Four clowns walk into a hospital elevator.
They exit the elevator into a long hall in the Shriners Hospital for Children in Portland, walking past decals of a rooster and a bunny on the floor. The clowns, all Clark County residents — Jim Cobb, Ray Zimmerman, Dave Bryant and Dale Vrsalovich — spread out and start setting up a keyboard and a magic table for their monthly performance for kids at Shriners in August as part of their volunteer work with the Aififi Southwest Washington Shrine Clowns.
The performances happen as part of birthday parties thrown at the hospital by the Daughters of the Nile. The parties are for kids in the hospital, regardless of whether they have a birthday that month.
Over about the next hour, the clowns will perform magic, while Vrsalovich, clown name “Keys,” accompanies the tricks with keyboard tunes. At one point, Cobb, nicknamed “Klutz the Magnificent,” performs a disappearing handkerchief trick.
“What the fudge?” a kid exclaims.
Cobb, an 89-year-old clown, has been performing for about four decades.
“I think there’s a little bit of a ham in all of us,” Cobb says.
He dresses up in full white face — his entire head, face and neck painted, with his body fully clothed so you can’t see any of his pigment. But more than all the awards he’s won for clowning, his performances at the children’s hospital stick out. All four clowns say their reasoning for the performance is to bring smiles to the kids and their parents.
“They’re still kids, and in spite of all that they’ve gone through, they’re still happy,” Cobb explains. “That really makes you want to support them.”
“We’re just trying to bring some brightness to their day,” Vrsalovich says.
Cobb chose clowning over bagpipes, which his wife Lois highly opposed, and is another unit you can do in Shriners.
“I told him, ‘I can’t stand bagpipes, so we’re going to do clowns,’ ” she jokes.
Now the couple’s Washougal home is filled with clown figurines, clown paintings and clown plates hung high on the walls in their kitchen.
Cobb takes about an hour to 90 minutes to put on his makeup and get dressed into his red, white and blue outfit with oversized shoes. Lois helps him with spots on his neck he can’t see. Before his August performance, Cobb jokes that he needs to take a deep breath, and mentions that drawing on his eyebrows makes him cuss. This day one eyebrow is higher than the other.
“I’ll let that go today,” Cobb says. “It’s not what I like, but it’s what I’m going to live with.”
His fellow clowns admire Cobb’s attention to detail.
“He’s the best,” Vrsalovich says. “He’s our beloved leader. He goes all in.”
Beyond funny business
The clowns’ work goes beyond funny business, as their local Aififi unit has raised about $50,000 in the past decade for funding to help burn victim research at Shriners Hospitals for Children. Heather Wadsworth, who was on hand for the clowns’ performance at Shriners with her 8-year-old daughter, Mazie, said the performance offered a reprieve for her daughter.
“They have a lot of activities here for the kids to do,” Wadsworth says. “They have to stay here so long it’s nice to have different things to have them go to and experience. It’s really fun.”
The clowns attempt a variety of magic tricks, mostly trying to make objects disappear and reappear, even though they joke they don’t always get the tricks right. At the end of their performance, the clowns’ attention shifts to the back of the activity room, where birthday cake and ice cream are waiting for everyone.
“Now it’s time for our favorite trick,” Cobb says. “We’re going to make some cake and ice cream disappear.”
