When it comes to the off-season, the Vineyard shines at a couple things. One is dancing. Another is dessert. Last Saturday at the annual Barnraisers’ Ball at the Agricultural Hall, there was plenty of both, set to the music of Johnny Hoy and the Bluefish that kept the barn bouncing.

The price of admission at the ball was dessert. And many paid. The dessert table was huge, with over a half a dozen versions of brownies, plates of cookies and a variety of pies, cakes and various sugar-coated baked items nobody could name. It would seem that with continuous pickings, the pile of home-baked goodies would have gotten smaller. But it didn’t.

There was beer. It was in a keg and it was in the bottle, all of it on or in ice. Mothers chased errant toddlers amid the fast and slow-moving feet of others, and it was a mystery how so many children could be so happy and none of them had a tantrum.

While there aren’t many free dances here on the Island in winter, the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society hosts more than it share. Plus, a night for dancing couldn’t have been planned better: the lousy weather made it an almost essential place to be.

The week had been mostly overcast. The week had offered about every shade of gray that a maritime climate sees: pink-gray on one morning, dark gray the next. The Vineyard could have exported its gray to the mainland.

Saturday was not only gray in West Tisbury; meteorologists had presaged a threat of late night rain, and much later in the night there was a thunderstorm.

A night of dancing and sweet desserts was all the Vineyard needed to fill the gray hole. A dance on the night of a damp gray maritime day was perfect. The rhythm and blues, foot-stomping music of Johnny Hoy and his team made it even more ideal.

The society’s annual dance dates back to November of 1994 when the Island community turned out in force to help raise the handsome barn that we now know as the Agricultural Hall. The barn had been hauled in pieces from its original home in Woodsville, N.H., a small town in the foothills of the White Mountains.

And after the barn was finished, the barnraisers put down their hammers and took home their saws. They got dressed up and came back for a potluck dinner and dance.

Husbands, wives, children and grandchildren showed up for the dance Saturday to commemorate the event, though there were also people in the hall who had no idea how it got started, as it happened before they were born.

The Barnraisers’ Ball was a way for those who wanted to remember to do so: and what a way to reinvigorate a cool, autumnal rainy night.

There were teachers, lawyers, musicians and both the newest and oldest of the Island’s year-round residents. There were farmers throughout. There was Andrew Woodruff of Whippoorwill Farm, Jim Athearn and his wife Debbie of Morning Glory Farm, and they were in constant motion.

There was Rebecca Miller of North Tabor Farm and Arnie Fischer Jr. of Flatpoint Farm and his wife Christa.

Nearly all were familiar, so greetings was a big part of what went on in long lines for dessert, beer and for those who their took their urge for action to the pine dance floor.

And as is custom in West Tisbury, (and required by Agricultural Society rules), the music stopped at about ten o’clock.