Exactly 20 years ago today, April 1 fell on a Thursday. Then, as now, Thursday was publication day for the Martha’s Vineyard Times. I was the Times Calendar editor. The synchronicity was too much to resist. In the following years, nearly everyone credited and/or blamed my colleague Gerry Kelly for the April Fool’s issue. He was capable of such a thing, people thought; I surely wasn’t. They were right about him but wrong about me. I dunnit — but I didn’t dunnit alone.
Gerry devoted his regular food column to piping plover recipes. As you can guess from the illustration below — by Omar Rayyan, who early in his illustrious career was a regular contributor to the Times Calendar section — piping plovers were very much in the news back then. Plovers on the supper menu? The horror, the horror! Island environmentalists went ballistic. Piping plovers were an endangered species. Endangered species were not a laughing matter. Etc.
I don’t have a copy of the plover recipes. If I did, I’d be including it here. If anyone out there does have a copy, please, pretty please, let me copy it?
From the Seasonally Occupied Territories . . . 
Try Shirley Craig. She must have Phil’s piping plover recipe.
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Did Phil have a piping plover recipe? That sort of rings a bell. However, what I’m looking for is Gerry’s food column from the April 1, 1993, M. V. Times.
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Heh. Well done, indeed! And I learned a new word: dubiosity.
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English is such a wonderful language to make words up in. 🙂 Back then, two dueling coffee table books had just been published, Martha’s Vineyard Houses and Gardens and Martha’s Vineyard Gardens and Houses. (I’m not kidding.) They featured, of course, the highest of high-end real estate, which is to say nothing that I or anyone I knew lived in. Several of us thought a Martha’s Vineyard Shacks and Dumps was in order, and since we didn’t have the wherewithal to produce the book, I reviewed the book we might have produced if we’d had the money.
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