Rachel Stein’s dad, Arthur (Adam Heller), after 9/11, had a freak out beyond everyone else’s freak out, but he had a certifiable right to it: One of the infamous planes flew into his office at the Twin Towers. While Arthur somehow muddled into a stairwell and was shepherded out by a fellow with a flashlight, the 65 employees who worked under him were not so lucky. Since then — and the action of the play takes place in 2003 — Arthur has not changed out of his pajamas and he’s starting to, well, stink.

Broadway could take a page from the Camp Jabberwocky rehearsal schedule. In the past couple of weeks, amid horseback rides, a Mad Max sail and fishing on the Skipper with a special lookout for the 18-foot shark in our waters, on the nights of July 15 and 16, the 30 campers and 28 counselors mounted a singing and dancing extravaganza that would have made Busby Berkeley proud.

Can you imagine explaining the contemporary garment known as a T-shirt to George Washington? Picture the guy dressed in layers of scratchy underwear, breeches, dress shirt, heavy jacket, tights, boots and a hat like a complicated folded napkin.

Many of today’s top writers of thrillers have spent untold hours in the actual forensics and crime fields, and Australian doctor and bestselling author Kathryn Fox is one of them. Dr. Fox will be signing her new book, Skin and Bone, in tandem with the Vineyard’s own celebrated maestro of the legal and police procedural, Linda Fairstein for her latest, Killer Heat (see right), at Edgartown Books today, July 4, at 3 p.m.

KILLER HEAT. By Linda Fairstein. Doubleday, 2008. 384 pages. $26 hardcover.

Killer Heat, like any good title, is a play on words. It refers to death by New York oven — the baking August temperatures that send the rich to the Hamptons or the Vineyard, and the poor to their fire escapes for a breath of nighttime air. Killer Heat is also a reference to an actual killer or killers and to the heat, slang for law, that hunts ’em down and brings ’em to justice.

The lights go out and the theatre is dark for a preternaturally long time. The sound of gushing water engulfs us, and we’re savvy enough about the events of August 30, 2005, in New Orleans to know that this is the 18-foot wall of water funneling down the streets of all the neighborhoods fanning out from the levees of Lake Ponchatrain.