Julia Rappaport
In just a few weeks, the agricultural hall grounds in West Tisbury will be abuzz with activity. Already there are signs that the annual Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society Livestock Show and Fair — the first day is August 21 — is just around the corner.
The Vineyard in August: ample time to amble, more than enough moments to mosey, and reasons aplenty to roam and rove. But when it comes to art, there is only one way to take it in and that is to stroll. “It’s like an arts block party with people just mingling in the warmest, friendliest way you could imagine,” said Judy Hartford, owner of the Red Mannequin, a boutique clothing store on Dukes County avenue, smack in the center of the Oak Bluffs arts district.
At a dinner party recently, I listened as the person next to me answered my standard dinner party question: what brought you to the Vineyard?
The response: “I wanted to go someplace where I could walk a little slower.”
It made me stop and think.
I myself am a fast walker. And this time of year, I walk on the street because the sidewalks are clogged with summertime dawdlers and packs of window shoppers. They slow me down.
Swiss-born designer Stina Sayre has fashion in her genes. “I love to design, that’s what I do,” she said recently from her Vineyard Haven studio and store. “I come from a clothing family in Sweden. My grandfather started a clothing company and my uncles took it over. I worked in the business as a kid,” she said. Mrs. Sayre began taking classes and courses in design and technique. It wasn’t until moving to Martha’s Vineyard 20 years ago (after meeting her husband, Nevin, both champion windsurfers) that Mrs.
Even Art Buchwald had his dream.
“I imagine it this way,” he wrote in a 2002 column in this newspaper. “I am going to be cremated and then have my ashes dropped over every cocktail party on Martha’s Vineyard. It’s the only way I can make all the parties held here in the summer. I want Cape Air, the friendly, nine-seat airline, to fly me . . . The plane takes off from Martha’s Vineyard Airport, and Mike Wallace is in charge of dropping the ashes.”
Up in West Tisbury, past the airport but before the Mill Pond, is a small building. A part of both Island and national history, it serves as a social and cultural melting pot and a way to track economic trends. It is the Lillian Manter Memorial Hostel and, on a recent Tuesday morning shortly after 10 a.m., every bed was booked, but not a guest was around. The hot July sun was out and the groups of bikers and summer campers, the travellers from Canada and Germany and the friends shacked up in the one private room were all off exploring the Island.