New York City Treating The Funny Bone

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Clown Care got its start in 1986, when an official at Babies Hospital asked if Big Apple Circus clowns would entertain at a gathering for patients and their families. Christensen and fellow clown Jeff Gordon obliged, performing a 20-minute parody of hospital personnel, food and procedures. Patients and staff alike roared with laughter, especially when the clowns coaxed the otherwise formal chief surgeon into participating in a silly bell-ringing routine. The session, says Christensen, was "the most fulfilling 20 minutes of my professional career, and it was from that experience that the C.C.U. plan took root."

With $10,000 in grant money from the Altman Foundation, used mostly for props, salaries and administrative overhead, Christensen and the Big Apple Circus designed a five-week pilot program. As he tuned in to the needs of his new audience, Christensen made changes in his timing and toned down his circus-arena makeup and gestures to suit the bedside. Perhaps the most daunting hurdle was earning the respect and support of the medical staff. "They had to accept that we were there as part of their world," he says.

Dr. Martin Nash, director of Babies' Pediatric Kidney Disease Program, recalls, "Most of us thought it was a wonderful idea, but we were not sure how it would work and if it would be accepted by the parents of sick children. But Michael's and the other clowns' techniques were so disarming, they captivated everybody immediately." Indeed, Nash confides, hospital personnel thoroughly enjoy the shows of Dr. Stubs and his colleagues.

At the end of the program's hugely successful trial period, Christensen and the circus had no trouble finding further funding from a number of local and national foundations and corporations. He recalls only one voice of opposition. "A hospital staff member once said, 'Clowns don't belong in the Intensive Care Unit.' So I said, 'Neither do children.' "

One of the most touching and poignant cases encountered by C.C.U. staffers concerned a gravely ill youth named Carmelo. The boy had a chronic renal condition, epilepsy and heart trouble that left him, at 14, just 43 in. tall and dependent on dialysis and a battery of medications. In addition, family troubles had rendered him angry and very lonely. For more than a year, the C.C.U. "doctors" spent time with the teenager, who rarely talked and refused to walk. Then one day comic magician Mark Mitton taught him a "mind-reading" card game, and Carmelo began to open up. The boy took great pride in fooling one of his real doctors with the card trick. Mitton later said Carmelo was a good enough actor to join C.C.U., except "we've got a problem because you can't walk." "Oh, I can walk!" Carmelo bragged. He hadn't taken a step in eight months.

Within a few weeks, Carmelo had procured a new pair of tennis shoes and was on his feet as a $2-a-day C.C.U. performer. Immensely proud of his new occupation, the boy found the will to battle against mounting odds far longer than his doctors expected. His condition began deteriorating rapidly last winter, however; in July, two months after open-heart surgery, he died.