Clowning Around and Fooling People Give This Versatile Performer a High

Perhaps it was a premonition, but when Valerie Vegh, 44, was younger and dabbled in art, she liked to draw clowns.

Just two months ago, she became a real one.

“I’ve been performing all my life,” said Vegh, married 24 years, mother of two and self-confessed tease. “And people I know aren’t surprised. They would say to me, ‘You’ve always been a clown.’ ”

She tells the story of coming home one day from a recent clown class with her costume on and her face made up with paint. “My son was just leaving with his date when I walked in, and all he could say to the girl was, ‘My God, this is my mom.’ ”

That’s part of her action. “I get a high from fooling people and making them and myself laugh,” she said.

And that’s one of the reasons she’s calls herself “Giggles the Clown.”

If she had a fantasy in life, it was to be an actress. “It still is,” she admits. “But clowning is a kick in the head, and it gives me a better chance to find my own way in life and make a living at it if I had to.”

Vegh charges $60 an hour.

She has prepared herself with eight weeks of classes with professional clowns and is taking acting and magic classes to “make myself a complete performer,” as she puts it. “I want to be really fantastic.”

The acting classes, she feels, will help her show more animation. “A clown shows emotion through the face and through body language.” she said. One of her costumes gives her the look of a Raggedy Ann doll.

But most of all, she said, “I need the fun and the laughs that come from being a clown.”

For a good part of her life, Vegh said she worked at various secretarial jobs. “I hated all the jobs and working 9 to 5,” she said. “It was like being in prison.”

During those years, however, she managed to use her artistic talent, painting serious portraits at Disneyland, then became a caricaturist until a friend told her: “I can get you a lot more money if you were a clown.”

That led to her current role, which is intertwined with other personal projects, such as her collection of 1,000 dolls--many she made herself--the antiques collection in her house and the two Packard automobiles--a 1947 sedan and a 1951 convertible--she helped restore.

Besides her bent to make others laugh, she said: “I want people to be startled and shocked when I’m around.”

Russ Lajoie, who moves dirt with his giant tractor for Orange County subdivisions, found a moving experience of another sort as a tourist last year in Tasmania.

“I met this guy (Karle Underwood) and we went to dinner together,” said Lajoie. “We started talking about a friendship stone for the Tasmanian International Wall of Friendship.”

As it happened, Underwood was the government coordinator for the project on Tasmania, an island south of Australia.

When Lajoie, who also is a land developer, returned to this country, he shipped a stone of California blue granite with the inscription: “Presented by the people of America as a symbol of friendship and good will through the State of California. . . .”

The stone and others like it will eventually form a wall of friendship at a site to be selected.

He wrote that he wasn’t sure that the 227 million people in this country or the 24 million people in California would approve of what he was doing for the friendship wall.

“But that’s what I did, anyway,” he said.

This is a “just-in-case-you-didn’t-know” item sent along by Harold Wall of Garden Grove.

On Nov. 15, 1867, Charles Algernon Sidney Vivian, the young English son of a clergyman, formed a social club in New York City aimed at merriment.

In a short time, the members decided to become more benevolent and charitable and decided to change the club name to the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks.”

But Vivian wanted the name “Buffaloes,” so the 15 members of the group took a poll. By a vote of 8 to 7, “Elks” won.

And so, they formed Elks Lodge No. 1.

Today, said Wall, a member of Garden Grove Lodge No. 1952, there are more than 2,200 lodges with more than 1.5 million members.

Wall said he thought you’d like to know.