It’s impossible to fathom, but there was a time when fine, upstanding gourmets didn’t find words like “free-range” and “organic” on their dinner menus; a time when Americans thought frisee was a ballet position and mesclun a hallucinogen. But that was before Alice Waters had her way with our palates. Not only would the founder of Berkeley’s famed Chez Panisse restaurant single-handedly change what we ate. She would alter how we thought, how we “felt,” about our food.

If Waters weren’t so passionate about the healing life force teaming inside natural foods organically grown and simply prepared, she would never have managed to communicate her message to a nation of people raised on canned peas and meatloaf. For we have Waters to thank for those sublime baby greens — the kind you see in profusion at even the most commercial chain supermarkets — that mercifully replaced iceberg lettuce.

And iceberg’s demise is just the tip of Waters’ contribution to our culinary evolution. We also owe Waters thanks for introducing our taste buds to simple pleasures, saying no to the overwrought cuisine that dominated “gourmet” dining for decades and abolishing the pretension that masked the elegant essence of unadorned, nourishing fare. As San Francisco food critic Patricia Unterman noted, “Julia [Child] set the stage for the culinary boom in America by teaching people how to cook, and then Alice Waters took everyone to the next step by teaching about ingredients.” We are in Waters’ debt for teaching us how to eat a peach, how to savor every bite. And to America’s small, organic farmers, she is, as the New York Times dubbed her, “a patron saint” who has shown chefs and diners alike that unprocessed, unadulterated, chemical-free food ranks somewhere up there next to godliness.

Among foodies — critics, gourmands, colleagues, farmers — Waters is the top of the food chain, an innovator whom the New York Times dubbed the “Mother of American Cooking.” Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker called her the “Materfamilias to a generation of chefs.” And not only American chefs. Waters’ aesthetic has had a dramatic impact on European cuisine as well, most notably in France (not a country that has taken kindly to America’s sense of taste) where, Gopnik writes, the legendary winegrower Aubert de Villaine, co-director of the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, the greatest wine estate in France, “speaks of her in hushed tones.”

Indeed, she is regarded as a sort of high priestess — a spiritual leader who showed the way to serve and eat locally grown food in season. Yet for all the fanfare, Waters is a most unusual flavor of celebrity chef. Though she’s had an abundance of offers over the years, she has never marketed herself or franchised her restaurant. Neither has she starred in a nationally syndicated cooking show or hawked a line of frozen pizza or BBQ sauce. Her only commercial endeavors include a line of cookbooks and Cafe Fanny Granola. Compared with the likes of Julia Child, Wolfgang Puck or Emeril Lagasse, Waters is a culinary wallflower.

Included in Waters’ family tree — those who’ve worked under her charge — are such renowned chefs as Paul Bertolli, founder of Oakland’s Oliveto Cafe and Restaurant and co-author of several Chez Panisse cookbooks; Mark Miller of Santa Fe’s Coyote Cafe; Deborah Madison, founding chef of San Francisco’s upscale vegetarian restaurant Greens; Jonathan Waxman, co-proprietor of New York’s Jams; and Jeremiah Tower, former proprietor of Stars, one of San Francisco’s trendiest restaurants in the ’80s. Gourmets worldwide make pilgrimages to her flagship restaurant Chez Panisse and the restaurant’s less formal upstairs cafe — both named for French author Marcel Pagnol’s Provengal hero Panisse — as well as to Cafe Fanny (named after her teenage daughter, who was named after another Pagnol character), a diminutive, Parisian-style cafe located a few miles away. Chez Panisse is at the heart of the “gourmet ghetto” of specialty food shops that have sprung up around it in the past 30 years.

President Clinton has dined at Chez Panisse, and Waters has been the chef at several Bay Area dinner parties given in his honor. And Martha Stewart makes a point of stopping at the restaurant when she’s in the Bay Area. Waters’ five cookbooks, most notably “The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook” and “Chez Panisse Vegetables,” are classics. Her cornucopia of food awards includes being ranked one of the world’s 10 best chefs by the prestigious Cuisine et Vins du France magazine and receiving, in 1992, the James Beard Foundation’s award for the Best Restaurant and Best Chef in America. Most recently, she’s been invited by the French to open a restaurant at the Louvre, a project that, if realized, will be completed in the next decade.

