Last summer a miracle occurred at the Hyatt Regency Lake Tahoe in Incline Village during a convention of librarians from Nevada, Nebraska, and the Dakotas The librarians were at dinner, and the miracle happened right after dessert.

Mark Twain came back to life.

He was suddenly standing there in the doorway, looking the way we always "remember" him in his white ice cream suit and a dark velvet bow at his throat, that outburst of gray-white hair, the brushy mustache and brows that bristle even when he smiles. He walked slowly to the microphone at the head of the room, and all conversation stopped as the librarians instinctively shushed themselves, already an eager audience. He began to speak, gently waving his big Honduran cigar like a wand.

"Seeing you here this evening, I am reminded that it was Benjamin Franklin who opened the first public library in the United States. That was in Philadelphia, in 1731.

"It was Benjamin Franklin who instructed us, in Poor Richard's Almanac, that 'Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.'
[Pause. . . .] "I don't see it."

All right, it wasn't really Mark Twain but an Incline Village man named McAvoy Layne, who has been performing this impersonation professionally since 1986. The miracle had actually begun an hour and a half earlier when Layne dressed himself in the white suit, sprayed his hair and mustache, and headed off to work.

The Missouri drawl continued: "I'm always pleased to be here at Lake Tahoe. My first visit was in 1861 - that's more than 130 years ago now. I was in the timber ranching business then, but I was not successful. But I did learn that three months of camp life at Lake Tahoe will restore an Egyptian mummy to its pristine vigor. Oh, I don't mean the oldest and driest of mummies, of course, but the fresher ones.

"I knew a man who came here to die, but he made a failure of it. He came here like a skeleton and within three months he was eating all he could hold, and chasing game up and down the 3,000-foot cliffs for recreation.

"This is not a fancy sketch I'm telling you, but the Truth - the Petrified Truth."

Layne first met Mark Twain where most of us did, at school, during his Northern California boyhood. But he didn't really get to know him until the winter of 1975. By that time Layne had been more or less educated at the University of Oregon, where he excelled at springboard diving. In his athletic enthusiasm he had attended the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, traveled on to teach school and coach basketball in Hong Kong, and finally settled into a life of pleasure and ease on Maui. He worked mornings as a disc jockey at KNUI and afternoons as the cross-country coach at Baldwin High School, where the athletes skip practice when the surf is up. His first true encounter with Twain came during a Lake Tahoe skiing vacation, when he became snowbound at Tahoma on the west shore for six days. To the eager athlete it seemed like six months.

"It snowed endlessly," he recalls. "At first I tried to keep the doorways shoveled out, but after the second day I gave up. I had food and firewood, so I was perfectly safe." As the snow drifted up over the doors and windows he started playing darts to work off nervous energy, "until my arm was stiff and my brain was soft."

When he finally sat down, Layne noticed two books on the coffee table. One of them was The Collected Works of Mark Twain. Layne picked it up and was immediately beguiled. He read nonstop until he had finished it, gathering in the process a glimmer of Twain's unique greatness.

"That's when the seed was planted in me," he says. "And if there was ever a great stroke of good luck in my life, it's that I didn't pick up the other book instead, which was William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich."

When he finally dug out from the Tahoe snowdrifts, Layne returned to Maui. "Twain said that the Sandwich Islands are a paradise for an indolent man, and they are. I spent 10 years there and never missed a single party. But I didn't want to be an indolent old man, and I began to realize it was time for me to leave."

On a later Tahoe ski vacation he met a man on a chairlift, and their conversation led to his becoming the morning disc jockey on KLKT at the north shore. Lake Tahoe was a second paradise for Layne. He skied through the winters and ran through the summers, and in 1986 he bought a tape recording of one of actor Hal Holbrook's famous Mark Twain performances to listen to while bicycling through Jack's Valley."

As he listened to Holbrook's recording, pedaling at 40 mph through Genoa and along the brushy foothills of the mighty Sierra, he thought, "Maybe I could do that."

From that day forward the former school teacher studied Mark Twain seriously. Day after day he read Twain, and hour after hour he rehearsed Twain. He made pilgrimages to the locales Twain had frequented from 1861, when he stepped out of a stage coach in Carson City, until 1864, when he departed Virginia City.

But it was a long time before he could bring himself to face an audience. "Even after I'd learned the material, so that I could articulate the master's words in a passable fashion, I was reluctant to stick my neck all the way out as a performer. That came when I finally spent $400 for a white suit. Josephine Baldazar made it for me in Carson City. Once I had that suit, there was no holding back.

"And still today, every time I put it on, I have the feeling that something good is going to happen."

