McAvoy Layne boarded a chairlift at Diamond Peak Ski Resort 38 years ago and struck up a conversation. After explaining that he worked in radio on Maui, he was offered a job producing radio on Tahoe’s North Shore.
“I went from surf bum to ski bum in three weeks,” he says. “If I’d been 5 seconds earlier, I would have missed that opportunity.”
“I don’t think I have a problem slipping in and out of Mark Twain, but my friends say I do. He gets under your skin and inside a conversation where you’d least expect it. He was limitlessly human and that’s what I love about him.” –McAvoy Layne
He’s lived here ever since. Yet, it was another “miraculous, serendipitous moment” in Tahoe when he discovered his true calling: to impersonate and educate people about America’s best-known author, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain.
The Truckee Historical Revue
UPDATE: Postponed until Sept. 4, 2022 | Piper’s Opera House | Virginia City, Nev. | truckeechorus.org
It all started when a massive snowstorm trapped Layne in a Tahoma cabin for five days. There happened to be a copy of “The Complete Essays of Mark Twain” sitting on the coffee table.
“I had cabin fever so my brain was soft and ready,” he says. “It took me 10 more years to read the 18,000 pages he left us.”
Watch a performance of McAvoy Layne
Layne got his big break as a Twain impersonator when Carol Piper Marshall of Piper’s Opera House in Virginia City, Nev., asked him to perform two shows a day, six days a week in the summer of 1988.
“That gave me 200 times to practice new material,” he says. “That’s the kind of lucky break anybody in performing arts would dream of.”
Decades earlier, Layne had visited Piper’s while traveling as a youth. He fell into a mysterious reverie while standing beside the stage, so much so that his father had to grab him by the arm to pull him away.
“I still get chicken skin when I walk into that building from the memories,” he says. “I knew at 10 years old that box would have something to do with my life.”
The following year, in 1955, Layne had the chance to attend the opening of Disneyland with his Uncle Bill, an animator on some of Disney’s first films. With a Brownie camera, he took pictures, one of which he still has today: a black-and-white image of the stern of the paddle wheeler, “Mark Twain.”
Over the years, Layne specialized in school programs, which led him to travel across the United States, Europe and Russia. He would often stand trial as a student jury tried him for alleged racism in his writing of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
“When I was visiting 10 schools a week, I worked mostly with secondary students,” he says. “Then I’d visit an elementary school to see fresh faces. On Friday, I’d schedule a middle school just to keep from getting soft. Then I’d come home on a gurney. I don’t feel like an actor. I’m an educator in a costume.”
Over the past 30 years, Layne has performed Twain more than 4,000 times. In talking to him, it’s hard to tell where the artist ends and the author begins.
“I don’t think I have a problem slipping in and out of Mark Twain, but my friends say I do,” says Layne. “He gets under your skin and inside a conversation where you’d least expect it. He was limitlessly human and that’s what I love about him.”
Layne’s favorite Twain novel is “Roughing It,” the author’s semi-autobiographical account of his travels through the Wild West between 1861 and 1867. During this time, he began a literary career at the Territorial Enterprise daily newspaper in Virginia City and made several trips to Lake Tahoe of which he wrote: “As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photographed upon its still surface, I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole world affords … The air up there is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn’t it be? — it is the same the angels breathe.”
On cold, windy days, Layne sometimes wanders down to Burnt Cedar Beach where alone on the shore he imagines what Twain must’ve experienced, a majestic mountain lake devoid of people or modern civilization.
“I think he speaks to us with an immediacy, a manner that transcends the ages” says Layne. “With his humor and insights into human nature, he was so ahead of his time.”
Layne, as Twain, writes a regular column in Sierra Sun called “Pine Nuts.” On Sept. 5, he will become Mark Twain once more at Piper’s Opera House when he narrates The Truckee Historical Revue alongside Truckee Tahoe Community Chorus. | ghostoftwain.com