What’s so remarkable about Alice Waters is that ever since she began her mission more than 25 years ago, she has been at the helm of a revolution. What Waters has in mind is social change on a grand scale. She says that once we return to the land — spurning homogenized, mass-marketed artificial foods that deaden our spirits, separating us from our essential selves — we will return to one another. She believes that sitting down together for a family meal is the best way to instill family values.

Waters is committed to the idea that if we take the time and care to put nourishing food on our plate, we will in turn renew our communities, our world and ourselves. Eat junk, and you demean yourself and destroy the environment. Eat natural, organic ingredients grown nearby and produced in season, and you will improve yourself, the community and the world.

Alice Louise Waters was born April 28, 1944, in Chatham, N.J. She came of age in the tumultuous late ’60s in Berkeley, graduating from the University of California in 1967 with a degree in French cultural studies. During her college years, she was involved with local politics, working for the congressional campaign of journalist Robert Scheer, who to her great dismay was defeated. Still, Waters was committed to doing good. While so many of her compatriots seem to have long ago abandoned their mission, Waters has maintained a crusader’s energy, intent on changing the world, one fava bean at a time.

At age 19 Waters had spent a year traveling in France. “I lived at the bottom of a market street, and I took everything in by osmosis,” she once told the New York Times. “This was my first connection with farmers’ markets and real food. I loved what I ate and I wanted that kind of food here.” What she came to realize was that “the best-tasting food came from the people who were taking care of the land and nourishing it. These were the organic farmers.”

When Waters returned to the United States, she got a job teaching. At night, she would cook for friends. “Chez Panisse began as an offshoot of dinner parties,” says David Goines, who has known Waters since 1966 and designed and illustrated “The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook” and “The Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook.” “Alice wanted to have her friends to dinner every night. The only way to do that was to open a restaurant.” In 1971, Waters took out a $10,000 loan — her father mortgaged his house — and with her friend Lindsey Shere opened a Provence-style bistro in an old wooden house on Shattuck Street, not far from the Berkeley campus.

Goines says that her idea “was to cook foods quite different from the preeminent style” — in other words, haute cuisine. “The food began with very much a French country overtone, simple and uncomplicated. You served a fresh fish and left it alone. You didn’t tart it up with all sorts of sauces. This basic philosophy matured over the years into Alice’s search for fresh, pure ingredients.”

The people who cooked and supped at Chez Panisse during those early days resembled a cabal trying to reinvent the world, not capitalists hoping to launch a posh restaurant. Back then, “There was a joyful abandon in creating a completely inedible meal,” says Goines. “There were several memorable disasters. That was part of the experimentation.”

But the restaurant didn’t make money. For years Chez Panisse lost a small fortune. The truth is, it costs dearly to make a perfect, simple salad. Eventually, Chez Panisse grew up, becoming more of a business and less of a playhouse. And in the process it also became a shrine to new American cooking. Waters’ recipe for success was never a closely guarded secret. Her cuisine has always been basic and down-to-earth, just the sort of Mediterranean cooking Pagnol himself would have loved.

But newcomers to the restaurant can feel shortchanged by its apparent simplicity. If you’re looking for sculptured “art” food, well, don’t go to Alice’s restaurant. Dinner is disarmingly plain, nothing more elaborate than a small watercress and beet salad; a bowl of vegetable broth; grilled fish; and for dessert, a single pear sitting on a plate. And every morsel, perfection.

What does such an effete aesthetic possibly have to do with Waters’ call to arms? Chez Panisse is among America’s best restaurants and is priced accordingly. The five-course, prix fixe dinner costs up to $68 a person. Critics claim that Waters is nothing more than an armchair liberal espousing idealistic notions, meanwhile entertaining the wealthy and privileged. Goines insists that from the beginning, Waters has never aspired — unlike some of her hippie-turned-millionaire brethren — to make a killing off a good idea.

