The film festival opens here tonight with a screening and party. Lenny Gail, an old college friend, and his family will arrive tomorrow to take in an impressive number of films with a little lunch and dinner squeezed in somehow.

Lenny is the organized type. His list of what the family is seeing and when is something to admire. I’m more the type who waits for recommendations then tries to find the time.

Last year, I was asked to be on the documentary jury, which meant watching something on the order of 20 short and longer films. Armed with an all-access pass, I saw the ones I was supposed to, and darted in and out of another half-dozen as well. What with a houseful of kids and work and everything else, I am not much of a moviegoer, so the festival allowed me to get in a year’s worth in the space of a few days.

A couple of friends and people we know casually here have films they were involved with in the festival this year. This adds to the complications, obviously, as Lenny and company have their own itinerary. Then there is my own preference for serious foreign-language films, which is a little at odds with my wife’s, Lisa’s, taste.

Some advice: With so many films to choose from, not all seats at all screenings will have filled up. The Star of Sept. 24 included a printed festival program, which can be picked up in shops around town and in Southampton or downloaded from our website. The box office is on Main Street, more or less across from the movie theater, and is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

A “rush” line forms 45 minutes before screenings, and remaining seats will be sold, one per customer, as they are available.

Hope to see you there.

When the Republican  candidates began to talk the other night about sending in the Sixth Fleet, strangling Putin, strong-arming China, and bringing Mexico’s bordercrossing legions to heel, I walked down the hall to see on our other TV the Pirates-Cubs game, which was such a nail-biter that, inspired by the debaters, I prayed Zeus would hurl a thunderbolt at Jake Arrieta. “I’ve got to stop this — it’s a terrible addiction,” I said to Mary the next morning. “No, it’s not drinking, it’s the staying up to all hours watching the Pirates play. They loaded the bases in the eighth, there was one out, and then...Idon’tknow . . . everything unraveled . . . arrrggghh.”

She wasn’t hearing any of it. How could she, tending as she was her hair with a dryer shaped like one of those creatures from the Burgess Shale.

Joe Zucker, a lifelong Cubs fan, thinks it will come down to a onegame wild card play-in at Wrigley. Neither of us — the Pirates always lost when I was growing up in Pittsburgh, and the Cubs never won, but who cared — is used to this Empyrean sphere, one in which Yankee fans have lolled about for years.

“What will be will be,” I say to myself. Though I can’t let it be.

Someone will save us, McCutchen perhaps, it is usually he, or Kang, or Polanco, or Marte, or even Sean Rodriguez (who looks more like a pirate than anyone). I can’t watch, I must watch.

It’s the same with the Steelers. And the other night they were both playing at the same time, which meant I was running up and down the hall, from one TV to the other, only to be doubly eviscerated at the end. I left Pittsburgh so long ago, but it — whatever that is, the trees, the buckeyes, the stogies, plaid-lined jeans, the Red American Flyer, Isaly’s iconic conical ice cream scoops, pistachio being my favorite, and the cigar smoke that wreathed Forbes Field on game day — has not left me.

Most of us who live and work out here often find ourselves in close proximity to celebrities. They dine in our restaurants, shop in our stores, and even run lemonade stands with their children.

Over the summer we had Jimmy Fallon, Bono, Julianne Moore, Jennifer Lawrence, Amy Schumer, multiple newscasters, Liev Schreiber, Chelsea Clinton, Chris Martin of Coldplay surfing at Ditch, and Scarlett Johansson. I know this because my three college-educated children work in local restaurants.

Seeing them off the glossy pages of magazines and the big screen makes you realize that they really are just like us, only a bit more uncomfortable in public. I often wonder if making the big bucks is worth it. Scarlett Johansson was so uncomfortable walking into a restaurant that she held her head down and kept trying to cover her face with her hair, which is really too short these days to accomplish that.

I’m not much of a celebrity worshipper but I would like to meet Dominic West and Ruth Wilson, who play Noah and Alison in “The Affair” on Showtime, which is supposedly set in Montauk. I gave it my best try as we were working on a piece about it, but their public relations people ignored my requests for a picture. And when they filmed out here earlier this summer, the security around the set was so tight that you would have thought the president was in town.

Before the series began its first season last fall, television critics from several publications wrote that Montauk was the real star of the series. Problem with that is that most of it wasn’t even filmed in Montauk. It made me realize that editing is an amazing thing. In the series, the Montauk Lighthouse would show up in the weirdest of places, and the house that Alison lived in, which she said was just over the dune at Ditch Plain, was actually in Amagansett.

