A Place Where Clowning Around Just Comes Naturally to Kids

What a circus, I thought, surveying a scene of unimaginable frenzy.

Then I hopped into the ringmaster’s car and Pam climbed into our RV and we drove off, leaving our children at the mercy of a man we’d known for all of 10 minutes, a man who once earned his living on a teeterboard.

Sometimes a road trip’s most enduring memories aren’t forged by slipping into a still lake as it drains the gold from the sky, or by the flavors of muffaletta eaten at a noisy New Orleans cafe during a downpour, but by an engine’s weird growl on a highway lined with darkened Kmarts and Pep Boys.

Were my wife, Pam, and I to launch a new Hudson Valley school of painting, our canvases would feature an RV jacked up outside a gas station. Our work would be sufficiently vivid that viewers might almost hear the nasal roar of mechanics cursing and laughing down in the pit, and feel the drool of sweat down fabric stuck to flesh by record heat. We’ll forever equate suburban New York with garrulous fix-it folks, grumpy Avis clerks and the heat of a strip mall Laundromat because this is where our rental RV’s front brakes broke as we continued across the country, exploring family issues.

The kids, though, will have entirely different memories, thanks to George Orosz, a friend of a friend who runs a summer circus camp at the State University of New York. For two days, Pam and I shifted into that high-pitched, just-getting-stuff-done gear that is triply annoying on the road because each mundane minute taunts of another excitement lost. We called the RV rental agency, found a mechanic, tracked down a rental car, then picked up the kids and shuttled them to an uninspiring business travelers’ hotel in the evening.

Only the next afternoon, when we return to SUNY with the RV’s brakes replaced, do we reawaken to the odd fact that besides being harried citizens of the automotive age, we also happen to be parents. We step back into the gymnasium expecting a reunion with Ashley, 12, Emily, 10, and Robert, 7. Instead, we are greeted by three . . . circus kids!

Actually, more than 50 kids storm around the gymnasium. They ping off the walls on unicycles. They swing overhead on a trapeze. Little girls tiptoe a 2-foot-high tightrope with balancing wings fluttering at their sides. Teenage boys rip polka-dotted hats off each other’s heads in a fast-paced clown routine.

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Nine years ago, when George first teamed with Chris Glober and her husband, Philippe Vercruissen, to create SUNY’s summer circus day camp, 15 kids showed. Now the 50 slots for each two-week session fill instantly, and the partners live comfortably at a confluence of familial currents they didn’t anticipate when they entered the circus world.

George, 46, was 13 and living in Hungary when his mother showed him a newspaper article saying the Hungarian State Circus School was looking for new talent. He was one of 800 boys to audition, one of 50 accepted. “I was a hard-to-handle child,” he says. “My mother thought the school would give me discipline. By the time she saw I was serious, it was too late.” He came to the United States under contract to do his teeterboard act with Ringling Bros. While working with another circus, he met Donna, an American dancer who had turned her talents into a career on the trapeze.

The two married and toured. In Las Vegas, on June 20, 1980, George watched from below as a trapeze strap broke. Donna dropped 25 feet to the floor. Bones snapped, her career over. George kept up his work on the towering teeterboard, but when the couple decided to have children, they reevaluated the circus life.

“I put my life on the line every day, twice a day, for 13 years--25 feet in the air, trying to land on someone’s back,” George says. “And I have zilch to show for it.”

Besides, he says, such dangerous work demands an expertise that some circus parents whip and bully their children to attain. “I would never subject my kids to that,” he says. “A 5-year-old wants to play.”

Philippe, 45, takes a different view of circus life. “A circus is the best place for families. It’s true family life--from early morning till late at night, parents have their children with them. The children see what kind of work they do. Because they travel all the time it seems to me that circus children are more conscious of the world. They meet people from different countries, different cultures.

“A circus is like a small village, traveling from town to town. Even though you travel, the children are in the same community with the same people, the same friends. . . .

“For 10 years, my wife and I traveled all over the U.S. and Canada with smaller circuses,” he says. “It was lots of traveling, lots of hard work, and the money was not that good.”

Still, he loved it. And when he and Chris--an American dancer-turned-trapeze artist, as it happens--had their first child 11 years ago, he didn’t see why things should change.

“I enjoyed it very much,” he says. “Chris did not.”

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For the founders, circus camp was compromise. For us, it was a family opportunity. Reconnecting with our children after even two days apart alerted us that our weeks together in a rolling cocoon has been a lot like swaddling. Emotions are constrained by circumstance. The faintest mood shift commands attention. And we’d all been too happy with road life to notice that our embrace was asphyxiating.

Pam and I stepped into the gym and encountered Robert, somersaulting through a tangle of kids on a blue tumbling mat and the more amazing sight of Ashley and Emily, whooping and giggling as they Ping-Ponged each other toward the rafters on a trampoline.

Later, Ashley--the introspective one--told us that she’d felt wretchedly out of place when we abandoned her. The first week of the two-week camp was over and the children had already formed friendships. Robert immediately shot off with George’s 8-year-old son.

So, as the group paired off to hit the swimming pool, Ashley’s forlorn eyes met her little sister’s.

Already, the road had been working on the girls’ relationship. Circus camp tightened the cinch. Ash and Em, the ferocity of whose sibling relationship sometimes rivals that of mongoose and cobra, became teammates.

Of course, the cautious big sister could not refrain from nagging: “Em, get off that rope! This is only your first day!” And the little sister--who was all of 2 when she noticed that clowning and daredevilry could steal away a share of attention--looped her leg around said rope and dangled upside down and wiggled ears with fingers.

But still, filled with pride as they recalled one outdoor play break, when they overheard someone whisper of their sisterly teamwork: “Wow, they must play a lot of Capture the Flag in California.”

Not everything was done in tandem. Circus Camp also channeled the children off in pursuit of their individual strengths and desires.

Robert, who is content anywhere there’s room to fantasize about being a knight or a policeman, darted from activity to activity, giving equal attention to dancing on rolling tubes and balancing on a bongo-board. Ashley, the aspiring surgeon, spent considerable time off by herself, juggling bean bags. And Emily. Well, Emily makes us a bit nervous.

“You’d better be careful,” Philippe calls down from a trapeze after helping Emily execute a tricky flip. “Theese one is a natural. She may run away and join the circus.”

In a sense, though, that may not be necessary. After the day’s session is over, George and Philippe listen to tales of our peripatetic summer.

Philippe grins. “It sounds a lot like the circus, doesn’t it?” he says.

* Next: Troubled souls in Bethlehem, Conn.

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ON THE WEB

Visit the Sipchens on the World Wide Web at https:// www.latimes.com/trip/ for maps, journals and sounds from the family’s trip.