“Alice’s vision is extremely clear,” he says. “She’s not concerned with the restaurant. She’s concerned with good food. If you were to light a fire and burn the restaurant down, she’d keep going. She’s on a mission.”

Waters would argue that indulging in delicious food is not separate from doing good works. The two acts are inexorably intertwined. “The sensual pleasure of eating beautiful food from the garden,” she told the New Yorker, “brings with it the moral satisfaction of doing the right thing for the planet and for yourself.” Chez Panisse is not there to feed the masses. The restaurant is a model for others to aspire to.

In one of several letters to President Clinton, Waters calls on him to publicly address the need to abolish the unhealthy way we grow our food and feed ourselves, to “invigorate public dialogue by turning our attention to how food must be at the center of our lives.”

Why does she feel such a goal is so essential to our country’s future? “Communities are brought together when people care about what they eat,” says Waters. “I continue to believe that the very best way to bring people together is by changing the role food plays in our national life.”

But what about those who can barely get by on food stamps? In response she writes, “Often somebody will complain that it is all very well for me — the owner of an expensive restaurant with a sophisticated clientele located in a mild climate — to prescribe this kind of eating, but for most Americans it is a luxury that is all but out of reach.”

Not so, says Waters. “Fresh, nourishing food need never again be stigmatized as elitist. Wholesome, honest food must be the entitlement of all Americans, not just the rich.” (One is tempted to pause and wonder how much the president, unrepentant Big Mac lover, took to heart Waters’ notion that a reformed America is a junk-food-free America.)

However noble and well-intentioned, Waters’ dream will be a difficult one to realize. She may have changed the way the Brahmins eat, but how do you introduce such rarefied fare to a populace that can buy a Whopper at Burger King for a fraction of the price of a Chez Panisse appetizer? It’s expensive to produce and buy organic, seasonal, farm-fresh food. Which explains why even today Chez Panisse reportedly earns little profit. The ingredients — whenever possible, organic produce and free-range and chemical-free meats — are costly, and the preparation she demands is time-consuming. She lives her own life with as little pretension and as much simplicity as she demands of her food. She doesn’t live grandly. With her daughter, Fanny, and husband, Stephen Singer, a wine and olive oil merchant and painter, Waters lives in an unassuming, slightly ramshackle Berkeley house close to the restaurant. This is in keeping with her broader effort to reach a social utopia. Live, work and eat locally. Stay committed to your community; nourish it and in return it will nourish you.

And if you don’t have what you need in your own community, create it. When Waters opened Chez Panisse, she couldn’t find the kind of food that was so readily available during her idyllic days strolling through the French farmers’ markets. So she established relationships with local farmers and ranchers, encouraging them to grow healthy foods. Where most high-end restaurants have purchasing agents, Waters hired a full-time “forager” to find suppliers who produce quality, ideally organic, ingredients. “Unfortunately,” Waters said in an interview with Online Chef, “it took a long time to develop a local farming system to produce and support fresh, local ingredients.”

But what revolution happens overnight? It takes years for awareness to grow, but eventually that awareness spirals outward. Through the basic principle of supply and demand, everything from pesticide-free corn and berries to steroid-free chicken and beef have become more readily available. Waters’ relentless demand for local ingredients and her allegiance to healthy, organic food has nourished a national trend that encourages community-supported, sustainable agriculture. In the end, Waters has proven herself correct. “The act of eating is very political,” she says. “You buy from the right people, you support the right network of farmers and suppliers who care about the land and what they put in the food. If we don’t preserve the natural resources, you aren’t going to have a sustainable society.”

At least in Berkeley and on the farms and ranches of the surrounding San Francisco Bay Area, Waters has helped create the sustainable society she envisioned. She buys from 75 different vendors. This tight society of food growers and merchants know one another and depend on one another to live. To drive home her commitment to the local farmers, in 1996 — to commemorate Chez Panisse’s 25th anniversary — Waters started the Chez Panisse Foundation. To date, the organization has donated a quarter of a million dollars to nonprofit organizations that promote sustainable agriculture.

