LIKE LEONARDO DA Vinci, Ted Brown of Severna Park is something of a Renaissance man. But don't call him that. He doesn't take kindly to flattery.
"You win a chess game," he grumbles, "and you're Bobby Fischer."
The 71-year-old retired educator, who holds a doctorate in education from the University of Maryland and was principal at Belvedere and Folger McKinsey elementary schools, finds nothing out of the ordinary about his accomplishments.
His interest in linguistics - he speaks French, German and Spanish - is a hobby, he says. As an actor, he's appeared in Colonial Player productions of Plaza Suite, The Lion in Winter and Twelfth Night. The Brooklyn, N.Y., native is a musician, having studied at the University of Maryland and Catholic University in Washington. And, he's a self-taught artist who's good enough to paint copies of masterpieces.
Combine these skills and you have the components of Brown's series of one-man shows, Masters & Maestros.
Twenty-six years ago, a co-worker asked him to play a little Chopin for a school assembly and the actor couldn't resist putting on a costume. As they say, the rest is history.
Today, his portfolio of famous artists and composers includes da Vinci, Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Frederic Chopin, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso.
At Oak Hill Elementary School in Severna Park, Brown recently portrayed Monet. "We love Dr. Brown. He comes twice a year, once for music and once for art," said Barbara Underwood, a general music teacher.
"I do about six weeks of preparation with the students before he comes. One of the first things they ask when they return to school in the fall is, 'Who will Dr. Brown be this year?'
"He comes in speaking the language of the composer, and then he says, 'From now on, everything I say will sound like English.' He has them in the palm of his hand," Underwood said, adding that she learns something new every time Brown comes to school.
Whether his costume includes beards, berets or a bandaged ear, Brown reveals intriguing details about each artist's life, and while he's speaking he paints or plays the piano. If his audience is young, he captures their imaginations with stories of the artist as a child.
Brown's wife, Donna, accompanies her husband when he performs. She was there for one particularly convincing performance of da Vinci before an audience of third-graders, where Brown had complained, as da Vinci, that his inventions weren't working to suit him.
A little girl turned to his wife and said, "Mrs. da Vinci, tell your husband it's all right. Everything he invented is being used today."
At one time, Brown was performing as many as 10 shows a week. Now, it's a little less.
He travels from Boston to Philadelphia to the Carolinas and as far away as Phoenix, Ariz., to perform for the American Medical Association, civic groups, schools and senior centers. For more than two decades he's taken what he calls his "New York Tour" to Saratoga Springs for 29 shows in three weeks.
Brown will present How to Speak Piano, 2 1/2 -hour workshops on da Vinci and the history of the piano, at senior centers this summer. He's also part of the Elder Hostel summer schedule at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore.
When a Montgomery County principal asked, "Why can't students learn something during the last week of school?" Brown was the answer. He's been invited back to Farmland Elementary School for years. Gunpowder Elementary School in Baltimore County brings him in each spring as the school's grand finale event.
Brown, who says his goal is to give everyone "the feeling they have been moved ... by the spark that lit the lives of these men," keeps performing because he enjoys his audiences.
"It's college students one day, a class of fifth-graders the next," he said.
Information: Ted Brown, 410-544-9595 or Arnold Senior Center, 410-222-1922.