Wednesday, December 03, 2003

Is everybody here?" asks the man on the stage. "Raise your hand if you're not here."

Giggles erupt as scores of little hands shoot up.

The man takes out a big coloring book he says he bought that very morning. As he rifles through it -- showing the children but not looking at it himself -- the giggling resumes.

He looks. Does a double-take. All the pages are blank.

He asks the kids to take a piece of color from their shirts and throw it at his now-closed book. They do. And presto-chango, the pictures are there -- in crayon brights.

"He's magic!" whispers a first-grader to her friend.

But Dennis Bowman's best magic trick may be reinventing himself. It's something that suddenly unemployed people often have to do. Some face the challenge in public -- where, for instance, will Jerome Bettis go when the inevitable happens? Most do it anonymously.

Bowman, WPXI's meteorologist for 16 years, left Pittsburgh in 2000 when his contract expired. The station's management told him "they needed someone to take them to a new level," he says. He landed gracefully enough in Topeka, Kan., a smaller media market near his native Kansas City.

After three years there, though, Bowman decided he was done with television. He and his wife, Debbie, returned to Pittsburgh in September, and he launched a new business, doing exclusively what he'd done for years on the side -- live weather education, one community group at a time.

"The weather keeps changing," he tells hundreds of kids in the "cafetorium" of Cranberry's Rowan Elementary School. "You wake up and it's sunny. Then the clouds roll in, and soon it's raining."

Yup, that's a Pittsburgh forecast.

Suddenly there's a muted yelling. Bowman moves toward a suitcase marked "Chester Drawers." As he opens it, the cries become clear.

"Let me out! Let me out!" He lifts up a red-haired dummy named Chester, and we're off and running with rapid patter full of puns. Bowman whips through the ABC song, getting Chester to repeat each line after him -- until Bowman sings, "Tell me what you think of me," and Chester says, "Okay, your nose is too big."

The kids laugh in delight, fully engaged. When Bowman speaks to senior citizens groups, he uses a dummy named Dennis McGinnis. Charles Mack, creator of the dummy that Edgar Bergen named "Charlie McCarthy" in his honor, also handcrafted McGinnis. As only the fifth owner of the century-old doll, Bowman takes McGinnis out for crowds who grew up listening to Bergen and McCarthy on the radio.

He gets gigs through his Web site, www.dennisbowman.net, and through extensive contacts in the region. The kids don't remember him-- they were toddlers when he left -- but their parents and teachers do.

Bowman thought about re-establishing himself in Kansas City, "but the 'who's he?' factor would have been a lot to overcome." With his 16 years on air here -- and his grown daughters here, too --Pittsburgh was the logical choice for this "Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs" come to life.

The kids clap along so enthusiastically during a Dennis/Chester duet that the teachers have to shush them. They quiet down in time to hear Bowman pause and call out, in a Steve Martin-esque moment, "In German now!"

The mix of serious, silly and downright absurd seems to carry information straight to the kids' brains. If their teachers asked them two weeks after the assembly to explain the difference between "high" and "low" weather systems, I bet most could.

These children know firsthand why accurate weather forecasts are important. Bowman mentions the "microburst" that swept Cranberry in mid-October. "Some of your houses were destroyed or badly damaged, weren't they?"

Then he unveils "The Mean, Mean Tornado Simulator Machine." Imagine a contraption shaped like a large box kite, with a burner and pan of boiling water on the bottom level and a small fan sitting on top. Between the two levels are four support columns -- tubes with rows of punctures pointed in toward the boiling pot. A blow-dryer is attached on one side of the bottom level, and when Bowman turns it on, air flows up the punctured tubes and out into the steam rising from the pot. The fan sucks the air upward.

"Oohs" and "ahhs" start right then, as the children see the steam beginning to swirl clockwise. Then Bowman, wearing goggles and gloves, plucks dry ice from a cooler and throws it into the pan. In the burst of white air, the mini tornado is perfectly visible.

Those high and low systems the kids just learned about? This is what can happen when those systems collide. This is what destroys houses. The lesson is clear -- and memorable.

"What's your job?" one child asks, his voice still awed by the tornado.

"I was on television for 31 years," Bowman responds, "but I finished that two months ago. This is what I really like to do."

You see the show, and you know it's true.

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