In 1990, Waters learned of the Garden Project at the San Francisco County Jail. The program, spearheaded by Catherine Sneed, served as job-training outreach, giving inmates an education in organic gardening and providing them with a place to work when they’re released. After seeing how dramatically the inmates changed their way of thinking after they got involved, Waters joined the project’s board and participates in its planning and development. For almost a decade, Chez Panisse has been one of the Garden Project’s most committed customers.

The county jail’s Garden Project inspired Waters’ own project: the Edible Schoolyard at Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Middle School. The cafeteria at the local middle school had long been shut down, only to be replaced by a “snack shack” that served packaged hamburgers, burritos and pizza. Waters proposed a curriculum to the school’s staff that allowed the students to plant and harvest their own food, then cook, serve and eat it for lunch. At the beginning, the notion seemed too idealistic, a far-fetched plan that would never be realized. Would junior high students who didn’t know from an heirloom tomato scoff at the notion of eating a lunch made from food they raised in their own organic garden? Today the half acre, formerly buried in weeds and cracked asphalt, is a flourishing vegetable and fruit garden.

This is only the beginning of Waters’ dream. She’s hoping that the Martin Luther King Middle School will inspire other schools nationwide. In Waters’ utopia, all children will be reaping the seeds they sow. We will all sit down and break the bread we’ve made together — stopping long enough to realize what we have before us, and what we’ve been missing.

I looked, all right? This morning, I took a long and unflinching gaze. How do I say this without sounding boastful? There in the bowl was a real beauty, my reward for yesterday’s hearty oatmeal breakfast and black bean and rice dinner. It was the kind of (how do we settle on a comfortable euphemism?) ejecta that would make Mom proud.

I consulted “What’s Your Poo Telling You?” my handy field guide to human stools, and discovered that mine had an ideal shape, sinking nicely to the bottom of the bowl. Because of its textbook-perfect hue — no alarming green, red or yellowish tinge proving my bile is diseased — I can be reassured that I and my hardworking colon are healthy. I can proudly say I’m an excretion achiever!

Millions who have never seen him perform live, or even on television, have heard of Marcel Marceau. He’s, you know, that French guy in white face who for some inexplicable reason doesn’t talk. (Oh, but he can talk. “Never get a mime talking,” he says. “He won’t stop.”) Yet how to explain what a miracle he is. He’s toured the world with his show 40 times. He’s been in scores of TV movies, independent and feature films, including — if you can imagine it — “Barbarella,” and had the only speaking role in Mel Brooks’ “Silent Movie” (he said, “Non!”). He’s written and illustrated several books. He’s received France’s highest artist honor — the French Legion of Honor — and two Emmys. Michael Jackson modeled his moon walk on Marceau’s walk-against-the-wind techniques (today, the two are close friends). There was a day dedicated to him earlier this year: The city of New York declared March 18 Marcel Marceau Day. He’s garnered honorary degrees from prestigious universities across America. He’s had three wives, four children, survived the Holocaust, joined the Resistance and marched in Patton’s army. All this, and he has a wickedly weird and original sense of humor. “Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards,” Marceau once said, “for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.”

Even when you don’t quite get it, Marceau makes you think twice.

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I was a young girl, maybe 11, when my parents first took me to see Marcel Marceau. Under the spotlight in a Denver theater, this graceful, solitary figure in black and white — topped, maraschino cherry-like, with a single red flower — entranced me with his silent eloquence. As Marceau is fond of saying, he made “the invisible visible.” I vowed, to my parents horror, to emulate Marceau by one day becoming the world’s greatest female mime. By the time Marceau returned to Denver a few years later, I had formed a mime troupe with my neighbor Katy Burns. In hopes of meeting our one and only god, Katy and I sent a note to the theater requesting an interview for our high school paper. Unbelievably, Marceau said yes.

