Word: clowns
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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...
...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...
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...
...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...
Theme-park actors do not, to be sure, make much use of training in Shakespeare or Method-style character analysis. But they say acting study helps nonetheless. Kevin Kraft, 22, is a University of Southern California junior in his second summer as a clown and juggler at Hersheypark; he has also toured with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Says Kraft: "If I pretend in slow motion to grab for a nonexistent ball, I'd better have a real intention to catch it, which is acting technique, or the comedy falls flat...