Layne's first audiences were children, as he made volunteer appearances at Tahoe schools. His apprenticeship included gratis appearances at service-club luncheons and library events. Three years after the fateful bike ride a convention coordinator called to see if Layne would perform at a spouse's luncheon at the Hyatt Lake Tahoe - his first paying job.

In the process of learning his craft, he made two promises. He committed himself to presenting the entire Mark Twain, the social critic as well as the funny man. And he vowed to avoid the grueling three-hour makeup procedure that Holbrook followed.

Holbrook is a masterful actor who established a high standard for presenting Twain on stage. Layne treasures a note from him that says, "Keep the torch burning," but his approach to presenting Mark Twain is different. Holbrook performs Twain with compelling stagecraft, wafting a plume of cigar smoke out out ahead of him as he returns to the stage after intermission, for instance, and toying with a white linen handkerchief - folding it, unfolding it, tugging it, rolling and wadding it - while hypnotically droning on and on with the story of "Grandfather's Ram."

Of course, Layne knows a few tricks himself (although he doesn't light up the cigars he uses in his performances) but he's not really an actor. He's a self-taught scholar, impersonator, and professor of Twain.

"It's not an avocation that you choose. The person chooses you. I only do Twain," he says. "I'm never Stanley Kowalski, or Hamlet or Superman."

Layne has perfected a makeup process that takes just 30 seconds. He found a mail-order source in Hollywood for the bright-gray spray that colors his hair and mustache. The hair was easy, but the mustache was hard because of overspray. After considerable experimentation, he perfected the technique of pulling on a ski mask, poking his mustache through the mouth-hole, and spritzing away.

This makeup method led to some tense moments a couple of years ago when Layne returned to Hawaii to perform Twain's "Letters from the Sandwich Islands." He wore his white suit for the flight because he was to be greeted formally as a visiting dignitary upon arrival, and as the plane began its descent toward Honolulu, Layne went into a lavatory to get ready.

He sprayed his hair. Then he pulled the ski mask over his face and sprayed his mustache, which is when the smoke alarm went off.

So every eye on the plane was riveted to the restroom door when the flight attendant wrenched it open, revealing McAvoy standing there wearing his ski mask, spray can in hand. When he rushed out to explain, the airplane erupted in screams.

Through those beginning years Layne was careful to keep his day job, and he's still not entirely sure he'd ever have taken the plunge as a professional performer if there hadn't been a sudden change at KLKT. "They moved the station down to Reno, and they didn't invite me to go along," he explains. "Without their help I don't think I'd have had the courage to do it."

But he did do it, and as his reputation grew, the jobs materialized. He has performed in every conceivable venue, from Piper's Opera House in Virginia City to the Mills Park Pavilion and the Brewery Arts Center in Carson City. He has presented Twain in storefront theaters, saloons, meeting rooms, and stages at the casino hotels in Reno and Lake Tahoe, at schools and on street corners all around Nevada.

With no background in stagecraft he felt woefully out of place at Piper's Opera House in Virginia City when he performed there in the summer of 1988. "I wanted to make sure I could be heard, so of course I kept my volume up loud, and I moved right up to the lip of the stage. And I'd stand there teetering back and forth with my feet hanging off the edge, emoting like mad," he says. "Nobody could keep track of what I was saying because they were so certain I was going to fall into the orchestra pit."

Under the tutelage of Reno drama teacher Patricia Mathews he learned to walk, talk, and stand without danger, and his audiences now listen undistracted. The librarians were entranced as he stared through his cigar into the distant past:

"I came to Virginia City to assume the position of city editor on the Territorial Enterprise. I had been a quartz miner in Aurora, and I was very glad at the chance to lay down my shovel and labor for a while with a pencil instead.

"But on my first day at work I was hard put to fill my two allotted columns. Things were looking dismal until at last a desperado killed a man in a saloon and joy returned once more. I was never so glad over one mere trifle in my life.

"So I said to the murderer, 'Sir, you are a stranger to me, but you have done me a kindness this day which I can never forget. If whole years of gratitude can be to you any slight compensation, they shall be yours. I was in trouble and you have relieved me nobly and at a time when all seemed dark and drear.

"'Count me your friend from this time forth, for I am not the sort of man to forget a favor.'

"'If I did not really say that to him, I at least felt a sort of itching desire to do it. I wrote up the murder with a hungry attention to details, and when it was finished experienced but one regret - namely, that they had not hanged my benefactor on the spot, so that I could work him up too."

"I don't assume the character," Layne says. "The character assumes me. Once I'm in that white suit, I'm Mark Twain in two steps - if the phone rings before I get out the door, it's Mark who answers it, not McAvoy."

