TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/110590/1105170.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.3 KB | 173 lines

                                                                                AMERICAN SCENE, Page 17

New York City

Treating The Funny Bone


With bubbles, baubles and a bag full of tricks, a troupe of
circus clowns brings laughter and solace to hospitalized
children

By LINDA WILLIAMS


    Dr. Stubs pokes his head into the hospital room of
five-year-old Dorothy. "I hope I'm not bothering you," he says
before entering. At her bedside, he pulls several crumpled
sheets of legal paper from his worn leather bag, digs for a
pencil stub and begins his examination:

    "Are you married?" "No," the patient replies. "Any
children?" She shakes her head. "Does your nose ever turn red?"
She furrows her eyebrows thoughtfully and answers, "Yes,
sometimes." "Aha," says Stubs. "Does it turn red when it's cold
outside?" The girl thinks for a moment, then says, decisively,
no.

    Though he makes rounds in hospitals including Babies
Hospital, a unit of New York City's Columbia-Presbyterian
Medical Center, Stubs is clearly no ordinary doctor. To those
who witness his offbeat bedside manner, Stubs' true trade is
obvious. He's a clown, a founding member of the one-ring Big
Apple Circus. But to Stubs, a.k.a. Michael Christensen, working
with young hospital patients is serious business.

    "Have you ever had a how-long-can-you-go-without-laughing
test?" he asks Dorothy, continuing his routine examination.
"No," she says, eyes widening. Stubs takes a large windup clock
from his bag and lets it drop to the floor. Dorothy giggles.
"You only lasted about four seconds," he says, feigning
disappointment.

    "Want to try again?" She holds her breath as the second hand
advances and bites her cheeks while Stubs tickles her with a
paper flower. But when Stubs gives the girl's mother a rubber
clown nose in a red-nose "transplant," the tiny patient erupts
with laughter. For a few moments, at least, Dorothy's mind is
off the pain and trauma of being ill.

    Since Christensen, 43, started the Clown Care Unit at Babies
Hospital four years ago, the project has grown to involve 25
trained clowns who make rounds at eight New York City
hospitals. Two or three days a week, bands of these performers,
dressed in mock hospital garb and bearing such names as Dr.
Comfort, Dr. EBDBD and Disorderly Gordoon, visit ailing
children and their families. The clowns' purpose: to alleviate
the fear and confusion of hospital stays and provide bright
moments with humorous routines, such as "drawing blood" -- with
red crayons -- and giving funny-bone examinations. Christensen
has found the C.C.U. so fulfilling that he quit performing with
the Big Apple Circus last fall to devote full attention to
improving and expanding the project.

    Why would a clown give up the big top for hospital rounds?
To Christensen, the C.C.U. is more than work; it's a calling.
"This project came out of an unconscious place in myself," he
explains. "After going through those feelings of loss and of
grief around my brother's death five years ago, this gave me
a feeling of celebration and joy, of healing after his loss.
Call it love and caring, God, a higher consciousness --
whatever -- I want to give my life to that."

    Clown Care got its start in 1986, when an official at Babies
Hospital asked if Big Apple Circus clowns would entertain at
a gathering for patients and their families. Christensen and
fellow clown Jeff Gordon obliged, performing a 20-minute parody
of hospital personnel, food and procedures. Patients and staff
alike roared with laughter, especially when the clowns coaxed
the otherwise formal chief surgeon into participating in a
silly bell-ringing routine. The session, says Christensen, was

it was from that experience that the C.C.U. plan took root."

    With $10,000 in grant money from the Altman Foundation, used
mostly for props, salaries and administrative overhead,
Christensen and the Big Apple Circus designed a five-week pilot
program. As he tuned in to the needs of his new audience,
Christensen made changes in his timing and toned down his
circus-arena makeup and gestures to suit the bedside. Perhaps
the most daunting hurdle was earning the respect and support
of the medical staff. "They had to accept that we were there
as part of their world," he says.

    Dr. Martin Nash, director of Babies' Pediatric Kidney
Disease Program, recalls, "Most of us thought it was a
wonderful idea, but we were not sure how it would work and if
it would be accepted by the parents of sick children. But
Michael's and the other clowns' techniques were so disarming,
they captivated everybody immediately." Indeed, Nash confides,
hospital personnel thoroughly enjoy the shows of Dr. Stubs and
his colleagues.

    At the end of the program's hugely successful trial period,
Christensen and the circus had no trouble finding further
funding from a number of local and national foundations and
corporations. He recalls only one voice of opposition. "A
hospital staff member once said, `Clowns don't belong in the
Intensive Care Unit.' So I said, `Neither do children.'"

    One of the most touching and poignant cases encountered by
C.C.U. staffers concerned a gravely ill youth named Carmelo.
The boy had a chronic renal condition, epilepsy and heart
trouble that left him, at 14, just 43 in. tall and dependent
on dialysis and a battery of medications. In addition, family
troubles had rendered him angry and very lonely. For more than
a year, the C.C.U. "doctors" spent time with the teenager, who
rarely talked and refused to walk. Then one day comic magician
Mark Mitton taught him a "mind-reading" card game, and Carmelo
began to open up. The boy took great pride in fooling one of
his real doctors with the card trick. Mitton later said Carmelo
was a good enough actor to join C.C.U., except "we've got a
problem because you can't walk." "Oh, I can walk!" Carmelo
bragged. He hadn't taken a step in eight months.

    Within a few weeks, Carmelo had procured a new pair of
tennis shoes and was on his feet as a $2-a-day C.C.U.
performer. Immensely proud of his new occupation, the boy found
the will to battle against mounting odds far longer than his
doctors expected. His condition began deteriorating rapidly
last winter, however; in July, two months after open-heart
surgery, he died.

    Often it's just as important to reach the parents as it is
to entertain the youngsters. One morning Christensen peeked
into a floor lounge and saw a woman sitting in a chair, reading
a magazine; a man -- perhaps her husband -- was on the couch,
intent on a novel. Stubs asked gently, "Mind if I come in? I
need to catch up on some paperwork." He sat on the couch and
starting ripping sheets of legal paper off a pad, crumpling
them up and stuffing them into his doctor's bag. He soon piqued
the adults' curiosity. "Office work, you know," Stubs offered.
"Who says clowns are just for kids?" the woman -- now all
smiles -- said to the man.

    Of course, the clowning isn't always well received. When
leading a visitor into one Babies Hospital room, Christensen
was greeted with frantic wails. Coattails flying, he rushed out
of the room. "That's my cue to leave," he explained. And as
with any audience, some patients just refuse to see the humor.
Christensen once paid a call on a teenage boy who was sitting
by a window with his head lowered. He kept it down as Stubs
conducted his exam. "I asked, `Have you ever had your funny
bone examined?'" Christensen recalls. "He said nothing. `Does
your nose ever turn red?' No answer. `Are you ticklish?' And
then, with his head still down, the boy asked, `Are you
retarded?' I said no. `Then why don't you act like a normal
doctor?' I said, `Because I'm not a normal doctor.' He looked
up, saw my costume and sighed, `Oh, God.'"

    Christensen tries not to let the occasional rejection deter
him. "I can hear no, see no, in someone's face," he says. "I
don't have to push to make it a yes. That's not my job." He
says he learned an important lesson from his dying brother: "My
responsibility was not to save him but to love him and give
what I could. My responsibility is to love the children, to
give joy and celebration, not to make them accept it. That's
their choice." Fortunately for all concerned, most do accept
the gentle medicine of Dr. Stubs with gratitude -- and giggles.