Oops! Wrong Thursday. Sorry, Mark

Plain Dealer and former Beacon Journal TV critic Mark Dawidziak will be sending his "Twain by Three" show down the track to the Nordonia Hills public library at 7 p.m. Thursday, July 15 (NOT today as posted earlier). This is the Largely Literary Theater Company’s third visit to the Nordonia Hills Branch Library at 9458 Olde Eight Road in Northfield.

Cuyahoga Falls resident Dawidziak adapts and directs the show and portrays Twain. His wife, Sara Showman, and Jason Davis, an Akron native who lives in Fairlawn Heights, also are in the cast. Their daughter, Becky, usually is in the audience, too.

Dawidziak's Largely Literary Theater Company, founded in 2001, will do "Encounter With an Interviewer," with our Mark as Hannibal, Missouri's Mark befuddling a younger reporter (played by Jason Davis), while Sara will do the "Eve's Diary" monologue. Funny stuff. I never tire of hearing it even though I think I have it memorized.

Dawidziak first portrayed Twain in one-man shows during the early 1980s in Tennessee and Virginia before he began working for the BJ.

Since, he's taken this show to Cleveland, Akron, Columbus, Solon, Kent, Wooster, Hiram, Orrville, Shaker Heights, Medina, Kirtland and other Ohio cities. Mark has been reading, studying and collecting Twain for more than 30 years. Two of his 11 published books are about Mark Twain: "Mark My Words: Mark Twain on Writing" (St. Martin’s Press, 1996) and "Horton Foote’s The Shape of the River: The Lost Teleplay About Mark Twain" (Applause, 2003). Dawidziak's personal library contains more than 500 books by or about Twain.

2010 marks the 100th anniversary of Samuel Langhorne Clemens' death, the 175th anniversary of his birth and the 125th anniversary of the publication of "Huckleberry Finn."

For photos of our Mark as humorist Mark, and our Mark's sketches of Hannibal's Mark, click on the headline. They were first posted in 2009 but the only changes are, as he says, that Dawidziak needs less touch-up to match Twain's gray hair and age lines.