Omaha's biggest clown is lost somewhere in the western suburbs.
Bubblegum T. Clown stops her minivan and sticks her entire head — pink wig, white cheeks, giant red nose — out of the driver's side window. She looks right and then left, straining to get a visual on Elk Ridge Village, the retirement home where she's to perform on this Saturday morning.
Bubblegum seems a bit nervous, a tad rattled, in danger of violating one of her countless showbiz rules — don't ever let 'em see the clown sweat.
This might be because “it's hotter than a two-pecker billy goat out today,” she says.
It's probably because Bubblegum T. Clown sees the clock ticking — 11:26 a.m., 11:27, 11:28.
She's tardy to pretty much everything when she's simply Donna Roth, a 68-year-old, thrice-divorced great-grandmother with a balky back and a sharp tongue and a house packed with clown memorabilia.
But when she pulls on her striped socks, puts on her green pants one leg at a time and shoehorns her feet into a pair of $500 clown shoes, she isn't just changing her outfit.
Then she's Bubblegum, the winner of 39 trophies in the United States and Puerto Rico, a Hall-of-Fame clown who has played Vegas and performed at the White House, a three-decade pro who has brought joy to the children of George W. Bush and Chuck Hagel and countless everyday Omahans.
When you are “the Cadillac of Omaha clowns,” as she calls herself, you simply cannot be late.
So she nervously scans east, sees the Elk Ridge clubhouse and floors her minivan, the one with the “CLOWN” vanity plates. And at 11:30 a.m., right on the big, red nose, she pulls her big suitcase and her balloon pump through the parking lot and into the retirement home.
Bubblegum T. Clown bursts through the front door.
A dozen senior citizens clustered by the entrance look up, startled.
“Helllooo, everybody!” the clown yells. “I'm the pole dancer!”
And the old folks chuckle and smile and watch as she makes her way across the room and sets up her balloon-making equipment.
Dozens of children materialize out of nowhere, clustering around the clown. They are the grandkids and great-grandkids of Elk Ridge's residents, and while the adults drift toward the hamburgers and hot dogs on the food table, these youngsters are pulled magnetically toward Bubblegum.
One of the first in line is Conor, an 8-year-old boy.
Bubblegum says she'll make him a purple balloon sword.
“Can I have a gun?” Conor asks.
Bubblegum shakes her head no and begins twisting and tying a purple balloon.
“Are you married?” she asks Conor. No.
“Are you engaged?” No again.
“Good, then we can talk,” Bubblegum says. “Do you like tall ladies with pink hair? Put me on your list, you might later.”
Conor turns the color of a fire hydrant.
Roth has been turning bashful children beet red since 1980, the first time she dressed up as Bubblegum.
On a whim, she took a half-day clown class. She figured out she was good at putting on clown's makeup and started to sew herself costumes.
She volunteered at first, worked for her first birthday party for $25, taught herself a few rudimentary magic tricks, learned to bend balloons.
And by the mid-'80s she was winning national clown competitions. She befriended the legendary Emmett Kelly Jr.
She persuaded Hagel to dress up as a chicken and cluck away at a birthday party she worked for his daughter.
She face-painted one of the Bush twins — she can't remember which one — during the White House Easter Egg Roll during the presidency of George H.W. Bush.
And she learned the subtle tricks of the art of clowning. How, for example, to make a child who is freaked out by clowns feel comfortable.
“Do you dress up for Halloween?” she asks one shy preschooler. “Were you Dora the Explorer?”
“A princess,” the girl says.
“I'm a mommy, but I dress up, too. When I go home, I take my costume off. Don't tell anybody, OK?”
The girl nods her head solemnly, vowing to keep the secret.
Bubblegum keeps other secrets from the kids and parents gathered around her, laughing, at Elk Ridge.
They do not know that Roth grew up in an orphanage and foster homes in Council Bluffs.
Her first husband, whom she married “fresh out of the foster home,” abused her, she says.
Her second husband, an Air Force captain, deserted her.
A longtime boyfriend died nine days before they were to get married.
Her third husband got drunk and punched her in the face.
All that heartache was nothing compared to what happened 17 years ago, when she got a call that Geoffrey, one of her three children and her only son, had gone missing in the Missouri River.
The day of his wake, she appeared as Bubblegum at an event for Pepsi. Then she wiped off her clown's makeup, changed her clothes and walked down the aisle toward her son's closed casket.
This is not the sort of thing you tell people as you are making them pink and purple balloon animals.
Crowns do not cry, she says as she sits in the west Omaha home she shares with her fourth husband, Mel, a retired clown named Trac.
Here, in an office crammed with clown figurines, signed clown photos, clown trophies, clown pins and a clown lamp, is where she keeps a small photo of her late son.
Here, hidden, is where a clown can weep.
“After he died, I'd feel like running away, like hiding. I'd almost think about taking my life. And then I'd look at my calendar and think, ‘I can't do that, I have a birthday party.'”
“And that's how I made it through,” Roth says, and uses a tissue from a clown Kleenex box to dry her eyes.
“Being a clown gave me a reason to keep living even when everything was dark. It healed me.”
Today, being a clown means lugging her balloon pump out of Elk Ridge at precisely 12:30 p.m., leaving several sad children who did not get to the front of the balloon line in time.
There is no time — Bubblegum jumps back in the clown van and heads over to a nursing home on the grounds. Then she runs home, changes into a red-white-and-blue outfit and drives over to Pacific Springs Village, another retirement community.
They are holding a patriotic “Spirit of '45” celebration today. They have hired Bubblegum to paint faces.
The face painting is a huge hit with the girls.
Bubblegum sprays glitter on their hair, sticks shiny stars in the middle of their foreheads, smears lipstick on their faces and paints beautiful flowers on their foreheads and their cheeks.
She jokes with them, asks about their boyfriends and their brothers, and holds up a mirror so they can see their faces before they scamper away, smiling.
Finally, a little boy, Tyler, elbows his way to the front of the face-painting line. He says he wants “something to scare grandma.”
“I'll give you a deadly spider out in the jungle,” says Bubblegum, and begins to work.
Tyler is excited, squirming in his seat, anxious to see the deadly painted spider that will surely frighten his grandmother.
“You don't have to be Michelangelo to make this kid happy,” Bubblegum whispers to an onlooker, but then she falls silent, concentrating on the spider's hairy legs, then its eyes.
“Wow!” says Tyler's grandpa when the painting is complete. He looks down at Tyler. “What do you say?” he asks.
And Tyler turns back toward Bubblegum T. Clown, gives her a smile that would melt butter, and says, “Thank you.”
And the clown and the little boy laugh, having captured something elusive.
Contact the writer:
444-1064, matthew.hansen@owh.com
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