Not Just Clowning Around -
Jeannie Lindheim's Hospital Clown Troupe
brings smiles to sick children

By Ed Symkus, Senior Staff Writer

The following article appeared in The Brookline Tab on October 7, 2004, and is provided courtesy of the Brookline Tab Paper.

Jeannie Lindheim could not make it any more clear. " We do not do birthday parties for well children," she says slowly. "We've entertained 21,000 kids in the past seven years - a lot in the hospitals and a lot at holiday parties for sick children."

Lindheim, a very youthful-looking 59, speaking on the back porch of her home in Brookline, is the founder, artistic director and executive director of Jeannie Lindheim's Hospital Clown Troupe, which has been bringing smiles to sick kids in the area since 1997.

But, she likes to point out, she's also a clown, who goes by the name of Bloopers. Yet behind the funny costume and goofy makeup, neither she nor any of the 21 volunteers who make up her troupe, is what you would call a typical clown.

" Our clown world is in the hospitals," she explains. "When people say, `Oh, you're a clown,' I say, `No, I'm a hospital clown.' Our clown world is loving and gentle. We always ask permission to enter a child's room. It is their space. We are the guest. We are their own personal clown. We will do whatever they want us to do.

" What would you like us to do?" she says in a high voice, pretending she's talking to a child. " I'd like you to fly," she answers back in a child's voice. "So we'll fly. We'll do triple back flips. We can do absolutely anything ... badly," she says with a big laugh. "And we involve them in it."

So what's the difference between what she does and what a circus clown does?

"They're not connecting one-on-one," she says. "They're being funny and big and campy. Now I don't mean this in a negative way, but it's not about the child, it's about them. In our type of clowning, it's all about the child and what they want."

Before Lindheim got into this part of her career, she was deeply involved in theater, both in performance and in teaching. After relocating from Cleveland to Boston in 1970, she started teaching acting at UMass-Boston, eventually moving into areas such as movement, improvisation and directing. She had studied clowning with Avner the Eccentric and his teaching partner, Julie Goell.

" It wasn't hospital clowning," she says, "but a lot of the concepts were similar. One is that 'obstacles are a clown's delight' - Avner taught a lot of principles that I still use."

But it was more than that period of study that led her into hospital clowning. In 1996, she happened to be reading "Gesundheit" by Patch Adams,the doctor on whom the Robin Williams film was based. A line in the book said, "I take clowns to Russia." And that line spoke out to Lindheim.

" Now, I don't like clowns, not clowny clowns," reveals Lindheim. "They're sort of scary and weird. And I was scared to go to Russia, because I grew up in the '50s and '60s when they were gonna drop bombs and had air raids. But I thought, I just have to go."

Her husband wasn't too keen on it, either, and she would have to leave the theater school she had been running in Brookline Village. But off she went, with her husband's blessing, for two weeks of entertaining sick kids in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

" And I fell in love with hospital clowning," she recalls. "I thought that when I went back, since I had the theater school, I'd offer a daylong workshop in it. I thought, let me offer a daylong in hospital clowning, and see if anyone is interested. I put a description of it in my brochure, and I got over 50 calls. So I did a daylong, and then I got a troupe. But it's progressed over the years. Now it's a two-year training program. Old clowns go with new clowns for a year and a half before they're on their own."

Looking back on the events of the past seven years, she says, "I didn't really have a vision. I thought I'd get a bunch of people who loved clowning, then I'd train them and we'd go into hospitals. That was about it."

But now I've got clowns coming out of my ears," she says with a big laugh. " Twenty-two clowns, all of them volunteers. We're doing a hospice training in the fall. And I now do four ongoing trainings a year. And I bring in two guest artists a year, to feed me and the troupe. We just had a mime in, and soon we're getting someone in physical comedy."

Lindheim was doing all of this for free, but was spending about 30 hours a week at it, while still teaching. She knew she had to find a way to raise money so she could leave her day job.

" I wanted to do this full time," she says, "so I could reach a lot more kids."

Through lots a networking, she put together an advisory board that has managed to get her some grants. And the troupe is about to be made a part of a study at Mass. General Hospital - they regularly entertain there and at Franciscan Children's Hospital. The head of Pediatric Intensive Care at MGH is doing a Cortisol study on children there, to see if their stress level goes down with a clown visit.

"They're doing 10 visits with clowns and 10 visits without clowns," says Lindheim. "They'll see if we make a difference. But I know we make a difference."

It might be even more interesting to check out the emotional states of the clowns, who often find themselves in their own tough emotional situations while trying to entertain these very sick kids.

" After every gig we do, we meet for 20 or 30 minutes and talk about it," says Lindheim. "We say what our feelings were and if something was really hard. And if something happens, we might call one another and say, 'Oh my God, that image is still going through my head.' But you know what joy you're bringing.

" We have two gifts," she adds. "One is the offer to clown (for the kids), and the other is the clowning. But if the kids don't want us there, they can say no. And we're the only people in the hospital they can say no to. It's challenging teaching the clowns not to take it personally. But sometimes the kids just don't want a visit. Or maybe they just don't like clowns."

But Lindheim wants nothing more than to be a hospital clown. Unfortunately there's all the management stuff to deal with.

" At one point, the board thought I was clowning too much, because I go on all the gigs," she says. "If I'm in town, I try to do all the gigs. So I said, 'Hellooo, that's why I started the troupe.' Running the troupe is great, and I love doing it. But the cherry on the whipped cream is clowning."