Album Notes

This CD contains some of Mark Twain's favorite stories, told in the slow, humorous, self-deprecating style for which he was famous to audiences around the world.
Bern Budd has been a professional actor and director since graduating from The American and Musical Dramatic Academy in New York in 1971. He has performed on both coasts, and in between, and has won numerous awards. He has also produced and directed radio plays for the Talking Information Center, a radio service for the blind and print-handicapped community, and is a past president of Bay Players, Inc.
Bern grew up on Long Island, graduated from Kent School in Kent CT., spent a year in Switzerland, and graduated from the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York in 1971.
His first professional work was with the now-defunct PAF Playhouse in Huntington, NY. A period of 7 years took him across the country to Seattle and back to New York.
In 1978 Bern moved to a 300 year old farm house in Massachusetts. Several shows with Bay Players in Duxbury and Plymouth on the South Shore - as both an actor and director - led to his becoming President of that group. He produced, directed. and acted in radio plays for TIC, a radio reading service based in Marshfield that serves the blind and print-disabled community. Moving north along Rte. 3, getting ever closer to Boston, Bern appeared with the North River Theatre in Norwell, Company Theatre in Norwell, Curtain Call Theatre in Braintree, and Fiddlehead Theatre in Norwood.
Bern's first professional show in Boston was with Ubiquity Stage, as Claudius in "Hamlet". Then it was Warwick/Matrevis in "Edward II" with Pet Brick Productions, a summer with the Publick Theatre, several shows at Wellesley College, another summer at the Publick, more shows at Wellesley, and "The Miser" at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge. All this time he was working on and refining "MARK TWAIN TALKS", the one-man show he has been performing since 2002.
"MARK TWAIN TALKS" is a series of entertaining "lectures" as America's greatest humorist would have performed them around 1890. At that time he was 55 years old and did not yet have the white hair and white suits that most portrayers use to represent him. He was at the very pinnacle of his professional career and he was as happy and content in his personal life as he would ever be.