My father used gestures and characterisations as far as I could remember. He had a repertoire of stories and he’d insist on telling them no matter how many times anyone had heard them.

And fact is, he was right, most of the time they were still funny even after hearing them an hour ago or for the hundredth time. What I liked about my father’s version of ‘conversing’ (it was more ‘monologues’ than conversing) was that he showed all the DOING, all the EMOTIONS, the PERSONALITIES, the shapes, weights, sizes, speed, textures and sounds of whatever he was telling about. And this is what Marcel Marceau was the master of. But the show was over for my father in 1994 when he died of cancer of the everything, aged 59. Now I see him only in dreams.
I have a social morning, nicely slotted into a predominantly solitary life, one morning a week, 10am-noon, regular as clockwork. And one of its pluses is that with one friend with a language processing issue, one who is new to English and one who is deaf, I get to use gestural signing there. It was the natural modeling of gestural signing and the use of communicating via showing objects DOING and using them to represent component of ideas which could be juggled on the table in ways my brain doesn’t do internally, that I became fluent in this medium. I wrote on one of those questionnaire thingies that my idea of a favorite dinner guest would be Marcel Marceau and I got to see him at his Melbourne performance in 2003 and moved to tears during his performance – of joy, of empathy. But now Marcel has passed away, I think I have a different idea about dinner guests. I’d love my father and Marcel to dine together over characterisations and gesture, using representational objects to play chess with ideas on the table and I’ll smile knowing my father is really conversing.

Marcel Marceau gave joy and relateability to the world. Gone in the physical world, he’ll live on in the internal world of nostalgia for a whole other lifetime.

…. Donna Williams *)

Autistic author, artist, composer, screenwriter.

http://www.donnawilliams.net