The sun rose at 5:07 this morning and will set at 8:19 this evening.
FilmFest Turns 30
The Film Festival is back in town this week, and much has changed about the island and the festival since it showed its first film 30 years ago. There was a sweetness to those chaotic early years, especially the first year, that seems lost as the festival has become more professionalized. And there was a sweetness to the island back then that has also dissipated.
My husband has had four films in this festival, starting with “Witch City” in that first festival, or maybe it was in year two. “Witch City” is a film about how, on the 300th anniversary of the infamous Salem Witch Trials, history was forced to share the city with the commerce of tee shirts and haunted happenings and the spirituality of new age wiccans. Elie Weisel and Arthur Miller were both in that film.
The venues in those early years were the old Dreamland, Gaslight, Bennett Hall and upstairs at the Methodist Church. “Witch City,” showed at Bennett Hall, and our son Kevin, then 6, had to scramble up a pole to help hang the banner for the film. This week you can find Kevin behind the bar at The Pearl making cocktails, when he’s not making art. Time flies.
I haven’t been to many other film festivals – one in Annapolis that we’ve been to twice when they’ve shown John’s films, and Jay Craven’s Middlebury New Filmmakers Film Festival. Both were much smaller and seemed more accessible.
The Middlebury festival is August 20-24 this year, and a full pass is only $160. If you like film and want to get away from the rat race of Nantucket in August, you might enjoy it.
We went to the documentary, “Jaws at 50” on Tuesday night, a day before the festival opened today, and I enjoyed it. While the film was shot on the Vineyard, the author, Peter Benchley, grew up summers on Nantucket, which is where he partly conceived of the idea for the book that later became the highest grossing film of its time. After the film there was a panel comprised of the filmmaker, a scientist and Wendy Benchley, the widow of Peter Benchley who met Wendy when he was having a drink at the Tap Room with Foley Vaughn where Wendy was a waitress.
The documentary was fun to watch, and if you didn’t see it this week, I hear it will be available on streaming services sometime in July. The Film Festival will be in town through Monday so there’s plenty of time to see some of the films. Monday is the Best of the Fest, when the most popular movies are shown again. Tickets, programs and merchandise are available at the Film Festival office on Oak Street in the office of real estate company Douglass Elliman, right across the street from the Dreamland.
I do wonder if eventually the festival might move to October, when lodging is more available and everything is less expensive. September and October are beautiful months to visit and everything is still open, so it’s still an attractive time to come to the island and far less crowded. It would certainly be a boon to island businesses in those slower months.
Water, Water Everywhere
I’ve been to the beach twice since Saturday and the water has been glorious! My summer routine is going to my exercise class from 6:30-7:30, gardening from 8-9 and beach from 10:30 to just after noon. Once people start showing up, it is time to leave. I like a quiet, uncrowded beach.
The island is experiencing a drought, and the town has put restrictions on watering lawns and gardens. We’ve never had an irrigation system and likely never will, so I’ve been hand-watering my flower gardens in the early morning hours to keep them from getting parched.
I don’t mind the lawn turn brown in the sun, so long as the flowers thrive. Plus, the clover we planted in some bare spots two years ago has self-seeded and is sprouting up all over the place. Clover is very resilient and doesn’t turn brown when water is in short supply so even of the lawn turns beige, we’ll have islands of green clover.
The heat these last few days has been awful, but when I mentioned it to my friend Mac, who lives in Houston, he gave me a quizzical look. Heat? He grew up in Texas.
As I write this, I’m sitting in our living room with a fan pointed straight at me. We are old-school Nantucket. There’s no lawn irrigation and no air conditioning in our house. But the latter may change. I see some form of air conditioning in my future. In this era of climate change, the days of opening a window to cool off seem to be over.
Back in the 1980’s we had an intense heat wave with temperatures in the high nineties. I was working at the paper, and one day around five o’clock, my dad asked if I wanted to cool off after work. I thought he meant let’s go for a swim. However, his idea was to drive to the airport, take the doors off his single engine airplane, a Luscombe with the tail number 63K, and climb to altitude where we could rise above the heat. It was wonderful.
It is too hot to write any further. I am headed to the Dreamland to sit in an airconditioned space, eat popcorn (that may be dinner) and watch a film I never heard of until I read about it in the Film Festival program. It sounds like a good one. Maybe I’ll see some of you at the movies this week.