Cool for School.(The Talk of the Town)(Blue Man Creativity Center)

In November of 1991, at the Astor Place Theatre, Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton, and Chris Wink put on bald caps and painted themselves blue. Since then, Blue Man Group, as they called themselves, has added dozens of new Men to its ranks and mounted productions around the world. But after you've spent fifteen years spattering audiences with paint, pounding drums and pipes, spurting goo out of your chest, and spitting chewed-up marshmallows onto canvases, what's next? For Goldman and Wink, married fathers in their forties, the answer was clear: start a nursery school for your kids and tell all your friends. Last week, the Blue Man Creativity Center (it can't call itself a school until it gets state accreditation) welcomed forty-three boys and girls between the ages of two and four to its first day of classes and mayhem.

One morning, not long before the opening, Goldman, Wink, and their wives stopped by the center, which occupies two airy floors in a row house on Lafayette Street. The director, Jane Racoosin, and three teachers were showing a visitor around the unfinished classroom, stepping over a stray disco ball and explaining that a large, apparently blank hanging canvas is an outer-space mural rendered in ultraviolet paint. Nearby, members of the Blue Man costume crew, on loan from Blue Man Productions, in Red Hook, New York, were riveting sheets of green vinyl to the foam-covered walls of what would become the "soft room."

The Goldmans and the Winks look like just the kind of downtown couples who would send their children to a pre-school that they have created. ("If your goal is to get your kid into an Ivy League school, this is definitely the wrong place to be," Goldman said. "But we hope the kids will be so well educated that they get into any place they want.") Goldman, a handsomer Richard Edson, and Wink, a less handsome Daryl Hall, are lean and boyish, though their hairlines and those of their Blue Man alter egos have met in the middle.

"We wanted to create the school that we wish we'd had," Goldman said. He and Wink met as students at the Fieldston school, in Riverdale. Before that, Wink attended Agnes Russell, an experimental school that was part of Columbia University's Teachers College, where, he said, "we would do some sort of geodesic-dome project, then write poems about it. But I didn't really learn basic skills, like how to spell and how to write an essay." Goldman went to P.S. 198, in the East Nineties, which he described as "a big institution with no soul." He said, "Parents would come for recitals or parent-teacher conferences, but otherwise it was almost weird if your parents were at school. We're trying to have that not be the case here."

"Imagine a school that people wouldn't have to ...