Snow at Last

Posted on January 22, 2012 by Susanna J. Sturgis

Dog-dish tiddly winks

The temperature may dip down below 10 degrees F, Trav’s outside water may freeze solid every night, and longjohns, a wool sweater, and sheepskin slippers may be a constant part of my indoor wardrobe, but it isn’t really winter until it snows.

Some years the approach of Groundhog Day is a source of relief and great anticipation: winter might be coming to an early end! This year? Hunh. How do you anticipate the end of something that hasn’t happened yet?

Yesterday it finally happened. It snowed. It snowed all day. It snowed more than the dusting we were expecting. It snowed enough to shovel the deck and stairs. It snowed enough to don waterproof pants and calf-high boots. It snowed.

I ran out of both milk and chewing gum, which gave me an excuse to drive to the grocery store while it was still snowing. The visibility wasn’t great, State Road was half plowed, and of course the back way out wasn’t plowed at all because it never is. Malvina Forester made it handily there and back with nary a thought of a skid.

Snowy trail with fuzzy butt

This morning Travvy and I struck out for our morning walk with about four inches of snow on the ground.  Snow-walking reminds you of muscles you’d forgotten you had: it’s tough on the calves, like walking in loose sand. Every winter at least once I wish I had cross-country skis and the ability to use them. I also fantasize being towed across the snow by my four-paw-power housemate, even though I’d probably end up nose-to-bark with a tree when he took off after a rabbit.

Snow transforms familiar scenes into painterly landscapes. I was glad I’d tucked my little point-and-shoot into my vest pocket.

This is the Nat’s Farm field across Old County Road from the West Tisbury School. Most mornings it looks pretty ordinary. Not today.

The bike path was a snowy carpet possibly leading to a magical place, but we were headed in the other direction.

My noble snow dog, in his element.

The fir tree outside my west-facing window

Given the extra effort of walking in snow, I thought to abridge our route by cutting through the Nat’s Farm subdivision, but no: walking through snow that no one has walked through before was too tempting, and the sky was moodily beautiful. We trudged on. Trav pounced on little critters moving in the grass and missed all of them. I gawked at the sky and took the occasional picture. Winter really is here.

 

 

 

 

 

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Internet Blackout

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Susanna J. Sturgis

High winds kept the SSA ferries in their slips last Friday and Saturday. Some people freaked out. Not me. Didn’t I once go two and a half years without going off-island? I started to wallow in my own smugness — then it dawned on me that I get antsy when my internet connection goes down, and if “down” lasts more than a couple of hours my anxiety skyrockets. I’m like a telepath who suddenly can’t communicate mind-to-mind. I’m locked inside my own head! Help!

So when an internet boycott was called to register opposition to SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (the Protect Intellectual Property Act), two misbegotten, scarily vague bills currently being considered by the U.S. Congress, I had two reasons for participating. One was that these bills suck and I oppose them. The other was that I wanted to know if I could stay offline for 12 hours without freaking out. Here’s how my day went, transcribed and slightly edited from the journal I kept in fountain-pen longhand.

7:48 a.m. Decide to forgo internet access from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Last night I blacked out my blogsite for the appointed hours and 3/4 decided to stay off Facebook. This a.m. I decide to go the whole hog. I will make one exception: last night a production editor (PE) I’ve never worked with contacted me about a rush job. I consulted my (mental) schedule and said I could do it. Not all details were available, so the PE may be contacting me today. I will check e-mail occasionally and respond if she does. (Note to self: This does not require logging on every five minutes.)

8:00 a.m. The blackout starts. I have washed my hair, on the theory that withdrawal symptoms, if they appear, are easier to manage with clean hair and clean clothes. Aha! My underwear drawer is nearly empty, and it’s a perfect laundry day: bright, breezy, and at least 10 degrees above freezing. By 8:15 I am heading for the laundromat, bellowing “O Mary Don’t You Weep” along with Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band. On the way home it’s “Erie Canal.”

9:30 a.m. Hang laundry feeling somewhat smug because I managed all this without checking Weather Underground to make sure no blizzard was forecast to arrive before my clothes dried.

