Over the past 15 years, Alison Berlow’s trajectory from stay-at-home mom to radio essayist, to founder and executive director of the Island Grown Initiative and, most recently, the editor of Edible Vineyard, has been inextricably tied with the rising fortunes of the local food movement.

If just the thought of a trip to an art museum gives you a dull ache in the lower spine, you are not alone.

When she was deputy director for finance and operations at the Peabody Essex museum, Susan Davy, the new co-owner of the Dragonfly Gallery in Oak Bluffs, noticed that visitors often would be forced to leave the museum prematurely simply because of physical discomfort. “For some reason there’s something about walking, and then standing still, and then walking — it’s more tiring than just walking,” she said.

Somewhere in the mountains of Afghanistan, beneath his army issue helmet, a U.S. soldier is wearing a soft black hat of blended wool and alpaca, knitted for him by Fran Resendes of Edgartown.

“I’m just getting to the end of this one. I have about two more rows to do and then I stitch it up,” she said, sitting in an armchair in a sunny corner of her home in Edgartown, the curling dark slip of knitting draped between her hands.

In his 1841 essay Circles, the transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrated the moment when a visionary rises up amongst us. “By a flash of his eye,” wrote Emerson, the artist “burns up the veil which shrouded all things, and the meaning of the very furniture, of cup and saucer, of chair and clock and tester, is manifest.”

Why do we tell stories?

Under the blanket of interminable Vineyard winter, the answer that jumps to mind most readily is claustrophobia; the need to leave our own the immediate situation and rediscover vastness; to escape ourselves for long enough to see our own contours a little bit more clearly.

The audience at the Katharine Cornell starts tittering the moment Coleman Conner (Chris Brophy) swaggers onstage. Hips thrust forward, jaw slack, malevolent halfwit eyes groping around the room for something to steal or mangle, he manages to make his trip from the doorway to the liquor cabinet into one continuous promise: we are in for a treat.