I’m not being politically biased here, but my favorite brush with celebrity was when I met Hillary Clinton. She was in Montauk to meet with fishermen and discuss federal regulations that they felt were unfair. She visited the Montauk Lighthouse and the Coast Guard Station on Star Island, and everywhere she went crowds formed.

Later that day I was dining at Gosman’s with my family, including my 89year-old mother, who enjoyed a good martini before dinner. Mrs. Clinton was also eating there with the fishermen, all of whom I knew. An owner of Gosman’s asked her if I could take a picture for the paper, and she agreed. But it was her departure that caused a stir among other diners, who surrounded her to shake her hand and ask to take photos with her, which she graciously agreed to.

Our table was nearby, so when I said goodbye to her I asked if she wouldn’t mind just saying hello to my mom, who was too old to walk over to her. Her aides and Secret Service people went into a tizzy, but she ignored them and followed me to our table. She held both my mother’s hands in hers, said how nice it was too meet her, and then posed for a picture.

My mother was nice to everyone we introduced her to, so she smiled and exchanged a few words with her before Hillary’s people shuffled her away. After they left the restaurant, the rest of us were saying how cool it was that she did that. Sensing something exciting had just happened, my mother, already on her second martini, lipstick a bit smeared, her ever-present wiglet slightly askew, turned to me and said, “Who was that, Jan?”

Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The East Hampton Star.

Salem witch trials. During the dark days of the Red Scare, in the 1950s, Arthur Miller wrote his fictionalized account, “The Crucible,” about them, and the city of Salem, in Massachusetts, recounts the terrible story in museums and in a “Witch Village.” The Salem trials took place in 1692. Nineteen people were hanged, one pressed to death, and four died in prison. You can’t visit Salem without being confronted by what the law-abiding citizens thought and did.

Not everyone who lives in or visits East Hampton, however, knows that we had our own accused witch. After a trial in Connecticut — which was the colonial-government seat for the settlers of eastern Long Island, much closer by water than New York City — she was acquitted of having caused a death by witchcraft and advised to return home and live peaceably. 

Her name was Elizabeth Garlick, and three East Hampton residents want to make sure her travails are not forgotten. Hugh King, Loretta Orion, and Aimee Webb, who hope to write a book about Goody Garlick, were the moving forces behind a conference about her, which the East Hampton Historical Society held on Saturday. 

Of course, in my line of work and because I’ve lived here as long as I have, I had heard of Goody Garlick. I even named a dog Goody in her honor. But I was intrigued by what might come out at the conference and decided to attend.

Goody Garlick was tried in 1657, 35 years before the Salem hysteria. The conference presenters, in addition to Mr. King and Ms. Webb, were Daniel Cohen of East Hampton, who seems to have read the entire first volume of the town records, which cover the years between 1639 and 1679–80, and Walter Woodward, a professor at the University of Connecticut, the state historian, and the author of a book about John Winthrop Jr. It was Winthrop who sagely ruled there was not enough evidence to convict East Hampton’s supposed witch.

It’s hard to imagine that everyone in the Old and New Worlds in the 17th century believed in magic, but a mix of science, religion, and magic was the prevailing way of explaining the world. Even Winthrop, an educated and compassionate man who was actually asked by the people of Connecticut to be governor, was an alchemist. Think of that!  

Daniel Cohen hasn’t lived in East Hampton all that long, but no one can accuse him of being a know-nothing “from away.” I dare say Mr. Cohen is as knowlegable as any bona fide Bonacker about East Hampton’s earliest days. He was the first to speak at the conference, describing what set the stage for an innocent woman to be accused of witchcraft. He summarized East Hampton society as “disciplined, exclusive, and male-dominated” — no surprise, but, of course, the devil is in the details.

 The town meetings in those days had what might be called universal jurisdiction. Women were outside the circle of men, who decided everything. (They even legislated against cutting grass on the dunes.)

Mr. Woodward’s talk was centered on the philosophy of the time, describing the culture’s misogyny, which made it easy for elderly, poor women to be tried as witches. Even highly educated men were terrified, he said, of powers they could not see, powers attributed to Satanic magic. 

Goody Garlick was the first accused witch to be spared death in Connecticut, and no one was executed in that state after 1662. Salem, on the other hand, suffered from what Mr. Woodward called community pathology. Presumably, it didn’t have a John Winthrop on hand to impose some measure of reason.  

At one point in the program, Mr. Woodward showed slides of horrific torture devices, including one, a chair, for primitive waterboarding. One could make a comparison to more recent uses of waterboarding, and modern-day circles of exclusion and power, but I will leave it to readers to flesh out that analogy.

