Today three gentlemen from California arrived on the Elmira College Campus, they will be performing a play here, Inventing the West:The Dangerous Friendship of Bret Harte and Mark Twain. One of these fellows, Randy Maple, has been a dear friend to me for nearly a year. We had lunch together then went to the cemetery where Twain and his family are buried to share a pondering moment or two. Ahhh, but what a mess greeted us, the cemetery had been vandalized this past week, dozens and dozens of markers turned over or knocked down, urns broken, stones broken. And the Langdon site was not missed, Ossip and Clara Gabrilowich's headstones were toppled over, and the cement flower urn at the base of the large marker on the plot was broken and strewn about. Randy and I sat and contemplated the mess so many will have to deal with; the TV crews were there, the newspaper people, and in the end we realized - it does not matter - the spirit of the man lives on, the lives the Langdon family lived and the evidence they left behind will far surpass a reckless spree through a dark cemetery. And doesn't he start us out with a trip to the cemetery in the dark to bury a dead cat? Did he not already see the crime in the midnight cemetery? The sad part - these night visitors were not looking for any sort of cure - worts or otherwise, let's hope they found one. From Elmira, Jane McCone