Remy Tumin
Everyday life can easily turn into theatre. Political theatre, familial theatre, personal theatre: We encounter it all the time. But good writers and directors can translate that onstage and make the audience connect with a scene they may have never encountered before.
Even better, playwrights, directors and actors can translate it into one-act plays.
The Tri-town Ambulance Service is requesting a 41 per cent increase for its operating budget next year due to a new state mandate that requires full-time paramedics for the service.
The budget, now pegged at $641,735, up from $453,000 last year, allows for two new full-time positions. It has been trimmed from an earlier draft that called for a 60 per cent increase.
If all three towns approve, the total cost of the service will go up $188,000 and each town assessment will go from $104,268 to $160,278, a 53 per cent increase.
“I was the kid who always wanted to join the Peace Corps and live in a mud hut. Always.”
Little did Suzan Bellincampi know that at the age of 23, that’s exactly where she’d end up.
“Termites like to eat the straw off thatched roofs, so basically the whole roof of the mud hut was covered in termites,” Ms. Bellincampi said of her time in Niger, Africa. “I put on a huge straw hat, took a stick, and pounded on the roof and all the termites came down inside the hut.”
A project to improve cell phone coverage in the up-Island towns is moving forward after a meeting between service providers and NStar this week took place to measure poles for the distributive antenna system (DAS).
If all goes as planned, up-Island residents could see improved cell coverage by July 1. Chilmark executive secretary Timothy Carroll met with Verizon, Comcast and NStar Wednesday morning to evaluate what needed to be changed on the existing poles in order to incorporate the system.
Citing increased summer rental activity, the Aquinnah board of health decided this week to open the landfill an additional day during the summer season. The selectmen requested the landfill be open on Saturdays to accommodate the weekly turnover day for renters.
Poet Rebecca Gayle Howell is a reader first and foremost. When she started to read in a serious way at the age of 11, Ms. Howell would sneak away with her older sister’s high school English textbook. That’s how she discovered T.S. Eliot.
“I read the Four Quartets, and for the first time I knew something had changed in me,” Ms. Howell said in a phone interview with the Gazette earlier this week. “I just kept reading from there.”