October is here, and instead of framing Goody Garlick in the context of American traditions of torture, it would be much more fun to remember her come Halloween time. Perhaps we’ll see a few Goody Garlicks trick-or-treating along Cooper Lane this year. Halloween, after all, is about assimilating and making palatable things that otherwise would be pure horror.

About a year ago I briefly had  an idea that I would like to lease a new Volkswagen TDI, one of the models now at the center of a massive fraud scandal. I decided against it, opting instead for a Chevrolet Volt.

Volt drivers, the dealer told me when I was first looking at the car, are a kind of cult. Nearly 12 months into the three-year lease I signed, I know what he meant and might add that we are a smug cult now that Volkswagen has been found cheating on emissions tests.

According to the Sierra Club, whether an electric car produces less climate change pollution than other cars depends on where you plug in. If your area’s electricity comes from a lot of coal-burning plants, your  electric car may be no better than a conventional one when it comes to the amount of CO2 produced.

Where all the power comes from on Long Island varies as PSEG contracts shift, but federal figures for New York and the neighboring states are pretty good, with generally less than 3 percent of net electricity generation from coal. The other top sources are, in order, natural gas, nuclear, and hydroelectric. By the way, solar and other renewables come in at less than 4 percent in New York, according to the Energy Information Administration. Considering the power supply, on balance, my Volt is doing well for the planet.

Chevy Volts and vehicles like it are not purely electric; a small generator kicks in when the battery is depleted, which in my case is after about 45 miles in warm weather. Having taken a few trips in the Volt, I have dipped into the fuel tank a few times, but even when I have this added up to only 120 miles per gallon for the 14,000 or so I’ve put on the car so far.

During the last 12 months, I used just over 100 gallons of gas in the Volt; had I leased the Volkswagen Jetta wagon I had my eye on, I would have been in for almost five times that much by now. Plus there’s the bonus of all that nice smugness. I’m sure I can squeeze a few more miles out of that.

“‘Rose, pure contradiction,joy...’”I began as Mary looked up from her porch chair on the afternoon of Tuesday, Sept. 15.

“That’s from Rilke’s headstone.” “...‘To be...sleep....’ Ican’t remember . . . ‘to be...nobody’s sleep. . . .’ ” “You’re right about that,” she said, brightening. “Nobody slept last night — we were all worrying about Johnna.”

Later that night, at around 9, the parturition news was imparted from California, to wit, that our grand- daughter, our eighth grandchild, had, at last, arrived.

And, of course, we all want to know the name.

Even before the mother began pushing, I was pushing for Mary, or at least a name with Mary in it. Their surname being Norris, I thought Marianna would be nice. Marianna Norris would go trippingly on the tongue, I thought. But, as  I’ve been told many times before it’s not about me. It’s about them and what they want. And, besides, there are so many people to please and it is their baby after all.

“I remember being so grateful after Johnna and Georgie were born that it was all over,” Mary said. “But then I realized: It’s just begun!”

We’re all flying blind here, and, unlike the bat I wrote about last week, we don’t have sonar. We bump about.

But there’s the rose and there’s joy, and who could sleep under that many eyelids? The baby, I’ll bet. And presumably the mother and father too.

Pretty heady stuff those exit lines of the poet’s. And so was this entrance, with everyone waiting, waiting.

So, I’ll be exchanging the rah-rah- ing for ahh-aah-ing these next two weeks.

And wait impatiently for the time when she hits her first tennis ball.

Last week my broken dishwasher committed suicide.

Yes, I was home at the time. No, I was not in the kitchen.

I had come home around 7 p.m., read the mail in the kitchen as I fed the cat dinner, and headed upstairs to look at emails and sort pictures in my office.

An hour or so later I noticed my eyes were scratchy and there was an acrid odor of smoke in the air. My house is by the train tracks and if the wind is blowing a certain way there is kind of a train smell, which we “trackers” ignore. But this was making my eyes tear a bit so I went downstairs and opened an outside door to sniff the breeze. I still smelled it, so I called my closest neighbors and left a message: “Do you smell something smoky?”

Then I went into the kitchen.

I was just sort of taking inventory as the smoke detectors were not whooping and the cat was just being a cat. However, the dishwasher, which had totally stopped working six weeks previous, was spewing stinky smoke and its little “on” light was shining green.

I called the fire department.

“No hook and ladder,” I said. “It’s electrical and I am looking at it.” I could hear the fire alarm before I hung up the phone. I live in town and could hear the firemen coming from Cedar Street 30 seconds later. I opened the doors and turned on the outside lights.

