Mother Nature lends a hand for a memorable rehearsal dinner feast on Craigville Beach.

Photo by Stacey Hedman

One of the best things about planning a rehearsal dinner on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, or Nantucket is that you usually don’t have to worry about decorations, or the setting of your event—Mother Nature often does that for you with effortless natural beauty.

A rehearsal dinner in a coastal setting also makes it easy to choose the menu for the evening. What could be better than an old-fashioned clamboil, complete with fresh local fare from land and sea?

Photo by Stacey Hedman

Last September, my husband and I were reminded just how lucky we are to live on Cape Cod when we hosted a rehearsal dinner for our son and his bride at The Beach Club in Centerville. Just a good Frisbee throw from Nantucket Sound, The Beach Club offers old-fashioned elegance with a spacious dining room wrapped around with windows and a big deck offering spectacular views. The sunsets here are famously beautiful, which is one reason why the club is a favorite with brides for both rehearsal dinners and wedding receptions.

On the autumn night of our rehearsal dinner, Mother Nature did more than cooperate: the night was full of natural splendor. It rained in the late afternoon just as the bridal party left their wedding rehearsal at West Barnstable Parish Church. The bride and groom ran into The Beach Club through the rain, ready for pictures on the deck with our photographer, Stacey Hedman.

Photo by Stacey Hedman

The happy couple were greeting the 80 family members and friends savoring Ahi Tuna with Crystalized Ginger and Hoisin Glazed Marinated Steak Skewers—just a preview of a delicious menu created by Falmouth’s Eat Your Heart Out Catering—when our photographer rushed in with the news that a spectacular rainbow was arching over the ocean.

The guests headed to the deck and were greeted by not one, but two vivid rainbows. Partygoers toasted the breathtaking sight as a good omen for the bride and groom and began digging into a heaping raw bar of fresh oysters, shrimp, and littleneck clams, artfully arranged in a rowboat on the deck.

Photo by Stacey Hedman

Eat Your Heart Out is a longtime favorite with brides and party planners (as well as several members of the Kennedy family), who have called on the Falmouth caterers for personal and charity events. The company worked with us to design a beautifully presented dinner from start to finish, from the distinctive appetizers through a tasty clam chowder course and onto the hit of the night: an old-fashioned clamboil featuring fresh, steaming-hot, one-and-a-quarter-pound lobsters; local corn on the cob; roasted garlic herb potatoes; and even a lemon-scented towel. Guests could also choose grilled barbecued chicken and a light salad with fresh greens.

As the guests sat down to tasteful yet simply decorated tables—given a whimsical seaside touch with burlap runners over white linen, festooned with sea glass, shells, and floating candles—The Beach Club glowed inside and out. After a dessert of four ice cream selections from Centerville’s famous Four Seas Ice Cream served with hot fudge, the entire party headed home. We were certain that Mother Nature would bless us all for the next day’s Cape Cod wedding to be held in a meadow with views over a West Barnstable marsh out to Cape Cod Bay.

Susan Dewey is the editor and associate publisher of Cape Cod Life Publications

The post Natural Blessings appeared first on Cape Cod LIFE.

Personal touches—and some unscripted surprises —charmed this Cape Cod wedding.

Photo by Dan Cutrona

The september morning of the wedding was overcast, with wispy fog rolling in on an easterly wind from Cape Cod Bay. The temperature hovered in the low 60s—not cold, but a little chilly for the bare shoulders of the bride and her bridesmaids.
After an exuberant rehearsal dinner the night before, when a rainstorm gave way to a pair of rainbows that faded into a glorious sunset over The Beach Club on Craigville Beach, the wedding party woke up to a gray morning. The parents of the bride and groom, several family members, and close friends headed for the reception site in a beautiful West Barnstable meadow overlooking Cape Cod Bay.

The sight of an expansive tent erected by Sperry Tent—floating like the sails of a clipper ship on the meadow’s rise—lifted the spirits of aunts, uncles, and friends who gathered to help set up. The bride’s father placed an elegant wooden rowboat—a high school graduation gift he restored for his daughter—on the edge of the tent to hold wedding gifts. A crew of the bride and groom’s aunts worked at a feverish pitch to decorate long farm-style tables with driftwood and rocks gathered from Cape Cod beaches, brightened with evergreens and mason jars filled with flowers from family gardens.