A few days later, I found myself standing before my hero. I was terrified. Intensely theatrical, Marceau maintained a dancer’s elegant, rigid posture and exaggerated out-turned feet, tapping the floor with his black ballet shoe — a trademark Marceau stage tic. Occasionally he’d vary his pose, gesticulating dramatically, his hands dancing in the air around his head like fluttering butterflies. His salt-and-pepper hair had a touch of Einstein’s brilliant unruliness; his thick mask of white pancake makeup and charcoal-lined eyes accentuated his wrinkles. The day I met him was his 57th birthday. To a teenager, he was ancient. I mournfully concluded that this tour would surely be his last.

Katy and I had come armed with a dozen questions, but managed only to ask one. I can’t remember the question, but I can recall that his answer, which lasted nearly 15 minutes so that the show started 10 minutes late, began somewhere with God, ended with Mozart and had an impressive number of Marceau references in between. He often spoke of himself in the third person. “It’s true, there is only one Marceau.” “In my heart, I feel that Mozart wrote his 21st concerto for Marceau.” “Even the Hollywood stars, they love Marceau.”

At the end of his monologue, he announced, “I must go.” But before walking away, Marceau gazed at me and issued a direct challenge: “Of course, you must study mime at my school.” And upon graduating from college, I went straight to Paris to audition. This second Marceau encounter was a tragicomic exercise in which I was asked to perform on a small stage before the master himself. “Allez, allez,” he said, standing below me in his school’s near empty theater, along with a panel of stern judges who would help decide my fate. There Marceau stood, holding the same statuesque pose and, naturally, tapping his foot. “Show me happiness. Show me sadness. Walk through a forest.” I grinned, I grimaced, I ducked under branches and feigned exaggerated horror at imagined snakes and long-toothed beasts. All of this I did, like so many Marceau wannabes, very, very badly. To my parents’ delight, I wasn’t accepted, which is why right now I’m writing this article, rather than tip-toeing after tourists at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf or in front of the Pompidou Center in Paris.

Now, some 20 years later, I hear that Marceau is not only still, shall we say, kicking, but performing and teaching at the same, superhuman pace that he’s managed for half a century. Stop for a moment to consider this breathtaking fact. The man is 76. So he’s pushing 80, so what? So, you try bending backwards, head almost but not quite touching the ground, as you prance about under hot spotlights, thousands of eyes fixed upon you, and only you. Or how about, night after night after night, going up and down an invisible escalator (The back! The knees!); attempting suicide; personifying all seven sins; and acting out the creation of the world, from amoeba to man, in 10 minutes or so. Now assume a relentless schedule that demands minimal sleep and maximum physical exertion so that you can perform your one-man show, up to 200 nights a year, at every far-flung corner of the planet. (Keep in mind that you have no understudy.)

And yet, despite his fame and genius, Marceau seems fated to swim against the current. There’s the irrefutable fact that some, OK many, people just don’t like mime. They find it too cutesy, too annoying, a form of corporal punishment. As with sumo wrestling, opera or bagpipes, you either love mime or you don’t. You really don’t.

In his essay “A Little Louder, Please,” Woody Allen is so confounded by the antics of a “famed international pantomimist,” that he launches into a solo game of charades. “Pillow … big pillow. Cushion? Looks like cushion …” Alas, after all these years, mime — the art that dares not speak its name — still gets little respect. Anti-mime jokes tend toward the violent (If a tree fell on a mime in the forest, would anyone care? If you’re going to shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?)

The antipathy is often justified. With the exception of a few rare talents, most are nothing but genetically inferior spawns, mimicking the one true practitioner. The trouble is that these watered-down Marceaus rarely get it right — and in so doing have made mime a four-letter word. “There is,” as Marceau says, “only one Marceau.” Yes, he’s the real thing. He has an impeccable comic sense, and knows how to make you feel, in your soul, the tragic moment. It’s no accident that children are his best audiences, because his art demands active participation, imagination. His is a world fashioned out of thin air. You see a statue, a pickpocket, a matador, a lion tamer, a soldier, a man passionately embraced by his lover. Marceau’s highly stylized, lyrical sketches can be light and whimsical or bitingly satiric and dark. “Marceau in our time,” says New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes, “remains the supremely eloquent voice of silence and poet of gesture.”

