Shields and Yarnell an American mime team Duo Shields and Yarnell were an American mime team, formed in 1972, consisting of Robert Shields and Lorene Yarnell. Shields and Yarnell's specialty was a series of skits called The Clinkers in which they assumed the personae of robots, with many individual, deliberate motions (as opposed to normal smooth motion) stereotypical of robots and early animatronics, enhanced by their ability to refrain from blinking their eyes for long stretches of time. Their