Remaining upbeat, the set-up crew warmed up a little with cups of coffee from West Barnstable’s Old Village Store around the corner. When the groom’s mother made a quick stop there for refills, the owner gave her a positive weather forecast. “Don’t worry,” he said after learning she was part of the bridal party for the big tent on Route 6A.“The wind is going to switch around to the southwest after lunch, the sun will come out—it’s going to be a beautiful day!”

Sipping hot coffee under the tent, the crew began to notice a slightly brightening sky. The groom’s mother and the bride’s parents—all year rounders—stayed cheerful, knowing the weather can turn in a heartbeat on Cape Cod.

Photo by Dan Cutrona

The tent was a bright spot of personal touches—bold dahlias in every color of the rainbow from the mother of the bride’s gardens glowed in nests of Hinoki cypress and juniper on each table, gathered from the groom’s great great grandmother’s yard in Centerville. At each place setting, soft linen napkins made by the bride and her mom over the previous summer held hand-stamped seed packets with the bride and groom’s names, filled with wildflower seed.

At the bridal party table, two yellow wooden chairs for the bridal couple—antiques refurbished and painted by the bride’s father—waited for bouquets from family gardens. The hard-working crew included aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends from both sides of the family. There was lots of love under the tent.

On her way to get dressed, the groom’s mother stopped at his house in West Barnstable. After a quick hug, the groom asked his mom if she could “get rid of this cloud cover,” while waiting for a breakfast cooked by a childhood friend and one of his ushers. He had nicked himself shaving and was trying to stop the bleeding before his 1 p.m. wedding at the West Barnstable Parish Church around the corner.

An hour later, the bride and her six attendants began to dress in an old-fashioned Cape house nearby, rented for the week by the bride’s family. The crowd of girls—who had traveled for this day from Florida, Georgia, and even Switzerland—had their hair swirled or braided into up-dos. The bridesmaids’ floaty slate blue linen dresses from Free People made a serene background for the bride’s hand-fashioned gown of silk organza and Alencon lace.

The bridal bouquets arrived, designed and hand-tied by the groom’s mother and her best friend. At the bride’s request, each bouquet included one vibrant dahlia from her mother’s beautiful perennial gardens in Orleans. The bridal party and the mother of the bride helped button up dozens of tiny silk buttons cascading down the back of the bride’s gown and got on their knees to help her with strappy silver shoes.

Every moment was captured by well-known Cape Cod photographer Dan Cutrona and his wife, Amy, whose cameras didn’t stop clicking for the next 10 hours. Down Route 6A, less than a mile away, the groom and his ushers donned gray suits, regiment ties in slate blue with muted orange stripes and waited for their boutonnieres to arrive. The groom, his father—and his best man—and the ushers shared a fortifying toast of bourbon.

Photo by Dan Cutrona

A crowd began to gather at the West Barnstable Parish Church, the oldest church on Cape Cod, first built in the early 1700s. The simple yet elegant structure has been through several reconstructions over the centuries, but its meetinghouse-style interior of encircling balconies around an altar shaped like a ship’s brow, still contains ancient wooden beams and a wooden floor worn pale with the passing of worshippers feet—and those of silver-footed brides.

As the 200 guests filled the wooden pews, the groom and his ushers waited before the soaring altar flanked by enormous windows. The crowd waited, watching the clouds roll by. The church organist played songs meaningful to the bride and groom and their families, including “Simple Gifts” and “Ave Maria.”

When the old wooden doors at the back of the church opened for the bride, she seemed to glimmer, standing bright and lovely beside her father. Was it the color of her dress, her blonde hair beneath a flowing veil? Or was that sunlight peeking through the cloud cover?

The yearning melody of the second movement from Dvorak’s “New World Symphony”—the groom’s parents’ bridal song 35 years earlier—filled the church. The groom smiled. And a few moments later, just as the bride and groom clasped hands and exchanged vows, the sun broke through the cloud cover, filling the church with light.

Photo by Dan Cutrona

Photo by Dan Cutrona

There were many more magical moments later that day during a glorious, summer-warm reception under a cloudless blue sky—with gentle winds from the southwest. The crowds arrived from the church to the delicious scent of fresh fish, lamb, and vegetables cooking over a wood fire. Westport caterers, Smoke & Pickles, worked with local vendors including Cape Cod Package Store and Cape Cod Beer, to make the day a uniquely Cape celebration. A close friend of the bride’s father, Arthur Tripp Grohe, was the event coordinator. “Tripp oversaw the seamless flow of events, which allowed Bob and I to enjoy the day without a single worry,” said the mother of the bride.