10:24 a.m. Laundry hung, tea made, waiting for oatmeal to finish cooking. No, I do not need to e-mail Michelle of Gemini Dogs a photo of Trav and his new ribbon. I didn’t do it yesterday, and it can certainly wait till tomorrow. I map out my day. There are only 2 bottles of beer in the fridge. Ordinarily this is enough but if withdrawal symptoms get bad I might need a third. Resolve to make a run to Oak Bluffs later today.

11:21 a.m. Log on for the first time today. This might be a record. Responded to update from PE, who is offering rush rate for rush job and asking for a 10-day turnaround. I can do it, say I. Responded to e-mail from another client, and queried yet another to ask if the edited files I sent yesterday arrived safely and looked OK. Took screenshots of blackout Wikipedia and my blacked-out blog. Cool. So far no sweats, shakes, or other signs of serious withdrawal. No craving for beer or chocolate either.

12:53 p.m. Underwear blowing across the deck. One pair of cords blew right off the line. Good drying day. Started reading Jeanne Córdova’s When We Were Outlaws, which I’m supposed to be reviewing for the Women’s Review of Books. I’m already arguing with it. This is a good sign.

2:00 p.m. Don’t need to research dog harnesses right now either. Well, yeah, eventually I do — Trav’s walking harness has a broken snap and his biking harness is showing signs of wear, and I’d love to find a single harness that can serve both functions. But I don’t have to find it right now.

Nearly all the laundry is dry and put away. Underwear drawer is so stuffed it barely shuts. Even the jeans are almost dry. No blizzard in sight.

4:55 p.m. Still some light in the sky at almost five. Trav is snarfing his dinner — we went for a bike ride after running errands down-island: Shirley’s, Our Market, and Reliable. Probably won’t need the extra beer but maybe I’ll have one anyway. Set a generous cup of dried beans, white and black, out to soak overnight — have all the fixin’s to make sausage chili tomorrow (my favorite). Now off to see if the virtual world has any messages for me that I can’t live without.

5:08 p.m. Nope. Responded to 2 work-related e-mails and that was it.

8:15 p.m. MADE IT!!

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Homage to Dr. King

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Susanna J. Sturgis

I had something I wanted to write on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, and then on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I didn’t write it because I had a job I really had to get done. The job went off today, a really good, thought-provoking book about white privilege and how it skews just about every aspect of our lives, especially the justice system.

What I wanted to write about was how when Dr. King was killed, I barely knew who he was. Well, I knew who he was, but I had no clue about what he meant, and to whom, and why.

This was not because I was a little kid too young to know anything. I was two months shy of my 17th birthday, a junior in high school, a daily newspaper reader who knew a fair amount about U.S. politics and foreign affairs. My school gave students permission to leave early to attend a memorial service on Boston Common. I was amazed by the number of students who thronged the hallway getting ready to go. I thought most of them were just grabbing an excuse to cut class. If I’d been a little black kid in Alabama, I would have known better.

It was the first and (so far) last time in my life that I realized that the rest of the world knew something I didn’t. Something big. Something really big.

That summer, the summer of 1968, the church my family attended (I’d dropped out after I got confirmed in eighth grade — Christianity just didn’t take) offered a series of lecture-discussions called “Where Is Racism?” I went to all of them. As a result I started volunteering for METCO, a nonprofit endeavor that bused black city students to schools in white suburbs like the one I lived in.

METCO was based in Roxbury, a Boston neighborhood that — if you lived in the white suburbs — was danger danger danger! the ghetto! the black ghetto! honkies keep out! My first day I drove there in my father’s VW Bug. With map on the passenger’s seat, I took Route 9 into Boston. I knew Route 9 like the back of my hand. My grandmother lived just off it in Brookline. One of my best friends lived off it; when I managed to borrow my dad’s car for the day, I’d pick her up and we’d head into school. I’d turn left past the lights, pass the famous hospitals, and turn in to the school parking lot.

