HOLLY NADLER

508-693-3880

(sunporch@vineyard.net)

Back from California, babe. Lunch with Nicholson, cocktails with Spielberg. Oops, I just channeled someone else’s L.A. vacation.

One thing we Vineyarders can depend on when we plunge into the real world for a week or two or more: we run up against the latest technologies that leave us whistling, “Everything’s up to date in Kansas City.”

For me, the latest innovation was glimpsed during a visit to a supermarket-sized health food store in Palm Desert. When you arrive at the check-out counter, it’s self-help all the way. You scan in your own groceries, then you poke a finger at the screen for your method of payment. This process may sound totally self-evident and intuitive, but for those of us who still keep all of our business records in a shoe box, we react as if we’ve been ordered to take a calculus exam on the spot — no looking at the old textbook that we failed to grasp 40 years ago.

This store in Palm Desert has nice workers in green aprons to come shepherd you through the process, but what happens when their help is no longer deemed necessary? Won’t customers be in the same spot we find ourselves in whenever we place a telephone call to a big company? In other words, won’t we be wandering from one unmanned check-out counter to the next wailing, “Can I talk to a live person, please? There are six billion souls on this planet and I can’t have just one measly little human being to help me here?”

On the plus side, this people-free cashier system might not be the worst thing for the Island. Why not have tourists buy their T-shirts, magazines, and candy with this same scan-and-pay method, thus freeing up hard-working Vineyarders for some unheard-of beach time? Yes, beach time. What a concept! And it could be ours if we’re willing to embrace modern day science and technology.

So out in L.A. I spent time with my son, Charlie and his three roomates in a brand-new, two-story townhouse apartment in Echo Park. Two of his roomies are Vineyard boys, Alex Schilcher of the famous set of triplets, and Kenny Hayes.

The fourth roommate, an aspiring screenwriter from New Jersey, Adi Kancharla, had an adventure buying a black wrought-iron bedframe from IKEA. He roped it to his car roof and merrily motored onto the downtown freeway. The bed fell off at the same time that an 18-wheeler truck bore down on it. Adi watched, horrified, from the side of the road as the bed got blasted onto 19 other freeways. Undeterred, he returned to IKEA, purchased a new bed, roped it to the roof of his car, and took surface streets all the way home.

One night I played den mother by arriving with bags of food and preparing the poor starving fellows a hot meal. Meanwhile a basketball game beamed from a gigantic TV screen while a football whizzed back and forth across the living room. At one point, Charlie leaned back in an easy chair, clasped his hands behind his neck, and said as the football pivoted over his head, “Even if I make it big in this town, I’m always going to live in a place like this with a few buddies.”

And I’m telling you, the West Coast is crawling with Vineyarders. One afternoon in Santa Monica, Charlie and I were having lunch at a place called Buddha’s Belly. Our waitress turned out to be aspiring actress, Sarah Murphy, a classmate of Charlie’s from Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School. Both of them rattled off names of Vineyarders churning through Los Angeles including, in Sarah’s corner, singer/musician Willy Mason and, in Charlie’s, Tyler Hurd, hard at work in the music industry, and Sam Reece en route from a winter of snowboarding in Jackson Hole to glow-worm spelunking and red-hot-volcano climbing in New Zealand.

This just in from Robert Iadicicco, moderator for the Friday Conversations at the Oak Bluffs Senior Center: Today, Friday, March 14, from 10 to 11:30 a.m., the guest will be Suzan Bellincampi, director of Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary, speaking on the topic Spring Flings — The Love Life of Animals. The guest for March 28 will be Jane Thayer, author of Elder Essence, The Gift of Longevity, speaking on Aging to Sage-ing.

At the Oak Bluffs Library, stand by for Basic Computer Skills II on Thursday, March 27 from 10:45 a.m. to noon. Reserve your place by calling 508-693-9433. Also at the library: Come to the Portuguese/English Easter Story Time with egg and rabbit stories, Saturday, March 15 at 10:30 a.m. Refreshments will be served at the end. Amadine and Taynara will read in Portuguese while Irene will read in English. All ages welcome.

Save the date: On Saturday, April 5, the Oak Bluffs School Parent Teacher Organization will present Family Trivia Night.

Here’s a question: Which beloved children’s book author was married to an Academy Award-winning actress and part-time Edgartown resident? That’s an easy one: Roald Dahl was married to Patricia Neal.