Photo by Dan Cutrona

Such personal, heartfelt attention to detail contributed to the success of the entire wedding from start to finish. “It meant a lot to us to be able to celebrate this day with our close friends and family in a beautiful outdoor setting with fresh locally sourced food, great music, and personal touches from family and friends,” said the bride.

Those loving efforts were in evidence everywhere: the bride’s wreath hand-woven by her mother, encircling her hair with flowers picked that morning from the Orleans gardens of family and friends; the poem about this Cape marriage written by the groom’s aunt; and the surprise performance by the bride’s father, strumming Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” on the guitar with a Cape bluegrass band, Crab Grass, for the couple’s first dance.

Of course, other moments, like the passing of a Cape Cod Railroad train at the bottom of the meadow, tooting its whistle just as the bride and groom completed their dance, and the swooping cloud of migrating swallows dancing above the tent as the sun set over Sandy Neck, were unscripted. It was a memorable day of love—and Cape Cod magic.

Susan Dewey is the editor and associate publisher of Cape Cod LIFE and the mother of the groom.

The post Cape Magic appeared first on Cape Cod LIFE.

Eugene O’Neill came to Provincetown and found the inspiration that helped him become an American literary icon.

Photos Courtesy of The Eugene O’Neill Foundation, Tao House

Standing alone in the dining room of a Provincetown cabin, Eugene O’Neill was afraid to hear the sound of his own words.

O’Neill had come to Cape Cod in the spring of 1916, a self-imposed exile from New York City. Shortly after his arrival, he found himself in a cabin owned by Susan Glaspell, a celebrated writer who had relocated to Provincetown several years earlier. While the timid O’Neill remained alone in one room, a group of amateur actors in the next read through an early version of O’Neill’s Bound East for Cardiff, a one-act play about Yank, a dying sailor recalling his five years at sea with Driscoll, his shipmate.

“Then we knew what we were in for,” recalled Glaspell after the performance had finished. The group loved the play, and they saw O’Neill’s burgeoning talent. A few months later, Bound East for Cardiff premiered in Provincetown—the first time O’Neill’s work would be performed in public.

A hundred years after penning his first play and 60 years after his death, Eugene O’Neill remains one of America’s greatest playwrights. Works like The Iceman Cometh are marked by a disregard for sentimentality and an unrelenting pessimism—natural themes for a man who battled depression and alcoholism, lost numerous family members and friends to drugs and suicide, abandoned two wives, and often lived the life of a bum while down and out in New York City. But when O’Neill retreated to the desolate dunes of Provincetown, he began to turn his inauspicious beginnings into Pulitzer Prize-winning drama.

Born in a hotel room on Broadway, O’Neill spent long stretches of his childhood traveling with parents: James, a theatre actor well-known for portraying the Count of Monte Cristo on stages around the country, and Ella, who struggled with morphine and alcohol addiction from the time O’Neill was born in 1888.

Extensive travels became a life of discontent in New York for O’Neill. In October 1909, two years after dropping out of Princeton University, he married Kathleen Jenkins. The two had a child together, Eugene Jr., in 1910, but O’Neill had no real interest in either his wife or the child, and spent much of his marriage abroad in Honduras and Buenos Aires. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1912.

Photos Courtesy of The Eugene O’Neill Foundation, Tao House

To satisfy Kathleen’s lawyers and the laws of New York state, O’Neill staged an affair with a prostitute to prove his infidelity. He left the brothel battling guilt, and went back to Jimmy the Priest’s, a waterfront dive in New York where he was living, and tried to kill himself by consuming a large amount of the barbiturate Veronal.

After the suicide attempt, O’Neill moved back to his family’s home in New London, Connecticut, and, with the help of his brother Jamie, became a reporter with the New London Telegraph. “It was when I joined the staff of the New London Telegraph that I found I wanted to be a writer,” O’Neill told Charles A. Merrill in an article published by The Boston Globe in July 1923. His time with the paper was cut short when he contracted tuberculosis and was committed to a sanitorium for six months. “It gave me a chance to mull over the experiences I had had in life,” O’Neill said. “Ideas began to formulate in my head, and I wrote some one-act plays.”

He spent the fall and winter of 1915–1916 often drunk and despondent, bouncing around seedy hotels and friends’ places in New York, writing just a handful of poems. When spring came, Eugene saw his chance to escape the city with Terry Carlin, an aging anarchist and his roommate; their friend, well-known revolutionary Jack Reed; and Reed’s girlfriend, Louise Bryant. The four planned on spending the summer in Provincetown to be with friends and avoid the summer heat of the city.

