Midsummer Madness

Kerry, Mike, Fiona and Lisa O’Malley at the opening night of Twelfth Night.

If music be the food of love, then Commonwealth Shakespeare Company played beautifully this summer, because everyone seemed to love its production of Twelfth Night.

Opening night began with drinks and light nibbles at the Parkman House (the city-owned mansion on Beacon Hill), and the crowd included Hollywood homey Mike O’Malley, whose sister Kerry played a hilariously sexy Olivia, along with his wife, Lisa, and their daughter, Fiona, snappy, crackling Pops conductor Keith Lockhart and his crackerjack wife, Emiley, achingly beautiful jewelry designer April Soderstrom, Scandinavian sex bomb Anja Kola and her lucky husband, Kier McDonough (aka Kiefer McDougall), quister mush William Grote, hedge-fund hottie Dennis Hong and the irresistible Rob Hagan, New England Conservatory rainmaker Janet Goff, stage legend Will Lyman, the ubiquitous Janet Wu, Babson grand poobah Kerry Healey, fundraising guru Jane Lewis, arts booster Joan Moynagh, dangerously fashionable duo Suhail Kwatra and Amber D’Amelio, Mullen Mad Man John Wolfarth and his handsome husband, Kevin Powers, ICA factotum Kate Shamon and her sexy cue ball, Andy Rushford, UK Consul General Susie Kitchens and her son, Tyson, attorney at-large Tad Heuer, beauty queen Ashley Karger and one unfortunate person who got chicken satay on his shoes (namely me).

After sipping and kibitzing, everyone crossed Beacon Street onto the Common to take their seats for the production, which was wet-your-pants funny. (Fortunately there were porta-potties.) A cast party followed at Carrie Nation, where the bartenders got a good workout and the guests could mingle with the likes of former Salon Mario Russo imp turned superstar Conner Christiansen, who stole the show as Sir Andrew Aguecheek.

In keeping with the family-friendly nature of the event, the evening’s funniest remarks were family-related: Speaking to a pregnant friend, one guest said, “Do you know the sex? Because boys are more of a pain in the ass, but girls are more expensive.” Meanwhile, a mother of two little ones said, “It’s not a vacation if you have your kids with you; it’s just a change of venue.”

Middle-Aged Ladies Say the Darndest Things

The audience at the Mentors Muster

On Martha’s Vineyard, there’s rarely a night when some member of the Taylor clan isn’t singing somewhere, but it was an especially beautiful setting when Partners for Youth with Disabilities hosted The Mentors Muster—a fundraiser featuring a performance by Sally Taylor and Something Underground at the Gannon and Benjamin shipyard on Vineyard Haven Harbor.

While the audience sipped wine and listened to JT and Carly Simon’s fantastically talented progeny perform with her Colorado compadres Josh and Seth Larson, children swung out into the water on a swing rigged to the boom of a sailboat, making for a backdrop straight out of a Ralph Lauren ad.

Present and accounted for: ethereal scenester Kristina Lyons and her king of the jungle, Patrick, gorgeous blond earth mother Julie Sennott and her unruly brood, prominent artist Alison Shaw, debonair do-gooder Jeremy Flug, Taylor’s husband, reformed male model Dean Bragonier, soon-to-be Bostonians Betsy and Todd Bowden, and a slew of deeply tanned, good-looking people.

The evening’s most amusing exchange: One attendee said, “I had brain surgery last summer,” to which another responded, “It looks like it worked.”

However, the award for most family-unfriendly remark goes to the woman who ran into a college classmate she hadn’t seen in 30 years and said, almost immediately, “You took me to my first gay bar, and we did poppers!”