Columnist Susan Snyder: There’s no mime like the present

Tuesday, June 21, 2005 | 8:15 a.m.

Here is what I learned at the statewide Hugh O'Brien Youth Leadership Seminar this weekend:

Justin Cooper, weather and traffic guy for KLAS-TV Channel 8, can dance without music and without appearing as though he's having a seizure.

There is nothing more terrifying on the planet than facing a roomful of teenagers who are smarter than you are.

And John Bernstein, account executive for Beasley Broadcasting, was once a mime.

"I worked as a mime for 10 years," Bernstein told the estimated 70 Nevada teenagers who gathered at UNLV on Saturday during the last of the seminar's four days.

Talk about silencing a room.

"I went from being a mime and not talking or manipulating the air to being in radio sales and being full of hot air," he said, eliciting a collective groan from the audience.

It would seem they thought his jokes were funnier when he wasn't speaking.

Still, sharing a media panel with someone who used to be a mime is akin to following the guy who drives the firetruck on an elementary school career day.

Who can top that?

But Bernstein rarely talks about his former mime status, he said when I called him Monday.

(If a mime picks up the telephone and answers a reporter's questions, is he still a mime?)

So he was a good sport to indulge my curiosity. Seeing him sitting there Saturday in his suit and tie -- a regular, middle-age, media executive -- it was hard to visualize the whole tights-and-whiteface thing.

Especially the tights.

But Bernstein wore them when performing in New York City's Central Park and Greenwich Village and while touring with the Mimika theater company some 30 years ago.

He reveals this part of his past most often when talking with children or teenagers, using the experience to illustrate all the ways in which people communicate.

"People think all communication is words, and it's not," Bernstein said. "About 85 percent of communication is nonverbal."

That can be news to a generation of youngsters who spend many of their waking hours with iPods and cell phones plugged into their heads. But Bernstein learned it early.

His mother was deaf. The family used American Sign Language. But as with any language, the words are only a small part of the message.

"I had a hearing father," he said. "But there was the influence of being in the deaf world with my mother. She had a coterie of deaf friends. And it was all (communication) with the hands and facial expressions."

He was studying theater and speech at Brooklyn College when he responded to an advertisement for the American Mime Theater. He studied both the rigid, traditional form and the more fluid, flowing form used by Marcel Marceau, then hit the road with the touring company.

It's a physically demanding skill, but Bernstein's still got it. At the teens' request Saturday, he pulled on an imaginary rope that seemed to pull back.

"When I tell the kids about my background, I'm surprised at the reaction," he said. "There seems to be an allure and a mystique. People find it fascinating to deal with someone who communicates without words."