This paper discusses mimesis, the direct representation and total imitation of an event. It studies the co-occurrence of quotative verbs with mimetic enactment based on two corpora of U.S. American English, both available through the University of Pennsylvania Data Consortium. The Switchboard Corpus has 542 speakers ranging in age from 20-60 years and sociolinguistically tagged by educational level and provenance from one of seven main dialect areas within the United States. The Santa Barbara Corpus of spoken English has 52 speakers, ranging in age from 17-70 years, coded by educational level and home state. Overall, the corpus includes tape recordings from 1988-95. Results indicate that the new quotatives are primarily used to enquote mimetic enactment. "Think," hitherto the primary item for the enquoting of inner monologue, is not used much for mimetic enactment. The paper shows that "be like" and "go" are synchronically used as quotative items for mimetic performances in contrast to the older quotative devices such as "say" and "think." It suggests that their non-commitment to the realization of the quoted speech/thought makes them good introductory items for mimesis. The paper asserts that it is due to their newcomer and still marked status that speakers prefer the new quotatives as introductory items for more expressive quotes. (Contains 20 references.) (SM)