As he translates the static page to the living stage, and ranges from Twain's time to ours, he inevitably speaks words Twain never wrote. "Young people now grow up in a different world from Tom, Huck, and Becky Thatcher," he observes. "Just last week I was asked by a junior high school student about safe sex. 'In my day,' I said, 'safe sex was making sure the pitchfork was not in the haystack when you jumped inside.'

"Mark Twain was a writer of recognized talent when he left Nevada in 1864," Layne says. "Then from California he tickled the funnybone of eastern readers with 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.' And then, unexpectedly, he struck a major turning point in his life in Hawaii, where he was writing 'Letters from the Sandwich Islands' for the Sacramento Union. He met Anson Burlingame there, the American Ambassador to China and a very cultured Renaissance man whom everyone respected including Sam Clemens. Burlingame told him, 'You have a gift, maybe even genius. What you need now is refinement of association.' Almost from that day you can see him begin to leave behind him the 'Mark me Twain' saloon life of frontier Virginia City behind, and to enter the 'Mark Twain-Safe Water' phase of his life. That's when he went East, and he never came back."

In the course of his self-education, Layne has visited all the great landmarks and shrines of the master's life. "In fact," he says, "I'm one of the very few mortals to have slept in Mark Twain's bed."

Layne was at Quarry Farm, Twain's summer refuge in Elmira, New York, for a Discovery Channel filming. He was so enchanted with being there that he asked permission to stay the night. While 'approved scholars' may stay in the house, permission was granted only after a written request and formal deliberation by the Quarry Farm Directors.

"I was lucky. The curator had seen how serious I am about Twain. 'If anyone asks,' she said, 'I'll just say there was nothing available in town.'

"And in the morning I woke to a tap on my shoulder - it was either Sam or the house cat that got me up that day. I like to think it was Sam."

"But it was in the billiard room at the Hartford house where I felt Sam the strongest. It was so profound, I think anyone could feel it — you can still smell the cigar smoke!"

Layne's depth of understanding of Twain's life and writings has led to a greater involvement with the world of scholarship. At first he was considered a novelty at seminars and professional conferences, but he is now generally recognized as a serious student as well as an engaging impersonator of the master.

Lately he has been especially busy in the schools, where, in a cooperative effort with school faculty, he defends himself in public trial on the charge of racism. Efforts to ban Huckleberry Finn began in 1885 ("too coarse for our youth" was the charge), and they continue today. In the Trial's debut at Incline Village, members of the high school debate team served as prosecutors, while at UNR the students in an American Studies class pressed the case.

Mark Twain presented his own defense, waxing eloquent, philosophical and funny. Twain's summation: "Compare me to Malcolm X. As a boy he was a black racist. I was a white racist in my youth. But over the course of my life I changed my ideas, just as Malcolm X changed his. Huckleberry Finn reflects these changed understandings, and it is not a racist book."

While he appears regularly at conventions and parties, more and more of Layne's bookings are coming from out of state. He stages 'The Trial of Mark Twain' all over the country now, at colleges and universities as well as high schools. During one busy week last summer he flew to St. Louis to bring Twain to life on the Mississippi River for the Discovery Channel and then back to Virginia City to meet a crew coming in from Hollywood to shoot a segment of Kenny Rogers' The Real West.

Recently he received a call from Westport, Connecticut, where Twain never lived. Westport is nevertheless near the heart of the New England's Mark Twain Territory—as distinct from our Mark Twain Territory, New York's Mark Twain Territory, Missouri's Mark Twain Territory, and New Orleans' Mark Twain Territory—and it has a tax-free entertainment zone (a la Branford, Missouri) on the drawing board. All they're missing is Mark Twain.

"It would be ironic if Mark Twain left Nevada and moved to Connecticut again, wouldn't it?" Layne asks with a smile. "But I love it here, and I love being Nevada's Mark Twain. As long as people want to hear the words of the master, I'll be here to say them.

"I guess I'm living proof that Twain was right when he said, 'All that's necessary for success is ignorance and confidence.'

"And isn't it lucky I'm impersonating a man who lived to be 74? If I don't make it that far myself, I'm going to be very, very angry."

"It was in 18 hundred and 35 when I came along that Halley's Comet was lighting up the sky. The Almighty up above must have said, 'Now here are these two indefinable freaks, these two unaccountable frauds, Halley's Comet and Mark Twain. They came in together, and they must go out together.' And it was 74, almost 75 years later, in April of 19 hundred and 10, that Halley's Comet raced across the heavens again. And I rode it out—the day after the perihelial passage. [Pause. . . .]

"But the good news is—I can still vote in Chicago!"

David W. Toll is the author of The Complete Nevada Traveler and the proprietor of The Nevada Travel Network. His son John impersonated Mark Twain at the 1995 Virginia City Chataqua.