The actors in Glaspell’s cabin had started presenting plays they had written in impromptu venues around Provincetown under the moniker the Provincetown Players. On July 28, 1916, the Provincetown Players debuted Bound East for Cardiff on a stage in a converted warehouse on a wharf. (O’Neill himself had the smallest role in the play as a second mate with a single line.) Glaspell, in The Road to the Temple: A Biography of George Cram Cook, recounts how perfect the warehouse setting was for O’Neill’s theatrical debut:

“The sea has been good to Eugene O’Neill. It was there for his opening. There was a fog, just as the script demanded, [a] fog bell in the harbor. The tide was in, and it washed under us and around, spraying through the holes in the floor, giving us the rhythm and flavor of the sea. It is not merely figurative language to say the old wharf shook with applause.”

Photos Courtesy of The Eugene O’Neill Foundation, Tao House

O’Neill returned to New York in the fall. The next spring he convinced drinking buddy and writer Harold DePolo to venture back to Provincetown with him in March of 1917. The two stayed at The Atlantic House, and O’Neill entered a fruitful writing phase. That spring, he would complete four new plays—In the Zone, Ile, The Long Voyage Home, and Moon of the Caribbes.

O’Neill often molded his characters on people he knew in life, for better or worse. Most were spared sharing names with their fictional incarnations. But some, like Abbie Putnam, a Provincetown librarian who denied O’Neill a library card because he didn’t own property in the town, incurred his wrath. In his 1924 play, Desire Under The Elms, a married woman seduces her stepson and becomes pregnant with his child. After giving birth she becomes worried that the child will complicate her relationship and kills the child. The woman’s name is, by no coincidence, Abbie Putnam.

In 1917, as another summer came to an end, O’Neill returned to New York, only to face more heartbreak and tragedy. The heroin overdose suicide of his friend, Louis Holladay, shook O’Neill, reminding him of his own suicide attempt several years earlier. He returned to his old ways and began escaping to the Hell Hole, a favorite bar. Agnes Boulton, whom he had met in the fall of 1917, several months before Holladay’s suicide, kept him from returning to total despair by encouraging him to continue his writing. In January 1918, the two eloped in Provincetown.

Shortly after, O’Neill finished one of his first full-length plays. Beyond the Horizon brought the newlyweds financial security and would eventually win O’Neill his first of four Pulitzer Prizes. During their summer stay, O’Neill and Boulton came across the Peaked Hill Lifesaving Station, a former Coast Guard station in the dunes of Provincetown. The couple fell in love with the structure as a possible home immediately. James O’Neill, now on good terms with his famous son, purchased the building for the couple as a belated wedding gift.

Before moving into the house the following summer, Boulton revealed that she was pregnant. The two had once agreed to let nothing and no one, including children of their own, get in the way of their love. Much to her relief, O’Neill was happy to learn that he was going to have another child. Before the couple moved into Peaked Hill, sand had piled up to the roof and a lot of work needed to be done before O’Neill and his expectant wife could occupy the new house.

Shane Rudraighe O’Neill was born on October 30, 1919. Eugene O’Neill spent most of his time after the birth of the child traveling between his new home and New York while putting Beyond the Horizon into production. The show opened to rave reviews on February 3, 1920, at the Morosco Theatre on Broadway.

Photos Courtesy of The Eugene O’Neill Foundation, Tao House

Time away from home greatly strained O’Neill’s marriage to Boulton. Letters—the couple’s only means of communication—detailed their anguish at each other’s absence. “If our letters are to become an added torture to our hearts already tortured by separation and by the mishaps of outside shame then we are lost,” wrote O’Neill to Boulton. The couple endured several turbulent years together and had another daughter, Oona—whom O’Neill would eventually disown after she married Charlie Chaplin—before he left Boulton for his third wife, Carlotta Monterey, in 1927.

By this time, O’Neill had won another Pulitzer and was fully dedicated to his work, which required him to be in New York, leaving Provincetown far behind. “Gene was happy at Peaked Hill, writing, living life as he wanted it, and always rather sad when it got too cold to stay any longer,” remembered Boulton in her 1958 memoir, Part of a Long Story. “I remember, too, the sunny morning the Coast Guard brought us a wire saying Gene had won his first Pulitzer Prize and how he and I looked at each other, wondering what on earth a Pulitzer Prize was.” In 1931, Peaked Hill was swept out to sea during a storm.