Going to METCO, I turned right off Route 9 instead of left.

And found myself in a whole different world. This was Roxbury, the notorious Roxbury, where terrible things happened (according to the Boston papers)? So close to Route 9, and not all that far from my school?

It was several years before I heard the term “psychic map” for the first time, but when I did, this was what I thought of: Route 9 was on my psychic map, from Framingham all the way into Boston, but Roxbury, just off Route 9, was not. Roxbury was a terrifying place that I read about in the papers. It didn’t exist in my world. You couldn’t get there from here.

But you could. I’d done it. I did it quite a few times that summer. I magically passed from a street where all the people were white to one where all the people were black.

How did 1968 change my life? I can’t count the ways, because I have no idea how things would have evolved had Dr. King not been killed, and then Robert Kennedy; had Chicago not gone haywire during the Democratic Convention, had the USSR not invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring, had Richard Nixon not been elected president. But the impact was profound, and lasting. Everything I know about Dr. King I learned after he died. It transformed my psychic map, and it changed my life.

 

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Musicale

Posted on January 15, 2012 by Susanna J. Sturgis

When I first heard a couple weeks ago that there’d be a musicale at the Pit Stop on January 14, I couldn’t wait. But as the date drew closer, my enthusiasm drooped. I didn’t want to go. I was afraid of what I’d find there. The online buzz was considerable. I was afraid it would be mobbed, or “a scene,” or a mob scene — something a long way from the musicale I wanted to be part of.

I went anyway, and boy, am I glad.

Paul Thurlow sings; behind him is Brian Weiland on percussion.

First, a word about musicales. The pronunciation is closer to “musical” than “musical,” and they have a long history on Martha’s Vineyard — and probably, by other names, in many other places. Musicales are friends, neighbors, and kinfolk gathering in one another’s living rooms to play music and sing together. Before recordings and radio, if you wanted to hear music you had to make it yourself, and that’s what people did.

I first learned about the musicales as a volunteer at Wintertide Coffeehouse in the mid-1980s. Wintertide in those days happened on occasional winter weekends, in whatever free or cheap space it could cadge. People often called it a successor to “the old West Tisbury musicales.” As Wintertide grew, attracting more off-island performers and eventually becoming a year-round thing, it also inspired a fair amount of grumbling. As a newcomer, I thought Wintertide was unmitigated wonderful. I didn’t understand the grumbling. I didn’t understand what was being lost in the increasing emphasis on off-island performers, on “professionalism” — the kind that comes at the expense of home-grown amateurs who make their livings doing something else.

Well, we’ve lost a lot more since then, including Wintertide, so when Todd Follansbee put the word out that there’d be a musicale at the Pit Stop on January 14, my expectations were high, and so were my fears that they couldn’t possibly be met.

(Some of) the musicians

So the Pit Stop lent itself well to the musicale format: a bunch of musicians gathered in a circle, the listeners grouped around them, with the line between performers and audience blurry and sometimes nonexistent. A song would be suggested, a key settled on, and off they’d go, trading licks and leads.

When audience members knew the words, which we often did, we’d sing along. The harmonies on “The Weight” and “I Shall Be Released” filled the room like mist and sunlight. We laughed a lot — seriously, people, when was the last time you heard a song like Peter Huntington’s “Mouse Farts” on either Pandora or the radio?

Tom re-strings the washtub bass

Tom Hodgson, musician extraordinaire who masquerades as a sign painter and an acute observer of the natural world, doubled on guitar and washtub bass. The latter provided suspense and hilarity — for want of a washer would the bass be lost? — before Tom won the cooperation of his persnickety instrument.

We were reminded that humans — which would include us — can make music with just about anything. And that music is too important to be left to the pros: last night’s performers included, along with Tom the sign painter, a contractor, a carpenter, a couple of teachers, and a landscaper who doubles as a Tisbury selectman.

Several of the musicians were mainstays of musicales past, and another musicale veteran, island native John Mayhew, who died last Wednesday, age 91, was very much there in spirit. The 1929 Martin guitar that he owned in the 1930s was there in person, as were his three children and three musical granddaughters.

