Briefly

Volunteer vacations can have a payoff

St. Paul, Minn. — Spend your vacation volunteering and you may be able to deduct part of it from your taxes.

The St. Paul-based Global Volunteers organizes one- to three-week programs in which participants immerse themselves in another culture while helping with a local project. Volunteering opportunities include caring for at-risk babies in a clinic in Romania, teaching English in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta and working in a coastal fishing village in Ghana.

Global Volunteers was recommended in a recent issue of the “TravelSmart” newsletter, which said all program-related costs for the trips, including airfare, were tax-deductible for U.S. taxpayers.

Fees for the programs range from $2,000 to $3,000 and cover food, lodging, ground transportation and necessary project materials; airfare is not included in the program’s price.

The programs are offered in 19 countries around the world, including the United States.

For more information, call (800) 487-1074 or visit www.globalvolunteers.org.

Music lovers can visit graveyard shrines

New York — Most rock ‘n’ roll fans know that the Doors’ Jim Morrison is buried in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

But did you know that Leo Fender — of Fender guitars — is buried in the Fairhaven Memorial Park in Santa Ana, Calif.? Or that Duke Ellington was laid to rest in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx?

The second edition of “The Tombstone Tourist,” by Scott Stanton (Pocket Books, $15) is a music lover’s guide to gravestones and shrines from Graceland to the Mount Zion Cemetery in Lyndhurst, N.J. That’s where Jeff Hyman — better known as punk-rocker Joey Ramone — was buried in 2001 after dying at age 49 from cancer.

The book is full of trivia about your favorite long-gone singers, from the sometimes tragic and sordid ways in which they died, to entertaining anecdotes about how they became famous.

Don’t worry about finding your way to that certain headstone once you get to the right cemetery; the book carefully describes the location of every music star’s grave that it mentions.