Perhaps true appreciation of Marceau requires a step back in time. Before Marceau broke out of an invisible box and stepped into millions of American’s living rooms on Max Liebman’s “Show of Shows” nearly 40 years ago, you could fit the number of people who knew or much less cared anything about the art of pantomime in a Citroen. What we know of mime — the mute theatrics, the exaggerated body language, the requisite black-and-white get-up — was essentially minted by Marceau.

From an early age, the theater seemed Marceau’s destiny. Born Marcel Mangel in Strasbourg, France, on March 22, 1923, he came from a lively Jewish family with socialist ideals and an artistic bent. His extended family included many musicians and dancers. By the age of 7, Marceau was entertaining neighborhood friends with his comic talent. “I discovered I could make people laugh and cry without speaking,” says Marceau, who wasn’t “doing mime.” He was, in fact, imitating Charlie Chaplin. (Indeed, Marceau’s thickly lined eyes and mouth and black-and-white silhouette evoke Chaplin’s silent-screen image.)

When Marceau was 15, his life unraveled. On the day France entered World War II, his family was given two hours to pack. Marceau and his older brother, Alain, fled to temporary safety in Limoges. Alain became a leader of the local French underground, and young Marcel joined in. To hide their Jewish origins, the brothers changed their family name to the solidly patriotic Marceau, a famous general in the French Revolution.

Marceau’s wartime activities presaged his later artistic role as illusionist. Using red crayons and black ink, he altered the ages of French youths’ identity cards, proving them too young to be sent to labor camps. And later, masquerading as a Boy Scout director leading campers on a hike in the Alps, he saved hundreds of Jewish children’s lives by smuggling them into Switzerland. No surprise, then, that his most affecting works — notably “The Trial,” “The Cage” and “Bip Remembers,” which recounts Marceau’s own wartime experiences — are highly political.

In 1944, Marceau’s father was captured and deported to Auschwitz, where he died. His mother headed to Perigueux, in the south of France, with the two brothers, but when the situation became too dangerous, Alain and Marcel fled to Paris. Despite the desperate times, Marceau continued entertaining fantasies of a future in the theater. “I wanted to be a speaking actor,” he insists, though most of his theatrical inspirations were silent screen stars: Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy and the Marx Brothers.

Again his career was put on hold when he entered DeGaulle’s Free French Army. Because he spoke such good English, he was appointed as a liaison officer with Patton’s army. When he returned to Paris, the city was liberated, and Marceau was free to pursue his dreams. In 1946, he enrolled in Paris’ famous Charles Dullin School of Dramatic Art at the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre.

It was at the Dullin School that Marceau found his mentor, renowned teacher Etienne Decroux, from whom Marceau would learn that there was, in fact, an art called mime. Decroux had invented an exacting physical grammar, “moving statuary,” that called for a virtuoso performer capable of perfect isolation and precise movement. Theater students weren’t lining up at the door. “In those days,” says Marceau, “mime was a tiny part of drama school study, like saber fencing. Most actors found it too tiring. But it captivated me.”

“You’re a born mime,” declared Decroux, and it was so. But Marceau soon parted ways with his mentor, who was at heart less an entertainer than an academic. Taking Decroux’s uncompromising grammar as a launching point, Marceau developed his own style, a language that proved to be more accessible to the masses — mime for the mainstream. His invention of “mimodramas” signaled the true beginning of modern mime and the end of his relationship with Decroux. Believing that Marceau had cheapened the “science” of mime, Decroux never forgave his star pupil.

This mainstream mime, however, enchanted audiences, especially starting in 1947, when Marceau created his alter ego, “the dreamy little poet” Bip. Dressed in striped sailors shirt and white flair pants, Bip was a classic underdog, a sweet loser who tried hard, and inevitably failed. First playing at Paris’ diminutive Theatre de Poche, Bip, aka Marceau, swiftly gained enough fame to take his show on tour, performing throughout Switzerland, Italy, Belgium and Holland. Over the next 10-plus years, he wrote dozens of mimodramas. In 1955, he decided he was ready to take his show overseas. If Marceau could make it in New York, he could make it anywhere.

