Clowns make the rounds at the OC Fair
It’s 11:52 a.m. Thursday at the Orange County Fair’s Blue Gate.
It’s Kids Day, and children 12 and younger get in free. Yellow school buses unload herds of kids with matching T-shirts. Some children in line stare into the parking lot, while a few preteens are on their phones.
Eight more minutes until the fair opens.
Suddenly a figure emerges from inside the gate. He’s riding a bike steadied by training wheels and decorated with sunflowers, carnations and clusters of honking horns perched on the handlebars.
Ravioli has arrived.
Sporting a green shirt and rainbow-colored pants and giant bowtie with zigzag patterns, this clown’s on a mission.
“To help people feel happy,” Ravioli says. “To help people get through the line.”
Ravioli the clown high-fives kids from a Westminster summer camp as they get in line to attend the OC Fair on Thursday.
The preteens from an Irvine summer camp lean against a fence by the gate, some with vacant expressions and arms crossed. Too cool for summer school.
Ravioli pedals up to them in his enormous shoes adorned with silver sparkles and honks the horn on his bike, drawing blank stares.
Time to pull another trick from his sleeve.
“Whoever’s going on the rides,” he tells them, “raise your nose!”
The preteens instinctively raise their hands, then immediately draw them down to point their noses in the air. They crack a smile at the clown’s joke.
Mission accomplished. He rides on.
Ravioli rides up to Clarisse and Vincent Woo, a brother and sister in the preteen camp, and lets them honk the horns on his handlebars.
“Clowns are a little bit creepy,” Clarisse says. “But I liked this horn.”
Elementary school-age children of a Westminster School District summer camp file through the Blue Gate in a line of purple shirts. Their eyes grow wide at the sight of Ravioli.
Shouts ring out from the sea of purple.
“Mr. Clown! Over here!”
“I love your flowers.”
“What size shoe do you wear?”
Ravioli stops in his tracks.
“My shoes are size 2,” he says. “Too small!”
The children laugh. He rides on.
Couple of clowns
On this day, Ravioli is working the first shift as one of three performers in the fair’s daily Clown Patrol.
He picked his name during his first training session at clown school in San Francisco years ago. His first teacher’s name? Noodle.
“I wanted to be a part of her family,” says Ravioli, who, like the other clowns, prefers not to give his real name.
Before arriving at the fair on Thursday, Ravioli woke up at 7 a.m. in his hotel room in Anaheim, where he and his wife, fellow clown Sparkles Delight, are staying during their working trip from the Bay Area, where they live.
Before putting on his clown makeup, Ravioli practices tai chi, a series of slow meditative movements. Sparkles Delight says it calms his nerves.
Ravioli paints a red circle on each of his cheeks and affixes a big white fake mustache. Meanwhile, his wife embellishes her face with blue eye shadow, a red heart on both cheeks and lipstick just on the bottom lip.
They both don a clown’s must-have — a red nose.
Then they hop in their car in full costume to drive to the fair. Call them commuter clowns.
Sparkles Delight says other drivers, usually toting families, often slow to peek into her and her husband’s car.
“Look at the clowns!” she sees some parents say.
Ravioli and Sparkles Delight have been married 13 years.
They had a clown wedding in the Central Valley where they recited vows like promising not to put ants in each other’s pants.
Guests on both sides of the aisle held up balloon swords to make a tunnel for the newlyweds to walk through.
Their wedding acted as a fundraiser for the Tracey Interfaith Ministry, which sold raffle tickets for children to win a chance to be part of the wedding party and dress up as clowns.
Out and about with Sparkles
At 1:15 p.m. at The Hangar on the fairgrounds, Sparkles Delight begins her shift on her bike, which is more of a beach cruiser than her husband’s.
A bundle of curly ribbons rests atop her head. On this warm Thursday, she’s wearing an orange T-shirt and a wide multicolored skirt.
By 1:33 p.m., she’s done a few laps on her bike past the food stands under the ski lift ride.
As she parks her bike near The Hangar, fairgoers Brooke Cecil, 7, and her brother Drew, 4, approach. Sparkles Delight asks if they would like to have some plastic rings that are in her bike basket.
The two wear the rings, then take turns honking the horn on the bike.
“They love the slapstick comedy [of clowns],” says their mother, Monique Cecil. “To see someone else older be silly makes them comfortable being silly.”
At 2:27 p.m., Sparkles Delight is finishing her performance, not on the ground but in the air.
She takes a seat on the ski lift with a bubble wand in one hand and a bucket of soap in the other.
As her seat propels forward, she gauges the direction of the wind to make sure her bubbles don’t hit other riders. The breeze is calm.
All clear. She dips the wand into the bucket, lifts it out and lets the bubbles fly.
Three teenage girls riding in the opposite direction glide toward the clown and her bubbles. A dark-haired girl in the middle covers her face with her hands like a baby playing a terrifying game of peek-a-boo.
“I can’t do this, I can’t do this,” she says. “I’m scared of clowns.”
The girl to her left laughs, pulls out her phone and takes a picture of Sparkles Delight.
The clown continues to make her bubbles and waves to the girls.
She smiles on.
A day with Veekay
It’s 3:06 p.m. and Veekay the clown begins his act outside the Kids Explorium on the fairgrounds.
More of a musical clown, he marches toward a group of purple-shirted Westminster campers with a metal washboard hanging in front of his belly and drumsticks in his hands. The washboard is decorated with cowbells and a horn on the side.
Working more of a steampunk look than the other clowns, he drums a tune on the washboard and asks the children to guess what it was.
He brushes a stick along the board, taps a cowbell and repeats the rhythm again and again.
“Is it ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star?’” a camper guesses.
“Or ‘Mary Had a Little … Bell?’” another asks.
Veekay reveals the answer to the mystery: “Yankee Doodle,” he says.
He sings the song and the kids join in.
“Time to go,” a camp leader says when the song is over. But the campers swarm Veekay like ants to a potato chip.
The clown bids the children adieu and continues his march, stepping to the rhythm of whatever beat he taps on his makeshift instrument.
A teenage boy breezes past on foot.
“You’re scary. Toot toot,” he tells the clown before disappearing into the crowd of fairgoers.
Veekay, looking unfazed, marches on.
He walks through the stretch of food stands from The Hangar to Fair Square.
He stops for pictures when fairgoers ask. He bows to the Queen Bee, dressed in a striped yellow and black dress, during her afternoon stroll. He waves to the Zuzu African Acrobats and says, “Hello, my friends!” as they walk to grab a snack.
“Clowns,” Veekay says, “are good people.”
Twitter: @AlexandraChan10