My neighbors had heard my phone message and they arrived as the firemen did — very quickly. Within two minutes of my call there were about eight wonderful firemen in full gear in my not- that-big kitchen. Bravo, guys!

By this time the green light (which I had not touched for six weeks) had gone out and, while it was stinky, there was

no smoke spewing and no actual firefighting to be done. Some of the guys set about opening every door and window to air the place out (did I mention it was stinky?), and one limber fella got on the floor to make it so the dishwasher could be pulled out.

They were all sure I had done something and I swore up and down that I had not. A moment later the dishwasher relit its little green light and spontaneously began to once again spew smoke. Well, that got everybody’s attention and the electricity to the house was turned off and flashlights were turned on. More windows were opened and fans were found.

They really had thought I was a crazy lady who didn’t remember turning on her broken-for-six-weeks dishwasher! Ha!

In the dark, with flashlights playing on the soon-to-be-murdered appliance, I explained, again, that it was a 15-year- old dishwasher and that it had stopped working (full of dishes, of course) in the middle of August. I told them that after having a mini tantrum and determining with a neighbor that it did in fact not work, I ordered another one for delivery in October, when I knew I would have an open day to take it, re-learned how to wash dishes by hand, and forgot about the dishwasher . . . until the night it decided to commit suicide. Twice. Once for me and once for the firemen.

It was a horrible disaster averted. I could have been asleep (don’t want to think about it) or gone to the movies or been away (don’t even want to contemplate it).

Finally the fire gentlemen dragged the dishwasher, now totally disconnected, out to the front yard, where it sits waiting for the appliance giant to take it away when the new one is delivered next week.

I should mention here that the totally functioning smoke alarms did not go off during this entire adventure. The fire- folk thought maybe I hadn’t changed the batteries or had disconnected the smoke alarms or done something else dumb, but our kindly judge-fireman checked every single one of them and the batteries were all connected and the smoke alarms worked when prompted, but they were not in the kitchen. One is now.

So what saved it all? My nose, my teary eyes, and the lovely men of the fire department!

What did I learn?

When an electronic thing breaks — hair drier, waterpick, fridge, or dish- washer — unplug it. How do you unplug a dishwasher? I have no idea, but I won’t ever leave a broken one plugged in for six weeks, that’s for sure.

Thanks to the neighbor King family and thanks to the gents of the East Hampton Fire Department. I knew you were cool, now I am telling the world.

Durell Godfrey is a contributing photographer for The Star.

A thick wool outdoorsman’s sweater made by Barbour of England — a gift from a family member who visited Great Britain a lot around the year 2000 and 2001 — has been my husband’s favorite for years. So as his birthday approached a few weeks ago, I decided to buy him another in a different color. A simple task given the simplicity of Internet shopping, right?

I first checked out the online shops of likely men’s outfitters and department stores — Brooks Brothers, J. Press, L.L. Bean, Saks Fifth Avenue — but had no luck. Lots of Barbour sweaters were available, but they either had faux-leather elbow patches (not quite my husband’s thing) or decorative stripes (even less his thing).

Eventually, however, I found a legitimate-looking website heralded with what looked like an official seal, complete with olive branches and a British Union Jack shield at center. At bottom, the site read: “Copyright @ Barbour UK.” The price in pounds was reasonable, and there would be free shipping.

His birthday, however, came and went with no sign of the sweater. Imagining that shipping from overseas was at fault, I sent a polite email to what I thought was a legitimate company, asking whether the sweater was on its way and when I could expect it to arrive. Getting no response, I sent another, which was a little less friendly. I had, of course, charged the sweater on a credit card and was beginning to smell a rat. Sure enough, returning to the website, I found that I had not studied the fine print.

It turned out that my credit cardinformation had been sent to outletonlinestoremy@gmail and that it had a URL reading “Fairwaydenver.com.” Back at Google, it appeared that I had been had. Red flags about Fairwaydenver.com were everywhere. The first scam-alert page I came to warned: “It could be unsecure: malware, phishing, fraud, and spam reports.” At the bottom of that page was a list of information, including an owner’s name (Hdam Yindrik) and country (Slovenia). “This website setup involves countries known to be high risk high percentage of online fraud or tendency to send fake/replica items.”

But wait! Another website-report page came up calling Tu Xiaofen the owner and Fuzhou, People’s Republic of China, the place of origin.