But he was virtually unknown in the United States. His tour opened on Broadway, at New York’s small Phoenix Theater, where he was scheduled to play for two weeks. Critics raved — “Marceau is the essence of theater” — and the houses filled. His Broadway run lasted an astounding three months, and he went on to tour the country to standing-room-only crowds. By the beginning of the ’60s, Marcel Marceau had become a household name.

Which is precisely what troubles him. When Marceau is gone, we won’t say, “There goes one of the world’s greatest mimes,” but “There goes ‘the’ world’s great mime.” Marceau is mime, which is the artist’s strength and the art’s weakness. When the man who made the invisible visible has departed, will mime disappear with him?

“I’ve heard some people say I’m a ‘classic,’” says Marceau. “But time goes so quickly and people forget quickly. What is really important is to remain a classic after your life. One way is to bring mime to more and more young people.”
Marceau hopes to keep mime alive through his Paris school, L’Ecole International de Mimodrame de Paris Marcel Marceau. He wants people to remember not just Marceau, but the art form he created. “Mimes are masters of silence,” he says, “soon forgotten if they don’t appear onstage regularly.”

To ensure his legacy, Marceau, after gentle prodding from colleagues, agreed to form the Marcel Marceau Foundation for the Advancement of Mime in New York. Foundation board members are an eclectic mix of stars that include Michael Jackson, Placido Domingo, Barbara Hendricks and Dustin Hoffman — all devoted fans.
The foundation’s primary goal is to collect and record Marceau’s work. At present, he is making an educational video to teach mime to theater and dance students. And despite the naysayers and joke tellers who’ve already penned mime’s obituary, Marceau believes mime has a bright future. “I believe in the 21st century mime will enter the field of theater as a modern art form,” says Marceau. “Remember, it’s taken dance 500 years to develop. We are only 50 years old.”

One night recently, I phoned him at his country home, a farmhouse just outside Paris. The next day, Marceau would be leaving for a summer-long American tour. It is midnight, his time. I thank him for taking my call at such a late hour.

“But I keep theater hours, you know,” he tells me in flawless English.

“You must get tired, though,” I say.

“Tired?” Marceau says. “No, I would have been tired if I hadn’t played. This has kept me young. My body has kept the same weight and agility it had 30 years ago.”

Indeed, Marceau’s still as flexible as a Slinky, but time has taken a toll on his hearing, so I find myself in the unkind position of bellowing questions at the world’s only great mime. But once he understands me — just as he had when we first met — he talks fluidly. He tells stories about performing as a young boy, for Patton’s troops, about finally meeting Chaplin in an airport and David Copperfield on an airplane. “Mr. Copperfield said to me, ‘You make the invisible visible, and I make the visible invisible.’ So I ask him if he could make the plane disappear. Can you imagine? What would the world think if suddenly David Copperfield and Marcel Marceau disappear in the sky?”

I type quickly to keep up while he speaks. Suddenly, he stops and says, “Hello? Hello? Are you there?”

“Yes, Mr. Marceau,” I say, “I’m still here.”

“Ah,” he quips. “I thought perhaps you were doing mime.”

How forgotten is Kate Millett? When I stop by my local bookstore to pick up a copy of “Sexual Politics,” it doesn’t occur to me that I won’t find her seminal work, the one that all but launched the second wave of the women’s movement. It’s worth noting that this is not a chain, where a militant feminist author of the 1970s might not be missed. I go to an independent bookstore in a San Francisco neighborhood peopled by highly educated liberals. I’m directed to the women’s studies section and find a single shelf’s worth of oddly random titles that include Nancy Friday’s “Our Loves, Our Lives,” Germaine Greer’s “The Whole Woman” and, given the paltry selection, a hefty offering of books on menopause. I return to the front desk and ask a woman, in her mid-30s like me, if Millett might be located somewhere else, possibly in the nonfiction section?