Holly Wheaton does not own a single little black dress or power suit. Those days are long behind her.
More than two decades ago, the Springs native traded in her sleek Chicago wardrobe for flannel shirts, blue jeans and work boots when she moved back home to join the ranks of the Springs Food Pantry that her mother, Betty Reichart, had started in 1992 — a time when feeding over 200 families was unimaginable.
But that is precisely what Ms. Wheaton faces today.
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Dressed in a medical gown, mask and face shield, Stratis Morfogen had poked his head into his 14-year-old daughter’s bedroom to check on her — when he saw tears streaming down her face.
By way of explanation, she simply handed him her phone.
“F you, Bea! I have to quarantine because of you,” one TikTok user wrote. “Bea this is your fault!” another said on Instagram.
And then came the comment section — brutal, relentless finger-pointing at the Southampton eighth-grader who had tested positive for COVID-19 less than two days earlier and complied with contact tracing.
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Mikayla Mott takes a seat outside the Ding Repair Cafe on a recent Monday morning, a warm winter breeze tousling her long blonde hair and dancing with the wind chimes nearby.
Under the basking sun, she and the restaurant are sheltered from the noise and traffic and throngs of people at the bustling heart of San Juan del Sur, a coastal town in Nicaragua that the 26-year-old East Hampton native has called her second home for nearly three years.
Here, it is mostly peaceful and quiet, just three blocks from the bay.
A month ago, it was an entirely different scene at the unassuming cafe, which served as a staging area following a pair of hurricanes, Eta and Iota, that landed within days of each other and devastated countless communities across the country. Here, Ms. Mott and her team of volunteers raised over $10,000 in donations and collected countless supplies, which they sorted, divvied up and delivered to those in need.
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Lance Gumbs was on a mission to find misplaced beadwork in his mother’s shop last week when he saw them — the thick stack of files piled high on her desk.
It was like she had planned it.
Abandoning his original quest, Mr. Gumbs sat down, opened the first file and started to read. And for four and a half hours, he didn’t stop. When he closed the last one, he saw his mother and her legacy in a new light, her many accomplishments — a handful of which he never knew about — shining bright.
In those hours, he had come as close as he ever would to talking to her again.
Harriett Crippen Brown Gumbs, the matriarch and oldest female of the Shinnecock Indian Nation — a woman who lived her life as an educator, activist, feminist and historian — died on November 25 of natural causes. She was 99.
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For nearly two decades, St. John’s Episcopal Church in Southampton had never once locked its doors, keeping them open for rest, prayer, solace and peace 24 hours a day, seven days a week — with no exceptions.
It was a tradition born from the devastation of September 11, 2001, a time when religious, spiritual and agnostic individuals alike needed guidance, or simply a place to go, following the terrorist attack on New York City that day, just 90 miles away.
Weighed down by uncertainty and fear, parishioners sought a similar degree of comfort when the COVID-19 outbreak reached the East End this past March. Some turned to their houses of worship as beacons of hope — and, in the case of St. John’s, knew the doors would always be open.
Until they weren’t.
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When Darby Duffin and Adam Jones set out to make their first documentary in 2013, they had no choice but to go big. It’s what the story deserved.
Over the next six years, their journey took them cross-country and overseas. They accrued nearly 400 hours of footage and earned the trust of tight-knit communities up and down the New England coast, compiling nearly six-dozen interviews with men and women who bear their souls to the camera — detailing how they’ve put their lives on the line to feed their friends and family.
For fishermen in the United States, this is the reality of the wild fishery collapse — where only five species make up over 85 percent of the American seafood diet, and 91 percent of the country’s inventory is imported. That is six billion pounds of fish — a staggering number made more offensive by the fact that some of that seafood is caught in the U.S., shipped to Asia for processing and then imported back, just to save a buck.
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On the wall of Sam Pollard’s childhood home, there hung three portraits — Jesus Christ, President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — their gazes constant and presence ever-felt as the young man navigated life in East Harlem.
They were his heroes. They could do no wrong. But as he grew up and into his career — now as an Emmy Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated filmmaker — Pollard knows better.
He sees them as the complicated men that they were, particularly the latter since making his latest documentary, “MLK/FBI,” the first to uncover the extent of the bureau’s deeply questionable monitoring and harassment of King and his closest confidants, which will open the virtual Hamptons Doc Fest on Friday, December 4, ahead of its official release by IFC Films on January 15.
Despite what the infamous surveillance and newly declassified files uncovered, Pollard’s opinion of the civil rights activist hasn’t changed one bit, he explained during a Zoom call last week. But his own responsibility to cover the movement — past, present and future — certainly has.
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Penny Wright never imagined this day would come.
For nearly three decades, the director of adult programs at the Rogers Memorial Library devoted her life to the Southampton community, piecing together a prolific range of classes, lectures, concerts and more that scintillated the mind, body and spirit, even in the darkest of days.
But recent events have snapped her own life into focus, Ms. Wright explained last week from her apartment in the village, where she has worked remotely since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. What she realized she was missing was time — time to cook, bake, walk and organize, visit with her friends and family, and simply relax.
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By age 15, Josh Franklin had mastered truth by omission.
The scene unfolded every night around the dinner table in New York, his family’s focal point for catching up. “How was your day, guys?” his mother would ask him and his older brother. “What’d you do today?”
“Oh, nothin’,” the younger sibling would typically mumble — his predictable teen angst masking a secret no one knew, other than the crew who was in on it, too.
“I didn’t even share it with them, with my family,” Franklin, now 53, recalled nearly four decades later from his home in Brooklyn. “It was really for me and for us.”
Little did his mother and brother know, he had worked his way into an underground movement, one that lurked in the shadows, anonymous to the world — defined by breaking and entering, stealing, vandalism and, above all, creating masterpieces.
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As the last days of summer beckoned crisp Autumn, Ken Jurow immersed himself in his Aquebogue fields, his hands gingerly picking mature hemp flowers, his eyes toward the skies.
One bad hurricane could destroy it all — 12 acres of his first-ever cannabis crop, the future product line to come from it, the realization of a longtime dream.
It was a race against time. But the master grower had science, and family, on his side.
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