Whippoorwills were once common throughout the woods of Southampton and East Hampton, especially in Wainscott, which is the center of the South Fork’s oak and pitch pine forest.

The question that came to mind over and over again while watching “Maiden,” the first SummerDocs offering of the 2019 season, was “Can this really be 1989?” 

 “G.E. Smith’s Portraits,” now in its fourth iteration, was conceived in 2015 and produced by Taylor Barton as a series of intimate evenings featuring actors, painters, and fellow musicians. Its first concert of the year will feature Loudon Wainwright III and John Wesley Harding at Guild Hall.

The latest gallery arrival on Amagansett's Main Street is ARC Fine Art, an import from Connecticut with ties to the region. Adrienne Ruger Conzelman, its proprietor, has been coming to East Hampton for many years and showing art informally on the East End in pop-up spaces. She has decided to formalize that relationship.

There is a sense of tangible danger in recent years on the South Fork. This peril does not derive from a murder or a slew of rip currents, although those are sobering in their own right. This precariousness stems from a material loss that carries a metaphysical threat, a loss of identity.

Strawberry season this year has been wonderful despite the rain. So far I have sampled berries from Open Minded Organics in Bridgehampton (no spray!), Pike’s in Sagaponack, and from the Mattituck Strawberry Festival.

“One Night in Central Park,” a two-hour examination of the Central Park jogger, made extensive use of courtroom drawings by Marilyn Church, now they are in an opera about the case playing in Southern California.

“Safe Space,” a new play by Alan Fox having its world premiere at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor next week, explores the detonation of issues related to identity politics, racism, and political correctness on the campus of an elite American university.