John Fasile

And buried in the pile, Gregory pulls out a glossy black and white photo of a young man wearing white clown makeup.

I gotta take a picture of this.

Gregory was, is a mime.

And here in America, mimes are kind of a joke, right?

Like, maybe you're picturing, you know, someone standing on a street corner, pulling an invisible rope, trapped behind an invisible wall, performing for tips.

But in the Soviet Union in the 1960s, when talk was perilous and everyone was listening... In Russia, you say, between three of us, one can be a betrayer.

Mime was a way to speak up without saying a word.

So your first performance, how big was the crowd?

Gregory gave his first mime performance somewhere around 1962 when he was in his early 20s for patients at a hospital in Leningrad.

And how did they react to your performance?

Gregory had rehearsed obsessively in his mother's apartment by the Neva River.

He had about 20 minutes worth of material.

The year before, Gregory had gone to see Marcel Marceau, the famous French mime, at the Leningrad Palace of Culture.

Did you know that it would be a totally silent performance?

And in the packed theater, in the dark, he'd watched Marcel Marceau, white face paint, black pants, striped shirt, mime picking up a flower in a way that he'd later copy.

But Marceau was also known for stories, short plays of pantomimes he called memo dramas.

They could be deeply philosophical, like the one where he plays a man trapped inside a cage who manages to wriggle out only to find himself trapped inside a smaller cage, and so on and so on until he dies.

So you really related to that Marcel Marceau piece.

Gregory's Jewish, and Jewish people in the Soviet Union faced a lot of discrimination.

It was difficult for him to get a job.