Clown Suits? What a Relief!

Rosalie Steiman and son Mark didn’t know they’d be wearing clown suits in Macedonia.

The two volunteered for the weeklong tour of Albanian refugee camps thinking it would be like a business trip.

They might have gotten a clue from knowing that one of the participants was Patch Adams, the Virginia doctor whose fondness for red plastic noses inspired a recent film by that name.

“Fifteen minutes before the bus to the camps was to leave,” Mark Steiman of Aliso Viejo recalled this week, “Patch said, ‘Why don’t you go get a clown suit?’ ”

So Steiman, an executive for an Orange County mortgage company, rummaged through a trunk for a green wig, red nose and turquoise dress. Rosalie Steiman, unemployed at the moment, also found an outfit to her liking, and the two joined a refugee relief group of 32 humanitarians, a third of them doctors and all of them clowns.

“What I learned,” Rosalie Steiman said, “was that you can be whatever you want to be. The only thing I can compare it to is having a baby for the first time.”

Added her son: “It was very intense.”

Intensity was not exactly the goal, said Richard Madeira, a Long Beach filmmaker and anthropologist who organized the trip last month under the auspices of Long Beach Sister Cities Inc. and several other relief agencies. “The idea,” he said, “was not to go over and take pictures of children hanging off barbed wire. We didn’t go there to justify our bombing. We went to bring some hope, love and, especially, to bring some care.”

But wherever Patch Adams is, clown suits are sure to be evident.

“Patch prides himself in being irreverent,” said Madeira, a longtime personal friend of the famous doctor. “He goes to cancer wards dressed as a clown to bring joy and happiness and goofiness and kind of lighten things up. I think we did the same thing--lightening the load by being silly, going for the heart rather than the mind.”

They also brought bags of donated clothing, coloring books and medical supplies. United Nations certification requirements prevented the doctors from practicing medicine in the refugee camps. So they and their cohorts, including three from Orange County, carried out their mission with bubble wands and balloons rather than thermometers and hypodermic needles.

“It’s amazing what we could do with no language,” said Marilyn Helgeson, a Westminster real estate broker who donned her first clown suit to meet some of the 45,000 refugees occupying the two camps the group visited. “It reinforced my belief,” she said, “in the importance of love and compassion.”

With the nearby pounding of NATO bombs shaking the ground beneath their feet, the group would divide into pairs to venture into camps housing those who had fled the violence in Kosovo. Within minutes, Helgeson said, each pair would be surrounded by hundreds of eager children. “It was obvious that they hadn’t seen clowns before,” she said.

The young refugees would smile, hold the visitors’ hands, touch their wigs and whisper appreciatively in their ears. The clowns, for their part, would respond by giving lessons in bubble blowing, handing out stickers and painting the children’s faces.

Afterward some of the parents would thank them and confide that perhaps that night their children would dream of clowns instead of bombs. For the first time in months, they would say, they had seen the children smile. Finally, the parents would tell the clowns, the children could be carefree again, if only for a day.

As the bus full of funny faces pulled away from the last camp for the last time, Mark Steiman recalled this week, its path was almost blocked by a crowd of children chanting, “I love you!” and forming hearts with their hands.

It was an ending worthy of Patch Adams, whose antics have become the stuff of Hollywood. And, much like the movie, it inspired the mother-and-son team who now say they would like to return.

“There is nothing more noble than breathing hope and love into somebody’s life,” Mark Steiman said this week at his office in Orange. “Someday when my own children ask what I did, I don’t want to have to say, ‘Nothing.’ ”