She Clowns Around, but It’s All for a Good Cause

Rebecca L. Rudolph, 20, has been having a good time clowning around for three years, but now she’s getting serious. Well, sort of.

Besides her regular role as Buttons, a birthday party and business-promotion clown, Rudolph is developing Carrot Top, a red-haired clown with a message to children that they ought to keep their bodies healthy through good nutrition and exercise.

“Carrot Top is a good name and it’s health oriented,” said Rudolph, a Cal State Fullerton senior studying public relations and health promotion. “Everyone knows that carrots are healthy.”

Although Carrot Top will have a serious side, “she’s still a clown and clowns promote laughter,” Rudolph said. “Adults and children need to laugh more and loosen up and Carrot Top is going to promote that.”

Because clowns can do and say anything silly when in costume, she said, “children can relate to me. My aim is to reach children so they can start eating more nutritionally so when they become older, they’ll have strong healthy bodies.”

But developing a new clown character like Carrot Top is no easy task, said Rudolph, who has performed at charity functions and with a professional clown group at Biola College. “The new character not only had to fit my facial features but it had to fit my personality.”

She said that though she has always been outgoing, “I tend to become more of a free soul when I’m in my costume.”

Her costume for Buttons includes a rainbow-colored wig, makeup that takes her up to 1 1/2 hours to apply (“I can do it in half an hour if I have to”) and striped pants and blouse in various colors. She is still developing the clothes for Carrot Top.

“I know children are going to take to Carrot Top,” said Rudolph, who attends health seminars and presentations at the University of Redlands in addition to her classes at Cal State Fullerton. “Children have to make changes in their eating life styles if they expect to grow up with healthy bodies. Eating junk food just isn’t the way to go anymore.”

She said family health problems prompted her to settle into health education through her clown characters. “At least there was enough sickness to make me think about being healthy,” she said.

Tracy Bellisario of Anaheim figures the way to win trips, cars, big money and thousands of others prizes in giveaway contests is to beat the odds.

The way to do that, she believes, is to learn the ins and outs from someone who, like she, knows, since she has entered and won money and many other prizes, including a cruise worth $3,500.

Her class at The Learning Activity in Anaheim is called “Sweepstakes and Contests,” and its aim is to show the beginner or novice contest entrant how to get in on the estimated $84 million that American companies spend each year on promotional contests.

“It’s like any other hobby,” said Bellisario, a mother of three who enters 20 to 40 contests a month. “The more you do it, the better you get.”

She doesn’t enter the lottery. “That costs money,” she noted. “You don’t have to buy anything to enter contests, only the postage.”

Wouldn’t you know that a week after Virginia J. Swink, 32, upgraded her wedding ring to half a carat, it would slip off her finger into the toilet. “Things like that happen,” said sympathetic husband William Swink. Then he hugged her.

That’s nice, but not good enough.

So she called a plumber. He couldn’t find the joined wedding-engagement ring, so he took the toilet to the backyard and smashed it apart. Still no luck. She called her insurance company and filed a claim.

The original ring was gone forever, apparently.

But that thinking was not good enough for Virginia Swink. She decided to call the City of Fullerton sewer maintenance department and report the loss.

Can you believe she got a call from them saying they would flush the line and try to locate the ring? “There was only a 10% chance,” they said.

She watched while sewer workers Don Pyle and Daniel Diaz went down the manhole and flushed the line. Still no ring and they left.

But an hour later the men called back saying they went a couple blocks farther, flushed the line and found the ring.

“The ring itself was ruined,” she said, “but the diamonds were intact.” And then she added: “Does that restore your faith in people?”