No one asks for the rope-pull anymore.
It’s always Do the invisible box!
I’ll do the invisible box if it’s organic to the performance.
But no one wants to hear that, and I’m not going to tell them.
Mime’s Lament
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I know that your website here is meant to be taken in fun, but you’ve hit upon something that I’ve noticed in the last forty years or so – let’s say post-Vietnam – of my professional miming career. Time was that people wanted to see you pull the rope or struggle forward against buffeting winds, but not anymore. I don’t want to say it’s a lack of imagination, because that’s only the small part of it. I blame Sigmund Freud and the media. People don’t want to see struggle and industry anymore. They want to be shown graphic representations of their powerlessness. “Put me in a box so that nothing’s my fault,” they seem to be saying. And, well, I do a lot of things for charity, but miming isn’t one of them. If these lazy bastards want me to “Do the Box” then I do the box.
Yours in Silence,
RK Abernathy