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This clown's seriously fooling around As Heart Fool, Pamela Weber combines fun with a positive message By DAVID PRESZLER ASHLAND -- The giggling little skeptics line a blanket on the hardwood floor in socks, all eyes on a woman who calls herself Heart Fool. Half mime, half clown, Heart Fool pushes her palms into nothing, conveying an invisible wall. Her wide-eyed audience laughs and one little girl voices the group's disbelief. "That's air," she howls. True enough. But that didn't stop Heart Fool -- Ashland's Pamela Weber -- from captivating the girl and more than a dozen other young children for an hour and half Sunday afternoon at the Ashland Community Center. The 50-year-old Weber -- with help from her husband Jonathan and daughter Crystal -- entertained the children with a mix of mime, singing and interactive storytelling. She has been practicing those art forms since 1971, when she got her clown and mime training in London. Since then, she's performed and taught in a dozen countries. The Webers moved to Ashland in 1992 and most of Heart Fool's Southern Oregon performances have centered on environmental themes, teaching children about recycling and loving their planet. Recently, she says she's been doing mostly smaller affairs -- birthday parties, company picnics and the like -- as well as some performing at the Rogue Valley Mall. Weber says variety shows like the one she did Sunday allow her to combine the art forms she loves and teach children about building a positive self image and caring for the environment. The mixed show also provides children an introduction to mime, which makes up several sections. "There's not a lot of miming that goes on," she says, "but a whole mime show is maybe more than a lot of kids can handle. They need that verbal interaction." Sunday's show opened with a number of traditional mime sketches. Heart Fool tried to lift "heavy" things, she picked, smelled and ate flowers and she played out a heart-wrenching game of "He loves me, he loves me not." She broke the silence to ask for the audience's help in inflating imaginary balloons and shifted into an interactive game that saw "Mister Man" (aka Jonathan Weber) selling invisible balloons for equally invisible nickels. "You're just faking it," one of the young skeptics laughed, as she grabbed hold of her fake balloon. Later, the show shifted to image-building songs like "I Like Myself" and an interactive lesson about how rainbows happen that featured some children as clouds, others as raindrops and parents dressed in primary colors as the rainbow. She's hoping Sunday's performance was the first in a line of public shows for children. "There aren't a lot of people doing small shows for kids," she says. Even with limited competition, the work isn't exactly lucrative. So Weber does some work in alternative healing and her husband is a contractor. Though the high-energy 90-minute show does wear her out some, Weber says she doesn't spend too much time practicing her routine. "I like being spontaneous and in the moment," she says. "I really believe that creativity springs up in the moment." She works on the songs with her husband as well as some of the general themes and then just plays off the audience. And, given the unpredictability of the average kid, that usually makes for a lot of fun. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA