When Sir Toby Clowns Around, It’s Part of the Act

In these days of specialization, apparently even clowns need higher education. So Paul Tobias Rechenmacher, also known as Sir Toby, is spending his days and nights at UC Irvine studying drama.

But while he prances around as a clown in colorful costumes, sometimes riding a 6-foot-high unicycle and juggling anything he gets his hands on, his dramatic dream is to end up as a stand-up comedian.

“Taking these classes expands my knowledge and helps me make comments on society and its politics,” said Rechenmacher, who lives in a trailer next to the college. He added that it is a major life style change from living for three years in Vienna, where he learned to juggle and ride a unicycle.

“I had an incredible time hitchhiking across Europe and it opened my life up to do something I want to do as opposed to do something I have to do,” he said. “It also helped me better understand the world and myself.”

And it has helped him better understand entertainment, he said.

“I just get a thrill out of being on the stage,” said the man who calls himself the “Jester Extraordinaire.”

“I’m very much a clown, but I’m not going to limit myself to one thing.”

That includes his private life. He said he also volunteers at a Laguna Beach family crisis center.

Rechenmacher, one of nine brothers and sisters, said he feels good about his future. “I want to go for it all and if that means stress, I don’t want a little of it, I want it all.”

It was his sister, Sandi Rechenmacher, a clown in Santa Cruz, who “opened my life to clowning,” he said.

Now, besides school work, most of his time is spent entertaining at birthday parties for children and at corporate gatherings for adults where he earns an average of $85 a hour. Most of his entertainment jobs come through the university’s Talent Registry.

“I have a spontaneous personality and just love walking around, greeting and talking to people,” Rechenmacher said.

When he finds time, he also sits in as “Doctor Smoke,” a disc jockey on the campus radio station and plays music from Jamaica.

Rechenmacher plans to graduate this year, but he said he may continue to take other college courses. “I’m learning how to slow down and listen to what others have to say,” he said.

“I’ve always been the life of the party, but now I’m reaching out and listening more.”

For the past four years, Russell Ramsey of San Clemente has been collecting teddy bears, and has set up a display of them in his garage.

During the Christmas holiday, Ramsey decided to share his collection and donated them to New Alternatives in Orange, a home for abused children.

All except one.

“I kept the one I had in my youth,” said Russell, who operates Chez Russell Beauty Salon in San Clemente. “I call him ‘Teddy.’ I couldn’t give him away.”

When Julie Golovkin was studying ocean currents as a fifth grader at Dana Elementary School in Dana Point, she wrote a letter to an unknown pen pal, put it in a bottle and had her teacher toss it into the ocean.

That was on Oct. 6, 1986.

Now a seventh grader at Marco Forster Junior High School in San Juan Capistrano, she has discovered that bottle was picked up by a fisherman in the Philippines.

He found it Nov. 19, 1988, and had his son translate it since the father couldn’t read English.

Now Julie’s sending a letter to her new pen pal through the regular mail.

On a less grand scale, Kristen Nylander’s helium-filled balloon only took one day to travel 500 miles to Utah after being released from Las Positas Elementary School in La Habra.

Her balloon traveled the farthest of 500 sent aloft as part of a Dare to Keep Off Drugs program.