As the evening drew to a close, we went reluctantly into the cold and windy night, all hoping and even expecting that there would be a reprise in the not-too-distant future.

Music makers

 

 

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Potluck

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Susanna J. Sturgis

Apologies for long silence — work does tend to get in the way of life, even when you basically like what you do for a living. Two of the three jobs I’ve had in since mid-December were delivered either on time or (gasp!) early. The third — well, the third is gonna be a little bit late, but we’ll make up the time in the clean-up phase.

So there’s no shortage of things to write about, just an acute shortage of time to chunk them down into manageable bits and think about what I think of them. Best remedy for that is Be concrete! Don’t think too much!

So last night I finally got to meet Waylon the (former) Wanderer. Thanks to his two-week walkabout, Waylon has fans all around Martha’s Vineyard, not to mention across North America and on at least two other continents. It was like meeting a celebrity, the kind of celebrity who isn’t spoiled by fame, or even aware of it. Betsy invited a few current and former Martha’s Vineyard Times staffers — Betsy’s tenure as photography editor overlapped mine as features editor, and she’s still my favorite island photographer — which meant there were more people in the house than Waylon had ever seen before.

Waylon presided first from a couch and then from his favorite chair. He was wary but not stressed. Not surprisingly, since he was covered with ticks when finally caught and this is Martha’s Vineyard after all, he’s got Lyme disease and is currently on Doxycycline; when it’s caught early, nearly all the dogs I know who’ve had it recover soon after they start on antibiotics. Trav’s already had Lyme once. Rhodry had it a couple of times, and Rocky Mountain spotted fever and ehrlichiosis too.

Supper was potluck. When I look back over the decades of my life, I see two common threads: I gravitate toward places where I can wear barn clothes 24/7, and places where potlucks are the norm. Being the daughter and granddaughter of indifferent cooks, I’m intimidated by people who can produce a meal for several people at which all the dishes are finished at the proper time. I also like to eat stuff that I didn’t cook. On Martha’s Vineyard, potlucks range from the small and homey to the astonishing spreads that appear at memorial services, fundraisers, and the West Tisbury town holiday party.

This is pretty much all that remains of last night’s supper:

Betsy made the meatloaf, the mashed sweet potatoes, and the asparagus that you can’t see because it’s in the Dutch oven. Tara brought the salad in front, and Susanna the predictable brought the bread. Mae’s coconut cake was waiting in the kitchen and missed the photo op.

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Wandering Waylon is featured in a story in the new Martha’s Vineyard Times, along with a lovely photo by Betsy of Waylon and Kevin.

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Susanna J. Sturgis | 1 Comment

My License Plate Fetish

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Susanna J. Sturgis

Everyone should have a hobby, right? Mine is collecting license plates. Well, OK, not quite: I don’t go around swiping license plates off cars or buying them at estate sales. I live in a studio apartment and what disposable income I’ve got mostly goes to the dog. There’s no space or money for collecting tangible objects.

What I do is spot license plates. Every January 1 for the last 22 (approx.) years I’ve started with a blank map. The goal is to spot at least one of every state’s license plates before the year runs out. I’ve achieved this goal, I think, once: North Dakota is the perennial spoiler, the one I’ve spotted exactly twice in those 22 years. But I keep trying.

For some background on my little obsession, see License Log, the newest page on From the Seasonally Occupied Territories.

2011 was a pretty good year. The only states I didn’t score were Idaho, Alaska, and — you guessed it — North Dakota. If you’re on Martha’s Vineyard and you spot a North Dakota license plate, message, e-mail, or phone me, OK?

Here’s my map/log of the year just past:

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Blogmanay

Posted on January 1, 2012 by Susanna J. Sturgis

To close out the old year, WordPress, the host of this blog, kindly e-mailed me an annual report. It’s so bling-intensive that it’s crashed or stalled Firefox every time I’ve tried to open it, but still, I appreciate the thought. This was the first paragraph:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 7,200 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.

