Review of "My Dinner with the Mysterious Stranger"
Hosted by Mark Twain at the Mackay Mansion in Virginia City, NV
Producer and performer John Robert Benneth opened the evening with a 1997 Silver Oak, a heavy oaken Cabernet, followed by a Mondavi and a Jekel. We were flabbergasted to learn, though, that Benneth was pulling the bottles out of the original Tombstone post office, a wooden bureau with about eighty long narrow boxes, perfect size for a letter to Wyatt Earp or Doc Holiday, or a collection of rare wines.
After appetizers and an ambrosial soup, the dinner by Richard Gong of the Mandarin Garden appeared as faux smoked salmon, roast duck, seafood medley, sweet and sour pork, vegetable souffles, splashes of Mondavi, steaks of Mandarin sirloin, hot saki, it was all we could eat and drink, ending with a fried banana dish for desert and a plum wine.
We then weaved up a steep, narrow staircase to the grand parlour where Benneth demonstrated Mark Twain's "Mental Telegraphy," appearing to project thoughts into people's minds. Writing a word down on an artist's sketch pad, he then asked someone to say a word out loud. When they did, he turned the sketch pad around to reveal that the word he had just written was the same word. He did this several times.
To demonstrate how the mind can see without eyes, Twain turned his back to the audience and named objects held aloft by guests. Roger LaVake, the producer for Squeak Steele, witnessed the performance and even participated by challenging the performer with a gold pocket watch, which was identified without looking at it by Mr. Twain as a Hamilton. A woman held a cigarette butt up, Twain, without looking upon it, said it was a breath mint.
He then appeared to project thoughts into people's minds..An envelope had been placed in the gold filigree above the entrance to the upstairs of the 1860 Italianate house built by George Hearst, just across from the half million dollar mantle piece by Robert Adams.
Twain asked each guest to think of something without saying what it was and write it down. When the list was made he retrieved the envelope, its contents were pulled out to reveal the same list.
Twain found many instances of parallel thinking in his day to day life, evidence of a universal mind. Twain cites his neighbor Harriet Beecher Stowe having written an entire novel at the same time someone else wrote a story so similar in plot and names it defies random coincidence.
The idea for publishing the history of the Comstock's "Big Bonanza" occurred to both writers at the same instant while DeQuille was in Virginia City and Twain in Heidelberg, and their letters to one another about it crossed in the transatlantic mail. Twain's belief in telepathy is detailed in Twain's "Mental Telegraphy" and "Mental Telegraphy Again."
