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MCAVOY LAYNE PERFECTS MARK TWAIN
By Richard Miner
Thirty five years after beginning his stage career as The Ghost After performing “Cure for the Common Cold” for his dad and his of Mark Twain Incline’s McAvoy Layne rang down the curtain at dad’s long time friends McAvoy decided he’d found his niche and Virginia City’s Piper’s Opera House on the evening of September the white suit became his attire for all subsequent performances 30 with what he claimed to be his final stage performance. Mac’s including his visits to area schools. Over the course of the next amazing career spanned three and one half decades and over 4000 thirty plus years Mac admits to having had at least a dozen performances for audiences across the USA and around the World. white suits made to order, three or four by Josephine and after His penultimate performance was staged just a week earlier with she passed (Mac spoke at her funeral) three or four more ladies an outdoor performance for locals at St. Patrick’s Church which stepped up to the task and made the rest. He currently admits to was also a standing room only affair. If you missed my article in having seven white suits with accessories, “…six in the closet at the Spring Edition of LIVE.WORK.PLAY about how a local radio home and one I keep in the car so I can still go to work in case the morning show host became famed author and humorist Mark house burns down.” For years McAvoy’s suits have always been Twain’s meme you can read all about that here: https://issuu.com/ lovingly cleaned and pressed by his friend Mike Trute’s Incline articles/21009152 Cleaners. Mike, for his own part, also has a thespian streak and now performs as Snowshoe Thompson in venues around the Over the years many of you have said that if they had the chance Wasach, in no small part encouraged by his friendship with the they have questions they’d like to ask McAvoy. Some of these Ghost of Mark Twain himself. questions recur regularly so I’ve asked Mac some of the most frequently raised ones and here are his answers. The Famous White Suit: McAvoy always performed as Twain wearing a beautifully tailored white suit so I asked him when did the historical Mark Twain first start wearing white in public? McAvoy responded that most Twain scholars agree Twain first started wearing white suits upon the death of his beloved wife Olivia in 1904. But it was his appearance in 1906 in an address to the Library of Congress which was considering changes to copyright laws that marked the first time he began wearing white whenever he appeared in public. Twain, according to McAvoy, called his all white attire “my I don’t give a damn suit.” McAvoy’s first public appearance in white came while he was still working as the morning show host on Incline radio station KLKT and trying out his Mark Twain stories in the afternoons for local elementary school children. For what he regarded as his breakout performance he decided to make a surprise appearance as Mark Twain at his father’s 75th birthday party at the LaPlaya restaurant in Carmel, CA. And for that occasion he ordered a tailored white suit from a Carson City seamstress named Josephine Baldassare. At the time Mac was also training for the Iron Man races in Hawaii and for the bicycle portion of that event he was riding round trips on SR 50 from Carson City to Spooner Summit and back. “I’d ride downhill, have a fitting with Josephine and then ride back up to Spooner.” How’s that for multitasking? LIVE.WORK.PLAY.
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HOLIDAY 2023 SUMMER
