Expertease Experts on: Dolphin-n-Mime Adventure!

Clare, our audience tonight is composed mostly of dolphin lovers. And that's your Expertise! You're listening to Expertise, spelled wrong. The podcast where the world's most expert experts discuss their areas of expertise expertly. Expert comedy writer Clare Sera and expert comedy writer Danno Sullivan bring their expertise to other unrelated expertises. Welcome, welcome one and all to the Expertise podcast. My special guest today is Clare Sera, who is the acknowledged expert in dolphins. I can't tell you how pleased I am to have been invited to talk on this little explored world of sea, mammalus, dolphinus.

Oh, that's the Latin, I presume? That is. There's three Latin dolphins that I am an expert in. Wonderful. And I know much of our audience is Latin speaking, so this will be perfect. Clare, even though today you are acknowledged as one of the foremost experts in dolphins, that has not always been the case. I know that you got started early on in related work as the beloved SeaWorld mime. So you were working there near the dolphins, seeing those dolphins, but not actually being part of the dolphins. And how I longed for it, Danno, how I longed for it. Ironically, I would take my breaks.

At SeaWorld? Yes, while I was working at SeaWorld doing mime shifts. And for me, truly, mime was money. However, I would take every break that I got, I would high me over to the dolphin pool. Which is right there, right? I've been to SeaWorld and I've seen that setup. So there's the big dolphin tank and then the big amphitheater for the audience. And that's where you would do your mime work through the audience, correct? The mime work, I would be mostly following after people as they entered into the auditorium. I would walk behind them. Yeah, that mockery, right?

Yes, yes. Taking their wallets. No wonder it was so profitable. It was very, very profitable. And people do love that when you do something that really just kind of makes fun of the way they look or the way they move. Love it. Yeah. Love it. But no speaking, right? That's the rule of mime. Loosely so. I mean, I would sometimes yell, hey, give me your wallet. I wonder if you're the mime that I saw on my visit to SeaWorld. Oh. It's not just one person all the time, right? No, no. We would work in shifts. Did not share our whiteout. That's what we call our makeup.

Was it actually whiteout? It was actual whiteout. The correction fluid for typewriting? Yes. That stuff does not come off. No. Well, you can probably still see a little bit around some of my edges. I can. Yeah. Yeah. I thought you were one dimensional and I see now that that's just an outline giving that illusion. And speaking of illusions, I felt that being a mime at SeaWorld in front of the dolphin tank was an improper illusion. How so? What I wanted was to give voice to the dolphins. Was there anything between you as a mime and the stifled silence of the dolphins themselves?

There was very much a silence in the first years of my research with the dolphins. And I later found out it was because they were shocked and horrified by the glaring white on my face and the way that it reflected off of the water. It was very sunny in Florida and I was searing their eyeballs. Some of your fellow dolphin enthusiasts blame you personally for having burned out the retinas with the reflected glory of your mime-manship. You know, A, that was one pod. That was one pod of dolphins. Yeah. B, it wasn't my intention to blind those dolphins. C, what came from that, what came from that was, I mean, nobody would have done it on purpose.

But what I discovered about dolphins once they had lost their sight is invaluable to dolphin research. And it's sometimes, Stano, if I may say, it gets me a little riled up that they won't include what I learned because of the way that I went about getting it. I guess what's sad to me is that after they had been mime-blinded, they were no longer even allowed to work at SeaWorld. Where does a blind dolphin go? Well, they had no choice. They were, they were dumped into the bay. So out to sea. Now this sounds like a horrible setback for someone in your position, but I understand this was really just kind of the beginning for you.

Very much so. I do want to point out that all those dolphins did thrive. The blinded dolphins in the pod that you had befriended? The mime-blinded dolphins of Oceana Bay, they're now known as, they've become their own tourist attraction and they are well fed and well cared for. They have very, very happy, I mean, a little bit bruised from bumping into things, but I mean, that's just in the natural course of survival. Once you created this attraction of the- Mime-blinded. Mime-blinded dolphins of- Oceana Bay. So once you had created this attraction of mime-blinded dolphins of Oceana Bay, naturally the tourists started coming in because anything in Florida has to have tourists.

