> Bim was Pond's son. Photos of young Bim can be seen in the book > "Overland with Mark Twain." Holbrook recounts meeting his old friend > Bim in the introduction to his published edition of "Mark Twain > Tonight" but does not reveal how he had already developed a friendship > with him (Bim) long before he (Holbrook) had developed his stage show. > > -Alex Effgen For many years Bim Pond gave slide shows and lectures about famous people, using his father's archives. I have his materials for his Mark Twain show, and a large archive of other James Pond archives, including the negatives, prints, and the other original materials published in the book about Twain's last tour across America, plus several letters written by Clara during that tour that are not published. Anyway, it's quite possible that Holbrook met Bim earlier at one of his slide shows. The Goober/Grant routine is pretty funny, but of course William Gillette wasn't a goober. He went on to a remarkable career, enshrined more or less accurately on wiki. Gillette gave many performances imitating Twain; I have an audio tape of one (thought to be Gillette, but uncertain), plus some correspondence by Gillette about his Twain show. I also have a transcript of another tape (also thought to be Gillette) whose "text" varies substantially from the tape I have. The textual changes are Twainian in nature, not the kind of change an imitator might impose on the text. Years ago, Al Gribben heard my tape and saw the transcript and agrees about the nature of those textual changes. It suggested to Al and me that one of the tapes might have been a tape of Twain himself that was used by Gillette to hone his own imitation. I have not been able to compare my tape to the tape whose transcript I have. Nor have I had a voice-print comparison made between a copy of one of Gillette's other audio recordings and his Twain imitations. I understand that voice prints are not as accurate as fingerprints and can be corrupted by copying from an original audio recording, so I'm not sure how fruitful this line of investigation might prove. Adding to the confusion, I have heard a tape of the jumping frog audio that includes an introduction (the Harvard tape from the 1920s) and is clearly Gillette. The other is a shorter version (mine) and may be a snippet from the Harvard tape, or a second performance, or...? I have not compared them side-by-side. So, there could be just one tape of one performance that has been copied several times AND mistranscribed, or two different tapes, or even three. All I know for sure is that one tape is Gillette, and NOT Twain. It makes my head hurt just thinking about all of this. While I'm rambling, I want to respond to Gregg Camfield's excellent points. I'd point out that while most of us are not attuned to how our own voices actually sound to others, stage performers are acutely aware of how their voices, expressions, and gestures are seen and heard by others, and there is abundant evidence that Twain was well aware in this regard, and certainly qualified to say whether the Gillette imitation of him was accurate or not. Likewise, Clara had heard her father speaking on and off stage for thirty years, and more than forty years later she surely remembered how he sounded, and was qualified to verify the accuracy of Holbrook's imitation. In this regard I can speak from personal experience about memory and sounds. Visual memories are notoriously inaccurate (ask any cop whose questioned witnesses). But let's keep in mind the well-established fact that sounds (and smells) can trigger vivid memories, so they may be stored in the brain more accurately than visual memories. A few years ago I heard a recording for the first time of my father-in-law, who died in 1974. I had not heard his voice in thirty years and only knew him for a few years before he died, but what I heard on that tape thirty years after I last heard him speak was exactly how I remembered his voice. I have no reason to think Clara had forgotten the quality of her father's voice. I agree with Gregg on the question of whether Twain's genuine voice and his "stage voice" were the same. They were not. I may have commented in my review of THE COMPLETE INTERVIEWS (a superb resource that every Twainian should own) that reporters commented that Twain's drawl came and went. And when lecturing around the world, there is evidence that it may have vanished for months at a time. Twain very likely sounded "different" on and off stage, or even when being interviewed (which is certainly a sort of stage). Likewise, Gregg's point about Twain's voice in old age is a good one; people's voices change slightly over time. Clara heard her father over many years, and the Gillette imitation that Twain witnessed was in the 1880s. Was Gillette later imitating the Twain of the 1880s or the elderly Twain? Was Clara remembering Twain's younger or older voice? So, which voice is Hal Holbrook imitating? Holbrook is getting older too. So am I. And if you've read this entire posting, so are you. Kevin Mac Donnell Austin TX