7,200 is slightly less than half of 15,000, the official year-round population of Martha’s Vineyard. 7,200 views does not mean 7,200 people, but the year-round population of Martha’s Vineyard looms large on my psychic map and NYC subway trains only flash into existence when someone mentions them. However, I now know that it would take 12,5 trips of a NYC subway train to carry the year-round population of Martha’s Vineyard.

Carry it where? Good question. As far as I know, NYC subway trains cannot cross bodies of water without the aid of a tunnel or a bridge. No tunnel or bridge currently links Martha’s Vineyard and the mainland. Either we have to limit ourselves to a subway sightseeing trip around the island, or we have to figure out how many ferry trips it would take to transport all of us to Woods Hole. Someone else will have to do the math on that one. Feel free to base your calculations on the carrying capacity of the entire SSA fleet, but don’t forget there are only two slips in Woods Hole and Vineyard Haven, one in Oak Bluffs.

So 2011 was a good year for me, and From the Seasonally Occupied Territories has been an important part of what made it good. On January 1, 2011, I wrote in my old Bloggery that 2010 had been “a year of continual, monumental unsticking.” When 2010 began, I had a horse and drove a Mazda pickup. When it ended, I was out of horses and driving a Subaru Forester. I’d also crossed the Atlantic for the first time in 35 years.

This was all good, but Discord was sitting at the head of the table, glancing my way and making me nervous. “My writing isn’t going out into the world,” I wrote, “it’s not replenishing the energy it takes to do it.” This was serious. For most of my adult life, I’ve thought of writing as my reason for being in the world. As 2011 began, I was running out of steam, out of faith. The great unsticking of 2010 seemed to be clearing the way for something, but what if there was nothing there? “The only thing I know how to do is turn it over and over and over again,” I wrote.

Reading that on New Year’s Day 2012 — well, it’s enough to remind me that if you keep putting one foot in front of the other, you’ll often find yourself in the right place — especially if you started off with no idea where the right place was or whether you’d know it when you got there.

Facebook profile, New Year's Day

At the end of January, I finally got myself on Facebook. Among my many surprises was how local it was. I started finding out about concerts and readings before they happened instead of afterward. I friended and was friended by Vineyarders I’d only known by name before, if that. I discovered new depths and dimensions in people I thought I knew. All of this communication was happening in words and pictures. Maybe words were important after all? Facebook is like the grapevine, and at the same time a virtual salon or coffeehouse. We are each other’s audience. That’s what I loved most about Martha’s Vineyard during my first decade here: the local theater scene, the music, the way it all flowed through the newspaper where I was working. I thought it had disappeared for good. I was wrong.

It was that feeling of having and being part of an audience that inspired me to start this blog in July. I linked each new post to my Facebook profile. People read them! People subscribed! People commented! No, we’re not talking hordes here — nowhere near enough to fill an NYC subway train, or even a single car. But when you’ve been afraid you’re living in a bell jar, any evidence that words are passing through the glass is hugely encouraging.

In August, I learned that the Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation, a local conservation organization, was suing Ben Ramsey and Nisa Counter over a parcel of land in Chilmark. The more I learned about the case, the angrier I got. Especially infuriating was the one-sided (to put it mildly) treatment it was getting in the local papers. Aha. I can write, I’ve got this blog — if the newspapers won’t tell Ben and Nisa’s side of the story, I will.

“Land Grab,” the first installment in what has turned out to be an ongoing saga, attracted more than 460 views in a single day. That remains this blog’s all-time high, but all my posts on the subject have been well read. (Links to all chapters of the Story Thus Far are appended to the most recent installment, “Slantwise.”) I’m beyond thrilled. My writing is going into the world. It’s doing its part in the fight against local injustice, and it’s pissing some people off. After I pointed out the flaws in its coverage of the story, and provided a link to my blog, the Martha’s Vineyard Times banned me from posting comments and erased all my previous comments on the subject. More recently, SMF’s attorney gave Facebook pages and blogs as her client’s reason for not agreeing to mediation. The reason is completely bogus, but I’m proud anyway: since this is the only blog that’s been covering the case, I think she means me.

