There are some people who just love conspiracies and mysteries and especially anything to do with “the end of the world” Remember all the brouhaha about the “millennium bug” that was going to destroy all our computers on January 1 in the year 2000? Sometimes I think there are people whose own lives are so miserable they dream of catastrophe and disaster as welcome diversions from the monotonous mundane lives they lead.
Recently it seems that this fringe crowd has been all excited about the Mayan Calendar and reports that it predicts the end of the world coming in the year 2012. The Mayans were, of course, the ancient indigenous people of parts of southern Mexico and northern Central America. I don’t stay up to date on this kind of thing but it seems impossible today to escape hearing about it on television and so forth.
Well, as we know, Kids watch a lot of television but don’t necessarily spend a lot of time these days learning to read and, more importantly, to spell.
Not too long ago we had Toma the Mime, one of our best school show performers, down in Texas performing his creative writing school assembly program Young Authors Day. Toma is a classically trained Mime who studied with Marcelle Marceau in Paris. It is a wonderful day where the students write stories and Toma, to the delight of everyone, performs the stories.
At one school in Texas, near the end of the day, a young fellow with a heavy Texan drawl stuck up his hand to ask a question. When Toma called on the young man, he asked what Toma thought about the calendar predictions regarding the end of the world coming in 2012. Toma replied that he didn’t really know anything about it. He asked the boy why he thought he would know about it. The young student, in his drawl replied:” Well you are a My-um, aren’t you? And it is the My-um Calendar that predicts it isn’t it?”
For what was undoubtedly not the first time, nor the last, our mime was struck silent.
Mime calendar indeed!
Oh, here is some additional information about Texas school assemblies!
Geoff Beauchamp is the Regional Manager of Mobile Ed Productions where "Education Through Entertainment" has been the guiding principal since 1979. Mobile Ed Productions produces and markets quality educational school assembly programs in the fields of science, history, writing, astronomy, natural science, mathematics, character issues and a variety of other curriculum based areas. In addition, Mr. Beauchamp is a professional actor with 30 years of experience in film, television and on stage. He created and still performs occasionally in Mobile Ed's THE LIVING LINCOLN
