Former BJ and current PD TV/movie critic Mark Dawidziak and wife Sara Showman of Cuyahoga Falls were at the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, Connecticut on Tuesday, June 9 for a performance of “Mark Twain’s Guide to Diet, Exercise, Beauty, Fashion, Investment, Romance, Health and Happiness,” based on material from Mark’s book.

Recalls Mark: “I was 16 the first time I visited The Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford. It was a magical summer day trip for a Long Island boy who had fallen completely under the spell of Mark Twain's writing. I've been drawn back many times since.”

Mark was there for his book-signing and a Q&A session.

Dawidziak teaches the Vampires on Film and Television course at Kent State University.

This is Mark’s 12^th book and is published by Prospect Park Books.

“Nobody gets Mark Twain the way Mark Dawidziak does,” PBS superstar documentary filmmaker Ken Burns says of “Mark Twain's Guide to Diet, Exercise, Beauty, Fashion, Investment, Romance, Health and Happiness.”

Actor Hal Holbrook, who does a one-man Twain show but was not in Stamford, and Mark Dawidziak have the best pulse on Twain of anyone in America today.

Dawidziak came to the BJ from Tennessee in 1983, and grew up on New York City’s Long Island, with the sounds of planes landing at JFK and LaGuardia airports lulling him to sleep at night or startling him awake.

Before the BJ & the PD, Mark's career took him to the Kingsport Times-News in Tennessee,
the Bristol Herald Courier in Virginia, the Associated Press’ Washington bureau and Knight-Ridder Newspapers’  Washington bureau.