For Venice Woman, Clowning Around Is All in Day’s Work

Joan Tinei has been married to a Samoan chief, sung the role of the cook in “Alice in Wonderland” for an opera overseas, and delivered babies.

But these days the Venice resident with flyaway hair and a wide grin specializes in clowning. She recently returned from a tour of Moscow orphanages, where she and a dozen other clowns made lonely children laugh. She also clowns for local nursing homes, where the residents sometimes cry when they see her.

“Clowning helps people to feel their emotions,” she said. “It is a kind of healing by love.”

Tinei, 66, was restless growing up in Queens, N.Y. After graduating from the nursing school at Cornell University, she went to Hawaii. “I decided to see the world,” she said.

She saw it. In Hawaii, she danced until dawn with American soldiers returning home from World War II. The pretty young nurse married one of them, had two daughters, moved to Guam and Washington, then divorced. She later married a Samoan chief, traveled around the world with her new husband’s dance troupe and cared for three sons. They moved to Hollywood, where her husband danced for the Seven Seas Restaurant while she worked in a hospital delivery room.

By 1977, though, Tinei decided that, in her travels, she had somehow left a part of herself behind. She participated in a workshop called Create Yourself--and launched her second career: Soon she was taking voice and piano lessons and acting in movies and plays.

Every day now, she takes a bike ride along the ocean. Most days, she sits in her apartment shaded by jasmine trees and meditates. She’s currently reading a book on yoga called “Energy Ecstasy.”

“I want to keep on growing into the more that I know I am,” she said.

But Tinei’s quest for self is not a solitary one. Her discovery of what she calls “the energy of pure love,” she said, is what has led her to spend much of her time performing for children and senior citizens.

Jan Gabrielson of Rancho Park has been elected president of the Century City Bar Assn. for 1991. Gabrielson, a UCLA school of law graduate, is a certified family law specialist and partner of Walzer & Gabrielson in Century City. He is also an American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers fellow.

UCLA Associate Prof. John Richardson Jr., who teaches at the graduate school of library and information science, has won the 1991 Research Paper Competition sponsored by the Assn. of Library and Information Science Education.

He received a certificate and cash for his paper “The Architectural Logic of General Reference Work: Basic and Subordinate Level Knowledge.”

The Beverly Hills Education Foundation honored the Max Salter family for their longtime support of the foundation at a dinner March 13 at the Regent Beverly Wilshire hotel in Beverly Hills.