Mime

Mime, the silent art form, is a language the whole world understands.The fun and wonder of this ancient entertainment, which has been around since the first Neanderthal men pantomimed the experience of the great hunt, is being taught this year to intellectually limited young adults enrolled in The Sky is the Limit Musical Theater Program.Sponsored by the Baltimore County Recreation and Parks Office of Therapeutic Recreation, the special workshops (which will continue through June 14) are being directed by professional mime Don Mullins, who participated in the Marcel Marceau Seminars of 1987 and 1988 in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Marcel Marceau, the great French mime who for seven decades mastered silence and brought new life to an ancient art form, has died. He was 84. Mr. Marceau died Saturday in Paris, French news media reported, citing his former assistant, Emmanuel Vacca. The cause of death was not disclosed. Yesterday, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon praised Mr. Marceau as "the master," saying he had the rare gift of "being able to communicate with each and everyone beyond the barriers of language." Active until late in his life, Mr. Marceau toured the world for more than half a century, giving more than 15,000 performances.

An unfortunate byproduct of the recent warm weather is the number of mimes who have again taken to the streets to pester people.I had the unsettling experience of running into a mime the other day at an outdoor pavilion downtown.Years from now, when I suddenly bolt upright in bed at 3 in the morning and begin trembling violently, it may well be a result of this encounter.The mime seemed to appear out of nowhere. One minute, the noontime crowd was leisurely enjoying the sunshine. The next minute, a vague sense of unease had descended over everyone PTC as this mime wheeled up on his unicycle.

Jack Julius was 7 years old when his foster family dropped him off at the Villa Maria Orphanage in Baltimore. He doesn't remember the exact reason - the family moved or someone became ill - but Jack soon found an unlikely way to recover from the blow. A magician showed up at the orphanage, and as quickly as you can say "abracadabra," the outgoing and optimistic little boy discovered his calling. The man, whose blond hair stuck right up a la Alfalfa from The Little Rascals, mesmerized Jack, particularly the trick of balancing a ball on an umbrella's tip. It wasn't long before Jack borrowed that for his own budding act. "Magic and performing was a way to deal with the crisis in my life," said Julius, 46. "Since I didn't have a real family growing up, the audience was my family."

I get e-mail that has a picture that I can't see. It is in MIME ver.1. Is there a program I can get to see MIME files? Most e-mail software handles the format known as Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions files just fine, but it can be a pain for those with systems that can't. It is a way to reduce graphics and other binary files into ordinary text codes that can be sent over the Internet without losing data. The best software I know of to ease the phantom MIME pain is the popular WinZip, now in version 8.1. You can find it by going to www.download.

Spring is a wonderful time of year, except it also means the streets are once again filling with mimes, who are surely the most annoying people on the planet.If you want to deal in cold, hard statistics, there are only about three dozen people in the entire country who think mimes are funny, and these are mostly shut-ins, preschoolers from disadvantaged homes and victims of industrial accidents in which severe head trauma has occurred.For the rest of us, the sight of a mime triggers an immediate tightening of the stomach and fight-or-flight response, with most people reporting the overwhelming urge to get a poke in at the mime if at all possible.

A black stage. A thick, white rope, sinuous and shining. A tall pole. A bright orange rubber ball. Black, white, orange. The stage lights are so bright that when the ball bounces, it casts a shadow sharp enough to cut paper. Up, down. Light, dark. Three men try to leave the stage and seemingly can't. On, off. Lost & Clown'd will be performed through Saturday at Theatre Project, 45 W. Preston St. Tickets are $10-$16. Call 410-752-8558 or go to theatreproject.org.

If David Geyer had a dime for every time a child squealed, laughed or smiled during his silent antics, he'd be, well, a rich mime.Performing his Imagimime routine recently at Charles Carroll Elementary School, the Westminster resident elicited laughter from children the way the clean-cut boys of New Kids on the Block evoke screams from prepubescent girls."

From time to time I get e-mail in the file format MIME. My XP Pro under Windows and MSN Mail can't handle it, so I have to delete the message. All I get is lots of ABCs that make no sense. These e-mails come from friends and probably hold some interesting info. - Tony Checkowski, Lansdale, Pa. Multipurpose Internet mail extensions, or MIME files, date back to the dawn of the Web and now are outdated but still used by quite a few diehards who cause a lot of consternation. In essence, a MIME file is written in conventional text (A to Z and 0 to 9)

"The Last Butterfly," which opens today at the Westview, might be best considered a footnote to another film already in the market, Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List."But it's not really an attempt to "cash in" on Spielberg or the Holocaust, as it was clearly made some years back, when the events of 1939-1945 were box office poison. It turns out to be in its own way an engaging and tragic memorial to the darkest of all times.Like "Schindler's List," it re-creates the iconography of the Holocaust, though since the director, Karel Kachyna, isn't nearly the dynamic artist that Spielberg is, his compositions are more inert and lack the thunderous force of Spielberg's.