O’Neill’s output in the 1930s and 1940s slowed considerably, but the quality of his work remained strong. The Iceman Cometh, A Moon for the Misbegotten, and Long Day’s Journey Into Night—the latter widely considered his opus—cemented his reputation as one of the great American playwrights.

Tragedy would continue to plague O’Neill for the remainder of his life. In 1950, his eldest son, Eugene Jr., committed suicide. Shane would follow in his half brother’s footsteps in 1977, when he leaped from the fourth story of a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn. O’Neill’s own health declined cruelly and he developed a Parkinson’s-like tremor in his hands that was so severe he was unable to write for the final 10 years of his life. He passed away on November 27, 1953, at the Sheraton Hotel in Boston, where Monterey had been tending to him. Ever the pessimist, his final words were: “I knew it. I knew it. Born in a goddamn hotel room and dying in a hotel room.”

But O’Neill’s plays continue to be performed around the world, and the influence of his work endures. “The O’Neill legacy in American drama, on a national level, would be hard to overestimate,” says Stephen Borkowski, chairman of the Provincetown Art Commission. “Interest in his work remains strong, and the continued reexamination and restaging of his work certainly gives it a life in perpetuity.”

Peace and serenity had eluded O’Neill for most of his life, but he found glimpses of happiness in Provincetown. The playwright made some of his greatest strides with his work after that first fateful visit to Cape Cod, channeling his demons into masterful prose. And a hundred years later, the playwright who couldn’t share the same room as his words still has an audience that wants to hear them.

Matthew Nilsson is special sections editor at Cape Cod Life Publications.

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Our writer recalls his favorite moments from 18 Figawi races across Nantucket Sound

Photo by Blake Jackson

“We are gonna hit that boat!” The man yelling those words over the wind, out in the middle of Nantucket Sound, was my first Figawi captain.

Boats at sea are not democracies. The captain’s rule is law. But we had a little parliamentary problem on board. This captain was brilliant. He was—quite literally—a rocket scientist. In fact, let’s call him Rocket Man. Genius? Yes. Decisive? Not so much.

The first mate and most of the crew were screaming at the helmsman to, “Round up, round up!” But the captain was yelling, “Fall off, fall off!” Either maneuver would have saved us. Rounding up would point the bow into the wind, slowing her. Falling off would further fill the sails with wind and speed us up.

But we did neither. We started to tack, but then didn’t. Now, flapping sails added thrashing, taut-snapping sounds to the noise of confusion on deck. I was caught mid-tack, in no man’s land halfway across the cabin top, when the captain started screaming about the imminent collision. I grabbed a deck rail and braced for impact.

Photo by Blake Jackson

There sits on the wall at Baxter’s Boathouse a modest little jug. Few notice it in the corner of the venerable Hyannis Harbor restaurant. The jug was the first Figawi trophy in 1972, now under the same roof where the famous race had its beginnings as a simple bar bet. The particulars are lost to the rum-scented mists of history and the accretion of legend, but the crux of the conversation reportedly went like this:

“I can sail to Nantucket faster than you.”
“Oh yeah? Care to make it interesting?”

Three boats sailed that Memorial Day weekend. Bob “Red” Luby raced first to the island, with brothers Bob and Joe Horan nipping at his heels. The next year they drew 15 boats. Now, hundreds of boats, thousands of racers and many thousands more spectators follow the festivities. The little jug at Baxter’s is immemorial, and now winners in the various classes are presented with gleaming silver platters and torso-sized trophies.

Most sailboat races, from the Olympics to the America’s Cup, are buoy races—sailors follow a fixed course around floats. But the Figawi joins the ranks of the Newport-Bermuda and the Sydney-Hobart as races that actually go someplace.

It’s a timelessly enchanting notion, to pack a bag and sail for unseen shores.

I chanced into the 1994 Figawi on a negligible invitation. A friend kindly lied about my sailing credentials, and suddenly I was crewman on a boat that would take a fourth-place trophy. My rampant under-qualifications were mostly hidden by my assigned job, that of “rail meat,” which is what they call the guys they stick up on the windward rail whose main job is counterbalancing the boat on upwind legs. You basically get soaked with cold sea water for five hours.

