Mark takes 'Twain' to McKinley

PD and former BJ pop culture critic Mark Dawidziak’s “Twain By Two” show has been around the country, including the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut.

At 1 p.m. Saturday, May 6 Mark and wife Sara Showman will do the full two-act version at the McKinley Birthplace Museum in the Memorial Auditorium in Niles, Ohio.

Previous venues include the Quarry Farm in Elmira, New York, where Samuel Langhorne Clemens is buried; the Barter Theatre in Virginia, the Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio, and dozens of other venues.

Twain/Clemens was born in 1835 in Florida, Missouri, grew up in Hannibal, Missouri and died April 21, 1910 in Redding, Connecticut.

Haley’s Comet greeted his birth and his death.

He is buried in Elmira’s Woodlawn Cemetery. I visited his grave.

In today’s dollars, Twain’s estate was worth $12 million.

William McKinley, 25^th President of the United States (1897 until his 1901 assassination), was born in Niles, Ohio but eventually began his law career in Canton.

Theodore Roosevelt became President after McKinley’s death.