Hm. Curious, I searched further, clicking on ScamAdviser.com. A long list of websites this site had investigated came up. . . . Further and further I went until I came across the following oddly worded advice:

“Do not use them, you are helping a scam to promote their site on search engine and damage other sites reputation. You might said they can spot out a scam, nope, that was a known scam that can be found somewhere on the web. If that was not, they will say ‘xx%’ likely a scam. Everyone can tell this story, not only them. Wake up, don’t believe this scam and help them fooling around.”

I really don’t know at this point if the original retailer is a scam website or if the scam-alert websites are the scam. But the good news is that as far as I know my credit card company either did not receive a charge for the sweater or knew better than to accept it. Still, it’s a hassle and I guess I will have to spend a few minutes this morning putting a block on the card.

Is there a moral to this story? Not really. My husband’s birthday is now a month past, but I have looked around and found a source for the genuine Barbour article in Michigan.

Abby Jane Brody, The Star’s gardening columnist, came into the upstairs office this week and told us about a horde of beetles that had descended on the milkweed in the native plant garden at Clinton Academy, next door. Milkweed borers, she said, make their living on the plants that give them their name, poking a hole in the stalks to lay their eggs. The adults, as I saw when I went outside to have a look, feast on the leaves and seedpods.

Milkweed is a key source of food for monarch butterflies, which, like the beetles, are an eye-catching orange and black. Abby Jane said she had seen few to no monarchs in the garden this year. This was not the story Sunday at Atlantic Avenue Beach in Amagansett, where I went with two of my kids and some old friends and newer acquaintances for a late summer afternoon swim.

The wind was moderately strong, coming from the northwest, and one after another, monarchs came along the beach. They were flying sideways, with their heads pointed into the wind, as many as one every minute or two at times. Dragonflies seemed to accompany them, though moving more deliberately and in greater numbers. It made a pleasing spectacle, a daytime analogue for a meteor shower perhaps in the way we waited for one to appear and then loudly announced its arrival.

For our son, Ellis, who is 5, the urge to chase the monarchs and follow their wobbling paths to the west was too strong. He paid no mind to his older sister as she yelled that he should leave them alone. But try as he did, he was not able to put his hands on one.

Abby Jane was relieved to hearabout our beach sightings of monarchs. There have been reports in the news that their numbers are threatened. She suggested that I take some milkweed pods home to seed a patch of our own. She also said I should catch one of the beetles to show the kids, which I did; they were briefly impressed.

It had been a weekend for monarch sightings. On Saturday, I was among a small group who buried a box of Deborah Ann Light’s ashes at the foot of a pin oak on the Quail Hill preserve in Amagansett. There is plenty of milkweed there on the slope of a small field otherwise at rest. As each of us took a turn placing a white rose on Deborah’s box, and then shoveling it over with earth, a monarch flitted over and back.

It is remarkable that these small, fragile insects can get much of anywhere, flying astride the wind in their deceptively purposeless way, up and down, jogging back and then forward again. And yet they do. Almost as soon as one appeared over us as we went solemnly about our work, it was gone, riding sideways on the wind toward some destination we could only guess.

I don’t know if it’s that I’m finally getting it, but I’ve begun to feel more akin to nature, which, yes, includes rats and bats, and, of course, those wonderful languorous slugs about whose lovemaking I wrote a few weeks past.

Two days ago, I found on opening the refrigerator a bug upended and stuck near the bottom of the peanut butter jar, and gently lifted him free and set him down on one of the deck’s steps and watched intently as he rubbed his forelegs together and arched his wings closely behind him, much as I do on the exercise ball at East End Physical Therapy. And while I compress my shoulder blades so that I can stand up straight, he did it to get unstuck.

He had a round green head, and looked worried, and I wondered if he were frying in the sun, suffering because of my beneficence. I looked away for a moment, and then back, in time to see him take off with a whirr, and I felt good about that.

Last night, I was nearing the end of a biography of Rilke when black wings darted into the room. It was a bat. As fearful as he, I went to tell Mary, who shut all the doors she could while opening the kitchen slider, and some time later, on investigating, I saw him, still, on one of the beams, shined a light to show her, and then we turned the lights out, trusting he’d find his way back outside at some point.

He was still there this morning, curled into a ball. I nudged him with a broom and he circled madly about before zigzagging full speed into the out of doors.

Rilke thought bats had it even worse than us, being half-bird, half-mammal, and not knowing what the hell to make of it.

Baring one of my fangs, I asked Mary if bats bit. She said no, which was reassuring.

I generally go to her whenever I have a question of a scientific kind. Though this morning when I’d asked her how many centimeters one needed to be dilated in order to give birth, she said she didn’t remember.

Well, it’s 10. I just looked it up on the Internet.

Everyone’s waiting. . . .