I’ve written about plenty of other things in this blog’s first six months, from the laundromat where I wash my clothes to the fight to prevent a totally unnecessary roundabout from being constructed at the blinker intersection, from the spirituals choir to the Artisans’ Fair to the newly reincarnated Pit Stop. Thanks to the blog I’m paying closer attention to my world, and the writing is more than replenishing the energy it takes to do it. What next?

P.S. for those puzzled by the title: Hogmanay is the Scottish celebration of New Year’s Eve, and I never met a pun I didn’t like.

 

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Waylon Comes Home

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Susanna J. Sturgis

A two-week saga has come to a happy ending, but I’m sorry to say I can’t tell but a fraction of the story. The star, the hero, the protagonist, the guy who knows what really happened — he’s not talking. He can’t talk. He’s a dog.

My friends Betsy and Kevin returned to Martha’s Vineyard late Wednesday, December 14, with their new dog, Waylon, a handsome springer-Lab mix. Waylon’s first 10 months had not been easy. He’d had a foster mom in Rhode Island for the previous three weeks. That was pretty much his first clue that some human beings could be trusted.

Waylon

Waylon slipped away from his people that first night. Waylon went missing. The word spread rapidly, by phone, e-mail, word of mouth, and Facebook. Posters went up with Waylon’s photos and Kevin and Betsy’s phone numbers. People started calling in with Waylon sightings. A young boy called to report that he’d spotted Waylon while riding a bus on County Road, Oak Bluffs. The bus driver called a little later, to make sure that the kid had called.

Waylon's range

The sightings helped establish Waylon’s range. Betsy and Kevin live in the Vineyard Hills area of Oak Bluffs, east of Barnes Road. Waylon was seen in the adjacent Tower Ridge subdivision and as far south as County Road. Several people spotted him in the Hidden Cove subdivision, which lies between the Edgartown–Vineyard Haven Road and Sengekontacket Pond. Travvy and I spent an hour or so on Monday, December 19, strolling the deserted byways of Hidden Cove. Maybe Waylon would be curious about another dog passing through? Maybe Travvy would notice something that the humans didn’t? Neither thing happened, but my blog “Seasonal” was inspired by our walk.

Waylon's crate

I didn’t mention in the blog what took us to Hidden Cove. The last thing anyone wanted was well-meaning people searching for Waylon and maybe freaking him out. Kevin and Betsy had set up Waylon’s crate near the house that Waylon seemed to be coming back to. They showed up to feed breakfast and supper, and to leave treats around the area. They saw more and more of Waylon, but Waylon didn’t want to get too close. Waylon wasn’t lost, exactly. Waylon just didn’t want to get caught.

I and others used Facebook to post updates for Vineyard people, but the postings reached far beyond Martha’s Vineyard. Before long Waylon had a fan club across North America, and even across the Atlantic.

Two weeks almost to the hour after he disappeared into the night, Waylon came home. Sighs of relief and shouts of jubilation were heard across the island, and probably across the continent. Waylon, it seems, did pretty well during his walkabout. Betsy thought he maybe looked a little thinner, but he was healthy, sound, and perky. Dogs, it seems, can do pretty well foraging for themselves and sleeping outside when it rains or the temp dips to 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Travvy, I’m pretty sure, wouldn’t mind changing places with Waylon the Wanderer.

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Pit Stop

Posted on December 24, 2011 by Susanna J. Sturgis

Some cold winter nights it seems that Oak Bluffs is just too far from West Tisbury to venture after dark, but other nights the incentive is powerful enough to make me bundle up and set off. (Note to off-islanders: Oak Bluffs is all of nine miles from where I live in West Tisbury. On Martha’s Vineyard the farthest you can drive in any direction without falling into the water is maybe twenty miles. “Too far” doesn’t mean the same thing here that it means other places.)