Yes. Oh, and I'm sorry, the actual attraction was called Mime-Blinded Dolphins of Oceana Bay World. Sure. Yeah. How else would you know it's a tourist attraction? Yes. Yes. So these dolphins had been trained in the ways of entertainment for the people. Right. But you had some surprising techniques that you were going way out on a limb to try. I guess you had nothing to lose at this point. You were not throwing the traditional sardines. You offered the dolphins something better. Corn. Oh, really? Yeah. Corn off the cob. Naturally, sure. They have no hands to hold a cob.

Exactly. Although they're evolving fast. That is the truth, Dano. You know, this was fun for the audience and fun for the dolphins because I had inherited from an old theme park some of those t-shirt guns that I loaded with corn. Oh, individual kernels. Yes. Yes. And the audience could fire corn at will into Oceana Bay and the dolphins would, they would hear the sound of the guns go off. And of their own free will, I did not force these dolphins to participate. They would come a-flying. Yeah. That's so beautiful. Leap up. I mean, they bumped into each other a lot.

Sure. That's going to happen. I wanted to ask you, one of the most surprising side effects that I read about was the agrarian system that the dolphins created to actually farm their own corn there within the bay. They didn't plan that, but it was a happy happenstance. Yeah. Because as we all know, if you eat corn, you poop corn. And who doesn't love poop corn at a show? Oh, yeah. Or sitting around a fire. And so the dolphins, by simply- Doing what they do. Communicating the corn from their bodies to the bottom of the ocean, an underwater corn bed. That's incredible. So this eventually created a self-sustaining cycle, right?

Yes. With the corn growing up, the audience members harvesting the corn in order to blow it right back at the dolphins and start the whole cycle again. It was a beautiful time in my life. That is where I took on my status as expert. Because at that point, you knew more different things about dolphins than any other expert in the world. I knew things that nobody should ever have known about dolphins. And nobody since agrees with or believes. Yeah. And that makes you a very special kind of expert. Thank you. One that's mostly considered wrong. Well, and again, Dano, if my research would be seen as valid, how much more would we know?

Well, we'd know as much as we have learned on this podcast. Yes. So let the record show that everything we say here is true to the point that we can verify it with each other. Claire- Sorry, I'm mansplaining. Claire, there's no doubt that you've brought pleasure to the world. There's no doubt that you've opened up lines of inquiry into dolphinry that have hitherto remained unexplored. And yet, at this phase in your life, I'm surprised to hear that you've left the dolphins and you're going back into mime full time. Well, thank you, Dano. And I did choose this podcast to make that announcement. And I would like to express that in mime.

Sure, go right ahead. That's that's one of the things podcasts excel at. My wallet! Where's my wallet? Rosemary? Do you have my wallet? Oh, oh, it's funny when you can't buy things anymore. Uh, well, my debut is back. Where will you be performing, Claire, if anyone would like to come see your little mime show? I will be performing outside of SeaWorld, or as we call it in the mime world, off SeaWorld. Yes, off SeaWorld. Is this at all related to the parking lot of SeaWorld? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's just off the parking lot, actually. Oh, so you're not even in the parking lot itself?

I wouldn't say even. I mean, I mean, do you call off Broadway? It's like, oh, you're not even on Broadway? No, it's an alternative, fresh, edgy version of something that's too cool for Broadway. So for all our listeners who'd like to see Claire's little mime show off off SeaWorld in the parking lot next to the parking lot, I think that's that might be Shell World. Or is it just a 7-Eleven? It's both. Claire, Sarah, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today to talk about your life, your livelihood, your brave explorations into the world of those merry mammals of the sea, the dolphins.

I've never been inappropriately touched by a dolphin. I mean, I know there's a lot of rumors about that, and a lot of people focus on that with dolphin encounters, and it's a lot of like the joke among the cool people that are inside SeaWorld. Oh, you know, inappropriate dolphin behavior. And it never, it never happened to me. And I made myself available.