June 04, 2025
Paige Haehlke
Rob Mermin ’71 uses mime training to find Parkinson’s symptom relief
When most college students decide to backpack around Europe, many bring a camera and a comfortable pair of sneakers. But when Rob Mermin ’71 left for Paris with $50 in his pocket during the summer of ’69, he packed a red clown nose, a pair of baggy pants, and ran away to join the circus—literally.
From a young age, Mermin had been fascinated by silent film characters. At 15, he watched entertainer Red Skelton and mime Marcel Marceau perform pantomime skits on TV, which inspired him to pursue miming.
“It was just phenomenal,” Mermin said. “It was funny and serious and dramatic and amusing, and I thought, ‘I don’t need to be an actor, but this pantomime thing—where you don’t have to learn any lines and you can just express yourself physically—that intrigues me.’”
Mermin had heard about the traditional traveling tent circuses in Europe, often run by families who passed on their skills, talents, and traditions from generation to generation. Fascinated, he spent the summer of his junior year hitchhiking around the continent until he found a circus to join.
Shortly after, he wound up in Paris studying with Marcel Marceau—iconic French mime, pictured with Mermin to the right—at his mime school in Paris.
“I wrote back to the College saying I was in Paris with Marcel and I might be starting my career,” Mermin explained. “They said if I could prove to them that a year of studying theater and mime in Paris was equal to a year of theater courses at the College, they would give me credit for the year and I could come back as a senior. So that’s what I did.”
After graduating, Mermin ran off to join the circus in Europe again. From England and Denmark to Hungary and the former Soviet Union, he went from show to show learning all aspects of the circus business.
“In the European tradition of clowning, you have to know a little bit of everything so you can fill in as needed,” Mermin said. “I learned bareback horse riding, walking a tightwire, juggling and acrobatics, and even putting up and tearing down the tent. It was a fascinating lifestyle.”
Following his nomadic years, Mermin settled in Copenhagen and was an actor on Denmark’s popular weekly show “TV I Teltet” with his dog Rufus, who also did pantomime.
Mermin’s other accomplishments include working as the Dean of Clown College for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, founding the award-winning international touring company Circus Smirkus, and volunteering his time teaching and performing magic, mime, and circus in children’s hospitals, nursing homes, and orphanages in 10 countries.
“The art of mime was my first love,” Mermin said. “It taught me—literally and figuratively—how to move through the world.”
Twelve years ago, Mermin was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. He realized that mime training helped him manage the symptoms he experienced, so he began teaching other people with Parkinson’s and movement disorders about mime. One goal of his teaching is to trigger the Paradoxical Kinesia Impulse as a movement management strategy.
Paradoxical Kinesia is a phenomenon wherein individuals with Parkinson’s-related movement difficulties suddenly perform complex movements smoothly, even though motor function had been substantially limited. Mermin hopes that applying the principles of pantomime will help people discover ways of becoming more conscious of daily movement, with the intent of adapting this awareness to counteract the symptoms of movement disorder.
“I've been dealing with Parkinson's for 12 years now, but I move around perfectly fine,” Mermin said. “Teaching the art of mime to groups of folks with Parkinson's around the country has been very rewarding.”
Despite not following a traditional career path, the liberal arts education Mermin received at Lake Forest proved crucial to developing his skills and interests. Two former professors, Professor of Psychology Charles Behling and Professor of Physics Tung H. ‘TJ’ Jeong, encouraged him to pursue his dreams of joining the circus; Jeong himself had been an acrobat in China before moving to America.
“Lake Forest allowed me to have the time to experiment with what I liked to do creatively and explore what abilities I could develop,” Mermin said. “My professors helped nourish my dreams, and that’s something I try to do with the students I teach. I try to find out what kind of crazy, impossible dreams they have and encourage them to go for it.”
Mermin recently published a memoir detailing stories of his European circus travels in the 1960s and 1970s, and he is currently working on a second book about the art of mime, his work with Parkinson’s Disease, and his decades-long friendship with Marcel Marceau.
To purchase Mermin’s book, get in touch with him, or view photos and videos from throughout his career, visit robmermin.com.