Rest in peace, Marcel. But as for Bip the Clown, well, good riddance.
When Marcel Marceau died Saturday at 84, with him died Bip the Clown: the silent, white-faced stage persona of the man internationally recognized as the face of mime. What may also have died, or at least lost its greatest proponent, is the modern flowering of an art form that stretches back through the Italian Renaissance to its roots in ancient Greece.
I think "flowering" would be too kind a word were it not in an obituary. I was thinking something more along the lines of "exhuming" or "rising zombie-like from the dead".
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