Some famous folks — Walt Whitman, Marilyn Monroe, Thomas King and others — will be appearing at the Sparks Library today courtesy of some local young performers.

“Young Chautauqua is a free educational program open to all youngsters between the ages of eight and 18,” volunteer Bob Piechocki said. “We are in our 16th year and we are the first youth program of it's kind in the country.”

The program is sponsored by Nevada Humanities and local businesses and private donors. Young Chautauqua is run by volunteers and has no paid employees except for two University of Nevada, Reno student interns.

“This year’s theme is ‘Myth Versus Reality’ with characters ranging from Walt Whitman and Franklin Roosevelt to Marilyn Monroe,” said Washoe County library systems program coordinator Beate Weinert.

“We’ve done both Chautauqua and young Chautauqua for several years,” said Washoe County library system marketing coordinator Bonnie Saviers. “These programs have always been very popular among (library) patrons.”

Saviers said that not only are the performances enjoyed by patrons, they are helpful for the performers.

“Having the performances by the young Chautauqua is a way for them to polish their performances,” Saviers said. “We give them the opportunity to perform in front of a live audience and we’re happy to provide a venue for that.”

Twelve-year-old Madeleine Williams will be portraying Marylin Monroe.

“A lot of it is research,” Williams said. “You usually buy a lot of biographies and autobiographies and also do Internet research to prepare. Another thing you need to do is get your costume. The costumes are usually very elaborate because they match the time and style of the characters everyone is doing.

“We change characters every year,” Williams continued. “This year I decided to be Marilyn Monroe because she had a lot of elements in her life that a lot of people don’t know about and she was also really, really famous.”

Williams will be wearing a dress fashioned after Monroe’s famous cherry dress.

Williams used to attend adult Chautauqua events with her grandmother, which is what first got her interested in the program. Williams and the other young performers sign up for the program in January each year and begin working on their characters in February. They work through late June performing around the area.

The Sparks library will be cutting its hours back by 25 percent, which may make scheduling programs like Young Chautauqua at the library more difficult in the future.

“The challenge with having programs like this (Young Chautauqua) is scheduling,” Saviers said. “We’ll still have most of the same programs, but they’ll have to be on a different schedule.”

The performance is free to attend and Saviers said that Sparks library usually has around 60 attendees.

“The Sparks community really supports the library system and programs hosted by the library,” Saviers said.

The event will begin at 12 p.m. today at the Sparks Library, located at 1125 12th Street.

Young Chautauquans performing today at the Sparks Library.