Magic show -- 49 West Coffeehouse, Winebar and Gallery will present Magician Jack Julius from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. tomorrow, April 28, May 26 and June 30. His show features illusion, a mime performance, dance and comedy. Admission is $12. Reservations are suggested. 410-626-9796.

A black stage. A thick, white rope, sinuous and shining. A tall pole. A bright orange rubber ball. Black, white, orange. The stage lights are so bright that when the ball bounces, it casts a shadow sharp enough to cut paper. Up, down. Light, dark. Three men try to leave the stage and seemingly can't. On, off. Lost & Clown'd will be performed through Saturday at Theatre Project, 45 W. Preston St. Tickets are $10-$16. Call 410-752-8558 or go to theatreproject.org.

From time to time I get e-mail in the file format MIME. My XP Pro under Windows and MSN Mail can't handle it, so I have to delete the message. All I get is lots of ABCs that make no sense. These e-mails come from friends and probably hold some interesting info. - Tony Checkowski, Lansdale, Pa. Multipurpose Internet mail extensions, or MIME files, date back to the dawn of the Web and now are outdated but still used by quite a few diehards who cause a lot of consternation. In essence, a MIME file is written in conventional text (A to Z and 0 to 9)

Lost & Clown'd is no mime show. While the play's three characters come straight from the circus and don't utter a word, they're not the traditional black-suited, white-gloved figures you might see in a park. "When people say a `mime show,' you think there's a white-faced person taking us to a `once a upon a time' story kind of place," said actor Mark Jaster. "This is really not that." Jaster plays a circus roustabout in the performance, which is part of the QuestFest theater festival.

Larry Dobkin, 83, a veteran character actor whose television and film career spanned seven decades, died Oct. 28 of heart failure. Mr. Dobkin appeared in more than 65 feature films including The Ten Commandments and Sweet Smell of Success. Born in New York City, Mr. Dobkin began acting off-Broadway in his teens. In the 1950s, he turned to television, appearing in shows such as I Love Lucy and The Adventures of Superman. He also appeared in a number of TV westerns, including Gunsmoke and Rawhide.

I get e-mail that has a picture that I can't see. It is in MIME ver.1. Is there a program I can get to see MIME files? Most e-mail software handles the format known as Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions files just fine, but it can be a pain for those with systems that can't. It is a way to reduce graphics and other binary files into ordinary text codes that can be sent over the Internet without losing data. The best software I know of to ease the phantom MIME pain is the popular WinZip, now in version 8.1. You can find it by going to www.download.

If there is a down side to the recent warm weather, it is the number of mimes who have again taken to the streets and parks to pester people.I made the mistake of having lunch outdoors the other day at Harborplace, somehow forgetting that Baltimore's yuppiefied waterfront is the home office for mimes this time of year.Sure enough, shortly after paying $27 or whatever it was for a chicken salad sandwich, the day went swiftly downhill.One minute the noontime crowd was sitting there enjoying the sunshine, and the next minute you could feel a chill in the air as this mime wheeled up on a unicycle.

In class with Mark Jaster, body language speaks louder than words."Mimes don't use their voices to express themselves," the 39-year-old Rockville resident and visiting artist at Forest Ridge Elementary School in Laurel tells a group of first graders. "We're not doing opera. You don't have to make a sound."He is one of several artists who hold weeklong residencies at Howard County schools, which receive grants through the county's Art Council and Parent-Teachers Association.This week, Mr. Jaster traveled to Forest Ridge to perform and to teach some basic mime skills.

At our family reunion we exchanged many old family photos, which I scanned into my computer and planned to copy onto 3.5-inch disks for each member. Some of my family members have Macs. Can they use the same disks as my Dell with Microsoft programs? The answer is a blissful yes. Almost all Macs in service can read Windows-formatted disks. So all you have to do is save those pictures as JPEG format files on that Dell and pass them out to your Mac relatives. You should know, however, that this is a one-way street, because Microsoft has never deigned to reciprocate by building Mac compatibility into its floppy disk formats.

Marcel Marceau seems melancholy. But his is a melancholy suffused with resilience. The man who is considered the greatest mime in the world (try to name another!) has a lot on his mind, and though the weight of his thoughts wearies him, he isn't daunted. For more than five decades, Marceau has been practicing his art in Europe, America, Asia, Africa, Australia. He has performed in movies and before presidents and diplomats, written children's books and been featured endlessly in newspapers and on television.