Between the thrills of racing and the social scene we found once we hit the docks, one Figawi was all it took. Excepting my own college commencement, I haven’t missed one since. I’ve crewed on five different craft. I’ve gone on boats that won silver platters, and I’ve been on boats that nearly sank. It’s never dull.

After that memorable first race, my buddy Slick—he now makes a living on boats and does not wish to be identified here—thought we could make our own run at glory on a Helms 24-footer that sat for years on stands in his backyard. It was full of water, which turned to ice and sagged the belly. It looked about as sleek as a jelly doughnut.

We mustered a crew. Slick would be captain. With one Figawi under my belt, I was de facto first mate. Two others had only been on motorboats, and my college roommate had never been on a boat of any kind—including ferries. The boat we spent the spring refurbishing was named Bulletproof. But it wasn’t even waterproof. It leaked. I’ve been in drier Jacuzzis.

Race day arrived with a misty morning. We sailed in circles toward the starting line, doubling back every time we fumbled another piece of equipment overboard. There went the winch handle, then the jib bag. Then some battens flew out of the sail. The 30-packs of Budweiser remained safely stowed below, like ballast.

On the way to Nantucket, there wasn’t enough wind—one guy got out briefly and swam—but on the way back, it blew like stink. Slick struggled with the helm in big seas. All these years later, I can still hear the groaning, creaking noises from the old wooden tiller, which steers the boat and for which we carried no replacement.

After that, Slick and I went back with Rocket Man, who won several trophies over the years. After Rocket Man moved to Hawaii, I hitched a ride on a stinkpot, as sailors derisively term motorboats. It was a friend’s Hatteras—big and broad and comfortable with beds instead of berths, a refrigerator instead of coolers, even a shower.

It was a new level of unearned luxury for me, but I soon learned that even swell motorboats present opportunity for public humiliation.

Eager to demonstrate my veteran seamanship, as we eased into the Boat Basin in Nantucket Harbor, I grabbed a stern line and hopped up, balancing on the narrow transom, ready to assist the docking procedure. But then the captain bumped the throttles at the worst moment and I fell in. Splash! Hat over teakettle.

As I climbed the slimy ladder to the pier, what seemed like thousands of people laughed and cheered from Nantucket’s dockside bars and restaurants.

Photo by Blake Jackson

The boat safely docked, I joined the celebration erupting all around us. This might be my favorite time of the whole weekend. The people-watching is nonpareil.

The rest of Saturday and all of Sunday is an open-air festival that is equal parts boat show, Mardi Gras and rock concert. Crews party on the decks of the boats, beer flows—from cans, because only an amateur brings glass bottles or bananas on boats, or whistles once aboard—and the afternoon becomes a pastel-clad, glad-handing procession of genial wanderings. Invitations on board become as casual as the wave of an arm.

By sundown, things are getting loud, funky and fun, and then they open the big party tent. Soon the drink lines are 10 deep, the band is rocking, and it’s a life-in-your-hands adventure out on the drink-slick dance floor.

There’s no racing on Sunday, when they present first a joke-telling session, the awards ceremony, and then a big clambake in the tent.

Like the Figawi itself, the joke session started informally when one race legend, the late Jeffrey Foster, ran aground in Nantucket Harbor. It became part of the weekend, moved into the tent and has been hosted for years now by a goodtime prankster troupe who call themselves the Band of Angels. They bill the event as a “champagne brunch, you bring the brunch.” It is a raucous and decidedly off-color event—50 shades of inappropriate.

After they sweep out the lobster and clam shells, the tent reopens for another bacchanal, traditionally topped at the end of the night as the band breaks into “God Bless America” and everyone sings along in full throat.

Then it’s back to the boats and berths, where sleep is fitful and the sea awaits the morrow.

Photo by Blake Jackson

Rocket Man narrowly avoided that collision, but there were other close scrapes. One time he got cut off and began to shout abuse at the other boat, unperturbed that it was, the Mya, helmed by the late senator Edward M. Kennedy. Bulletproof got sold and would later sink—while tied to a dock!

Slick got a dream job, ultimately living on the same beautiful boat in Nantucket Harbor aboard which he met his future wife (also beautiful).

As for me, I haven’t been on a boat that won anything in years.

But I’ll always go. To see friends you only see on that weekend, for the pastel promenade on Straight Wharf, for watching people in pink whale hats attempt to dance with two drinks in each hand, for the rolling motion of the sea, for the salt and the wind and boozy bonhomie on the docks, for the music and the dancing. I’ll go as long as there’s an open berth.

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