Keri Russell | Shane Deary | Massachusetts island | carpenter and an amateur surfer

A Cover Girl's Gorgeous Getaway

by Mark Seal

Keri Russell has one very good reason to love Martha's Vineyard, the roughly 100-square-mile Massachusetts island that serves as a getaway for dozens of America's rich and famous. Her reason has nothing to do with the beautiful fall foliage or the cool summer nights or the tony company or the relative proximity of the Vineyard to her New York home. Oh, she likes all of that. But there's something else to it for the 31-year-old former star of television's Felicity, who now makes her living as a spokeswoman for CoverGirl and with roles in such films as andWaitressAugust Rush, a drama out this month in which she costars with Jonathan Rhys Meyers. The reason she loves Martha's Vineyard is actually much more poetic than falling leaves or summer breezes. You see, the first time Russell visited the island, she was in the company of a man who grew up there and whose parents still live there. She fell in love with that man - a carpenter and an amateur surfer named Shane Deary. In fact, his connection to the Vineyard was one of the things that first attracted her to him. "We met through friends," Russell recalls. "I'd been single for quite a long time, and he was, honestly, one of the first guys I met that I thought, He is so cute! I immediately went outside [after meeting him] and texted my girlfriends and said, 'There is such a cute guy here, oh my gosh. And he's a surfer from Martha's Vineyard!'?"