Last night was such a night. Jemima James, Dan Waters, Brad Tucker, Nina Violet, and others were playing at the Pit Stop. The lineup alone was worth driving twice nine miles for, plus I’d been hearing great things about the Pit Stop. Friendly live music venues are scarce enough to celebrate. I’m still mourning the demise of Wintertide Coffeehouse in the late 1990s. I missed the heyday of Che’s Lounge because I was deep into horses, and every horse person knows that when you’re deep into horses you don’t have the time, energy, or money to do anything else.

Since its rebirth earlier this month — at a release party for Nina Violet’s stupendous new CD, We’ll Be Alright, which I missed because Travvy and I were off-island — the Pit Stop has been hailed as a worthy successor to both Che’s and Wintertide. As soon as I walked through the door I thought, Yeah!

The Pit Stop is the most recent incarnation of a space that has been, among other things, a motor vehicle repair shop. It’s next door to Smoke ‘N Bones, a very good but unfortunately seasonal rib joint, and across Dukes County Ave. from Tony’s Market, purveyor of beer, wine, groceries, lottery tickets, and humongous sandwiches. This puts it at the edge of the self-styled Arts District, about which I am somewhat ambivalent. The upscale galleries and boutiques were closed, the Pit Stop was open — if the Arts District were like this 24/7/365, I’d like it better.

Dan Waters and Jemima James

I entered through the appointed door, which is in the back. No one was at the table, so I put my $5 in a glass vase and gawked at the various cakes and goodies on the refreshments table. Through the next doorway was the performance space, where Jemima James and Dan Waters were just getting ready to perform. I loved it at first sight, probably because it reminded me of Wintertide and half a dozen folkie coffeehouses. The stage was jammed with mikes, instruments, a soundboard, and a plethora of serpentine wires. You could sit close enough to identify the guitarists’ chords, or you could sit a little ways back and indulge in sotto voce conversations that wouldn’t disturb either the musicians or the most intent listeners. Or you could raid the refreshment table, help yourself to hot chocolate, and catch up with whoever else was doing likewise.

Brad Tucker

The light was appropriately dim, but I loved the strings of pink lights along the edge of the stage and the top of the wall. Posters and original paintings graced the walls, and the overhead heating unit (tended to at one point by one of the musicians) reassured me that this wasn’t any renovated-to-the-nines boutique.

I’m not a musician, never mind I’ve been caught in various choral ensembles, but the Vineyard’s music scene is one of the things that keeps me putting one foot in front of the other. It’s inspiring, it’s been inspiring all the time I’ve lived here, and the younger musicians now taking center stage are not infrequently the offspring of musicians, thespians, and artists in other media who’ve been paying their dues for a long time. Willy Mason, who’s been making waves across the U.S. and in Europe (and played backup several times last night), is the son of Jemima James and Mike Mason.

Adam Lipsky on piano, Nina Violet on viola

Nina Violet, whose CD we’ve been celebrating all month, is the daughter of Michele Jones and Don Muckerheide — the owner of the Pit Stop. Nina’s sister Marciana Jones sang backup last night; sister May May Oskan couldn’t sing along because she was home in San Francisco. Pianist-composer Adam Lipsky is the son of the late Jon Lipsky, playwright, director, and associate director of the Vineyard Playhouse, and Kanta Lipsky, who’s no creative slouch either.

Brad Tucker and Willy Mason (Nina Violet in back on viola)

The audience was, shall we say, multigenerational, and no fan of good music would have felt estranged. I hadn’t heard Brad Tucker before, but I sure hope to again: he’s a wry and warm performer whose bluesy-folk style made me feel at home — and how could I not love anyone who writes songs for and about his dog?? The musicians backed each other up — I swear, Nina Violet can back anyone up, no matter what they’re playing — and seemed to be taking great pleasure in each other’s musical company. Also performing, though not pictured here, were Shawn “Bones” Barber on standup bass and percussionist Matt Rosenthal, just in from the west coast.

A huge thanks to Don Muckerheide for turning the Pit Stop into such a marvelous performance venue, and for being such a congenial host. Methinks it’s going to be a musical winter on Martha’s Vineyard.

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