high and lit up like a stage set.

Noepe Center for Literary Arts
 

 

 

Unpredictable Power to Heal Unleashes Powerful Theatre

Holly Nadler

“Astonish me!” Sergei Diaghilev famously demanded of the poet Jean Cocteau; this past week and the next at the Vineyard Playhouse — until Sept. 16 — the theatre does exactly that. From the moment the audience arrives and is ushered not to the theatre but to tables and chairs downstairs in a pub setting or, as the trio of actors all iterate, “a lounge bar, really,” the astonishment begins.

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Dacey

Songs in the Key of Barbara Dacey’s Life

Holly Nadler

The blue front door of radio station WMVY looks like a relic from colonial times. Its last coat of paint was perhaps slapped on before the day in 1986 when a young singer from Wellesley and then Cambridge named Barbara Dacey first knocked on it. Once inside the small studio, she offered to do some unpaid on-air commercials as a way of auditioning for some work.

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beauty queen

Runaway Beauty Queen Gets Crowned at Vineyard Playhouse

Holly Nadler

For a young, pretty girl growing up in pre-women’s lib Arkansas, a sure way out of a small hick town was winning a beauty contest. But what if the girl happens to have a mind? A good, questing mind? Once she wins the contest, is she going to be content cutting ribbons and crooning Wayne Newton hits in piano bars? Maybe not.

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book

Personal and Political in Playful Pages

Holly Nadler

But I Wanted a Baby Brother, by Kate Feiffer, illustrated by Diane Goode, Paula Weisman Books, $16.99

Two books from Little Pickle Press by Rana DiOrio, one illustrated by Chris Hill, the other by Chris Blair, both $16.95.

A child’s book works best when it operates on two levels, appealing to both child and parent. All the classics — Wind in the Willows, the Eloise and Madeline sagas, and Winnie the Pooh, accomplish this. But at bottom, the best books in this category impart something for children and grownups to ponder.

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