If there’s one kid I like the best here at The Lake of the Sky, it’s Darin Talbot, AKA Jimmy Buffett. Some adults are blessed by staying young, and that’s Darin. The fact that he is the spitting image of Jimmy Buffett, and can sing just like him, serves to endorse Darin’s one man show as Jimmy Buffett.
Darin is performing in the Florida Keys right now, but will be returning to his Tahoe home next month, when the Ghost of Mark Twain, yours truly, will welcome him home.
Darin and I are contemplating collaborating on a two man show, “Jimmy Buffett Meets Mark Twain on the Road to Heaven.” We imagine a fast-moving program just brimming with Buffett music, interspersed with insight and humor from Mark Twain. Who could stay away?
In real life, Jimmy was a huge Twain fan, tailoring much of his music to Twain’s writings. Buffett’s tributes include some sentiments from Twain’s Following the Equator, “We had a hope when we were young that if we lived, and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.”
As a fellow drifter who followed the Equator, Twain welcomes Jimmy onto a path to Heaven’s Gate. “Jimmy, can I offer you some etiquette on getting into heaven?”
( Jimmy takes out his pen and takes notes … )
“Upon arriving at the Pearly Gates, don’t speak first…Let St. Peter speak first. And don’t try to take a selfie with him, hell is full of people who have tried that. And don’t take your dog. Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out. Oh, and if you get in … don’t tip St. Peter —- publicly.”
Jimmy is duly inspired to sing, and his music takes Twain’s sentiments to the very gates of heaven. In his song, “Take Another Road” Buffett resonates, “Follow the equator, like that old articulator / Sail upon the ocean, just like Mr. Twain.”
In his song, “Fruitcakes” Buffett employs the line, “That’s the difference between lightning and a harmless lightning bug,” thus adapting Twain’s quote, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between the lightning and a lightning bug.”
On it goes, between these two kindred spirits, linking song and literature as only Buffett and Twain could do.
In the song “Barefoot Children in the Rain” Buffett includes raft and riverboat imagery, which alludes to Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Also, the lyric, “Wrinkles only go where the smiles have been” paraphrases Twain’s quote from Following the Equator: “Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.”
I look forward to working with my brother Darin on crafting a Buffett-Twain show that will delight a Tahoe audience.
Want to hear McAvoy Layne tell it? Go here for an audio version of this column.
— For more than 35 years, in over 4,000 performances, columnist and Chautauquan McAvoy Layne has been dedicated to preserving the wit and wisdom of “The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope,” Mark Twain. As Layne puts it: “It’s like being a Monday through Friday preacher, whose sermon, though not reverently pious, is fervently American.”
