Paying It Forward With a Bang

When the Great Bonac Fireworks show, a national-class Grucci Fireworks midsummer display, begins sparkling over Three Mile Harbor on Saturday night, Laura Sobieski will have a front-row seat.

Ms. Sobieski, a resident of Brooklyn who will head east for her first visit to East Hampton tomorrow, will be spending the weekend, gratis, at a harbor-front residence on Babe’s Lane, the guest of the homeowner, Chris Rowan, who rents out a room in her house on summer weekends through the online short-term rental company Airbnb.

Inspired by a program last year through which Airbnb sent $10 to those who have listings on the site, asking them to “pay it forward” and donate it or use it to do a good deed, Ms. Rowan decided to go several steps further. She decided to offer two nights’ lodging on a prime July weekend — perhaps the prime summer weekend at her house, given its perfect location for viewing the fireworks display — to someone who could use a break.

Ms. Sobieski is an acquaintance, Ms. Rowan said this week, and had been struggling with the effects of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. “She’s been through it, and through it all she’s had a wonderful attitude,” Ms. Rowan said.

While Ms. Sobieski will be the fireworks weekend guest this year, Ms. Rowan said that, to continue the tradition in future summers, she will allow anyone who books a stay with her before Memorial Day to suggest the next recipient of her “random act of kindness” — someone, perhaps, who has had a loss in the family, is undergoing financial hardships, or has been ill. One person will be chosen, “and we’ll invite them to come,” Ms. Rowan said.

“It doesn’t cost us anything; we don’t make the money, but it doesn’t cost us anything,” she said. “It gives somebody a chance to get away from the madness of their lives.”

“That’s the idea — pay it forward,” she said. However, there is a catch: each guest will be asked to help with another good deed while they’re here — helping to raise money for the Clamshell Foundation, an East Hampton nonprofit that sponsors the fireworks and makes grants to support various community programs.

Each year, the Clamshell Foundation scrambles to raise the money to pay for the popular fireworks show, a summer tradition it took over seven years ago after the closing and sale of the Boys Harbor camp, for which the show had long been a main fund-raising event.

Donations are collected through the Clamshell Foundation website, clamshellfoundation.org, and by selling caps and T-shirts, with new designs annually by noted local artists. Seafaring volunteers in boats visit the watercraft that crowd Three Mile Harbor for the fireworks show to make sales and solicit support.

“It’s all about raising money for different programs here in town,” Rossetti Perchik, the foundation’s founder, said this week. “So make those donations.”

In addition to the fireworks show, which marks its 35th anniversary this year, Clamshell sponsors an annual sand castle contest at Atlantic Beach in Amagansett in August. Proceeds are used to help stock local food pantries, support environmental efforts, arts programs, and youth activities, and to give annual scholarship awards to high school graduates.

(This year’s Great Bonac Fireworks T-shirt design is by John Jinks. David Geiser did the sand castle T-shirt design — “two of the most dynamic” images, Mr. Perchik said, since the sand castle event began in 1992.)

Ms. Sobieski didn’t know it yet when she spoke to The Star by phone earlier this week, but arrangements have been made to get her out on the water on Saturday night — an even better spot from which to watch the fireworks, and where she can help collect Clamshell Foundation donations.

With Ms. Rowan and others, she will be a guest on a boat belonging to Dr. Mike Antonelle, another resident of Springs who raised over $1,100 last year during the fireworks.

“It’s like one big circle kind of thing,” Ms. Rowan said of spreading the good works around.

Ms. Sobieski said she had received the invitation to come to East Hampton back in February — Ms. Rowan made “a very cute little invitation,” she said — but that she wasn’t certain that her health would allow her to come. But her doctor gave her the all-clear. “It’s nice to be back to normal, to be able to come to an event like this weekend . . . to be with people,” she said. “It’s been a pretty crazy couple of years.”

After her diagnosis and a stem cell transplant, Ms. Sobieski went into remission only to learn later that her cancer had returned. She had to be treated again. It is now being monitored, she said, and is not expected to recur.

Through it all, she said, “it was amazing, the generosity that you find in people. As terrible of a situation that it is, the amount of people that supported me was more than I would have imagined.”

That in itself inspired her to continue efforts she had already been making on behalf of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, and others with whom she worked did so as well.

“One of my things is to participate in whatever I can to help someone else out,” she said. On Saturday, hopefully while enjoying herself, she will have an opportunity to do just that, having a hand in helping to engender whatever community assistance the Clamshell Foundation will provide in the coming year.

The fireworks will go off just after dark, around 9 p.m. Prime viewing spots can be found all around Three Mile Harbor.

A soundtrack will be simulcast on the Peconic Public Broadcasting station, 88.3 FM WPPB.The music accompanying the fireworks show can also be heard through a new Fireworks by Grucci app, Mr. Perchik said. It is available as a free download for both iPhones and Android phones from the iTunes store, and from Google Play.