Waiting for Bozo: In Chicago, they take a clown seriously.

Andrea Stava, pretty in pink from hair bow to party shoes, leaned against her mommy’s knees as she waited in the crowd. She seemed awfully calm considering she had waited all her life for this moment.

Maybe the 6-year-old was too young to grasp the full import of the occasion. It wasn’t lost on her mother. “I waited 28 years!” Debbie Stava exclaimed. “When we got the tickets I went bonkers for Bozo!”

Waiting for Bozo is as quintessentially Chicago as deep dish pizza or the Cubs’ Bleacher Bums. Tickets for “The Bozo Show,” the longest running children’s program on television, are so much in demand that parents order them before their children are born.

Nancy Vanau ordered eight tickets while pregnant with her first child. Nine years and five kids later, she finally got the word that her time had come.

Karen Watson and her husband received four Bozo tickets from a neighbor when they were married. “It was a great wedding present,” Watson recalls. “I remember thinking: ‘Gee, what will we be doing in 10 yea”

The reservation list for the show became so unmanageable that it was frozen 10 years ago at 200,000 names. WGN-TV, the Chicago based superstation that produces Bozo five days a week, 155 shows a year, recently got down to the final few names. It briefly opened a special telephone number a few weeks ago to take ticket requests for the next five years.

Illinois Bell logged about 27 million attempts in Illinois alone. And since the program is also carried on cable systems throughout the United States and parts of Central and South America, ticket requests poured in from thousands of miles away as well.

The 140,000 tickets were snatched up in 5 1/2 hours.

Julie Ursin, a Los Angeles resident who grew up in Chicago, ordered four tickets even though she has no children. “My sister has a newborn and wanted them so badly that I made an extra effort to call,” she says. Ursin plans to come to Chicago for “The Bozo Show” and will bring “my sister, her child and maybe if I have one in five years. . . . I don’t anticipate seeing the tickets for several years.”

Bozo has been around for more than half a century and has even entered the lexicon as a slang term for a “fool.” The character was created for children’s records, but made its way onto the television screen when Larry Harmon, the Los Angeles actor who was the voice of Bozo, bought the rights to the clown in 1954.

He franchised the character to more than 80 local stations across the country, including one in Washington, D.C., where Willard Scott, now the weatherman on “The Today Show,” played the clown. Today, only a few locally produced Bozo shows remain, but none come close to the success of the Chicago version.

“This, by local standards, is a large production,” said producer Allen Hall, who has been with the show since it premiered here in 1961. “Most stations can’t afford to do this kind of thing.” The show’s prop cage has floors of costumes, laugh-getters like a real 15-gallon hat and shelves chock full of rubber chickens, turkeys, salamis and a host of other unedible edibles.

Cavorting with Bozo under the yellow, red and blue studio big top is Cooky, a round, naive clown who is often the target of the season’s 15 to 20 cases worth of shaving cream pies and Wizzo, a magician decked out in Arabian garb. And there is Professor Andy, the show’s spike-haired musician, a preteen heartthrob who regularly gets perfumed love letters from young fans.

Lessons in morality lose out to pratfalls and banana peels. Nevertheless, Hall likens Bozo to Mr. Rogers, the popular children’s TV host, in that both communicate with kids. “They’re like members of the family. The kids feel like they’re watching friends.”

Festooned in his thick stage makeup and bright orange wig, Bozo (actor Joey D’Auria) agreed. “You get little kids, little tiny ones, and they say ‘I love you Bozo,’ ” the 38-year-old one-time stand-up comic said before a recent taping. “That makes you melt.”

Before Bozo, D’Auria performed in Los Angeles comedy clubs. As Dr. Flameo, he screamed in key as he placed his hand over various sized candles. His act won on “The Gong Show” and gained the attention of Johnny Carson’s bookers. D’Auria sent a copy of his appearance on the talk show to WGN-TV when Bob Bell, the original Chicago Bozo, retired in 1984. The rest is history.

“I have the best job in the whole world,” Bozo/D’Auria squealed. “I get to make people happy and I love doing it.”

Although each program is taped a week in advance of its air date, editing is considered taboo. Even the plea from a boy who once whispered: “I gotta go to the bathroom” into Bozo’s hidden microphone was aired.

Skits are spiced with sight gags: One clown hitting the other with a 6-foot sponge mallet. And there are the old jokes: Bozo’s brother is getting married to a two-headed lady. Asks Cooky: “Is she pretty?” Answers Bozo: “Well, yes and no.”

Everybody’s favorite feature is the Grand Prize Game when a boy and a girl are randomly selected to toss Ping-Pong balls into six buckets, each a bit farther away than the last. Parents fondly recall practicing at home when they were only knee high. Children anxiously await a chance to win a bicycle and $100.

Andrea Stava was lucky enough to win the chance to play the Grand Prize Game. Her arm wasn’t strong enough to get past the third bucket but she still took home a bounty of gifts, and got a big hug from Bozo. What did she like best? “Everything,” she said. “I like everything!”