Gerry Yukevich

A Toast to Rabbie

A Toast to Rabbie

If a Scot be ripe for toastin’,

If a Scot be fit for praise,

If a Scot stands high above the rest

For the way he spent his days,

Let’s raise a cup now, all about,

And celebrate the cheer

That Rabbie Burns has brought to the world

Now for two hundred, fifty years.

Nay, no poet was ’ere as fecund or fine

Read More

From Salzburg to Super Bowl: Comedy and Tragedy in HD

Vicious art as a warm-up for brutal sport? Super Sunday on the Vineyard offered exactly that.

Read More

An Inspired Island Community Chorus Gives a Transcendent Spring Concert

G rateful Vineyarders will long remember the dazzling musical high wire act performed so superbly last weekend by Peter Boak and the inspired Island Community Chorus in their thrilling Spring 2009 concert.

Read More

Island Pianist Charms on New Album

That proud twinkle in John Alaimo’s eye on the cover of his latest solo album does not deceive.

Called Songs for Three Seasons, the disc delivers a rich and textured display of a master mood painter on an enchanting and enriching spree. Mr. Alaimo affably invites us to share his whimsy, his nostalgia, an occasional flirtation with regret, all on a splendidly harmonic solo pianistic tour of nature’s three warmer seasons.

Read More

Father of Modern Jazz Dave Brubeck Brings the Melody to Starbuck’s Neck

During college in 1940, while working as a summer cowhand on the family’s Northern California cattle ranch, Dave Brubeck asked his father’s permission to take a job playing jazz at a San Francisco night club. Confounded by the idea, his father shook his head and replied, “I can’t understand why you would want to spend time in a dark and noisy and smoky place, when you could be out here with me in the fresh air with beautiful country all around you.”

Read More

Inspirational Healing: Doctor Describes Year in Life of Addict

THE ADDICT: One Patient, One Doctor, One Year. By Michael Stein. William Morrow. March, 2009. 275 pages. $25.99.

A medical license is a license to ask questions. Ordinary conversation disappears quickly in my office. Business has to be taken care of.”

Read More

An Old Ball Is Lost, But Dreamers Endure

The ancient signatures on the yellow horsehide were hard to read. But when I first held that old baseball in my hands in the early 1950s, I had barely learned to spell my own name, let alone decipher the signatures of old Pittsburgh Pirates players. My grandmother Mimmie never commented on the relic, which she kept, oddly, in the upper right corner of her sewing machine table.

Read More

Vineyard Bookshelf

THE GREATER JOURNEY: Americans in Paris. By David McCullough. Simon and Schuster, New York, N.Y. May 2011. 558 pages, photographs. $37.50 hardcover.

Read More

Pages