Lamenting in short order “that three and a half hour shambles on Sunday night,” the Academy Awards; the “very stupid piece in the New York Times this morning which implies that the popular movies should have won the awards;” and the news that show-business trade magazine Variety had fired its veteran critic — “that’s really an outrage” — David Denby sounds every bit the articulate, authoratative film critic he is every other week in the New Yorker magazine.
Victoria Campbell is, as she said yesterday, not a real nurse. A week ago she had not seen a human skull in surgery, assisted in amputations or dressed jagged gouges the size of her fist at the base of a man’s spinal cord. “I’d have been queasy just at the thought,” she said in a voice betraying her own disbelief at the time she has just spent in a Haitian hospital.
Vineyard voters stood decisively for Democratic candidate and state attorney general Martha Coakley in Tuesday’s special election, but it was Republican state Sen. Scott Brown who staged an unexpected surge to win the U.S. Senate Seat left vacant by the death of liberal leader Edward M. Kennedy.
Statewide, voters split 52 per cent to Mr. Brown, 47 per cent to Ms. Coakley.
Tuesday afternoon’s earthquake in Haiti measured seven on the Richter scale, but the tragedy it created is incalculable. Yet as cries of “Amwe! Amwe!” — ”Help me!” in Creole — were reported heard in the rubble of a primary school in a Port-au-Prince neighborhood, already Vineyarders of all ages were doing what they could to answer the call.
The Island’s oldest players, the self-described vagabonds of Island Theatre Workshop, have found a home. After 41 years on an endless Vineyard shuffle, the troupe aims to set up shop in the cozy building on Music street in West Tisbury that housed the town’s library for 100 years.
In their pale pink tights and soundless slippers, teeny ballerinas scurry across the vast stage just a little too quickly in this rehearsal; when the lights come up tomorrow and Sunday, the troupe will be hidden underneath the huge, stilt-supported skirt of Mother Ginger in the annual Island production of The Nutcracker.
“Mother Ginger can’t move that fast,” gently chides artistic director Beth Vages, who is staging this holiday ballet for her 23rd time, her 12th on Martha’s Vineyard.
