By Jeb Phillips
The Columbus Dispatch (Ohio)
Copyright 2006 The Columbus Dispatch
All Rights Reserved
It had been four months, so when the door opened and the guys in camouflage came through, people cheered. They cried. They waved their American flags and their “welcome home” banners.
After all the attacks in Kirkuk, all that time away, everyone was home safe. The families and friends standing at Gate B35 at Port Columbus could exhale.
Then Master Sgt. Matt Roach walked out.
In the middle of all this emotion, the release of all this anxiety, it was hard to take your eyes off the rubber chicken strapped to his pack.
There’s a clown in every group.
Roach’s colleagues tease him. He’s a civilian firefighter at Rickenbacker Air National Guard Base, and when he’s deployed, a military firefighter with the Guard’s 121st Air Refueling Wing. He’s a veteran of Desert Storm and now the war in Iraq, and one of his great passions is putting on makeup and acting stupid.
“He gets some funny looks around here when he dresses up before he leaves for a party,” said Dave Patterson, a firefighter and medic at Rickenbacker who works with Roach.
The makeup thing started in high school, when Roach wore costumes to work at haunted houses. He even owned a haunted house in the Brewery District for a couple of years. He had to work on his face to scare the customers, a kind of reverse preparation to be a clown.
About four years ago, he was visiting patients at Columbus Children’s Hospital, as firefighters sometimes do. Roach didn’t cheer the kids very much, but then some clowns came through.
“The kids were sad, and then they were happy,” Roach said, and that was enough for him.
He joined the Freemasons fraternal organization and later as a Master Mason could become a Shriner. Shriners are famous for children’s hospitals, circuses and clowns. Roach, 33, trained to be a Shrine clown for several months and emerged as “Bug-A-Boo” (a play on his last name and his haunted house history).
A good clown does not just paint his face and talk in a goofy voice. Roach calls those clowns “ugly clowns,” and the particularly bad ones “hideous clowns.”
It takes time to learn how to make balloon animals and to do magic tricks. Children want to squeeze your nose. A good clown knows how to let the kids squeeze without taking the nose with them.
“A clown’s worst nightmare is a nose falling off,” Roach said recently at his Far West Side home, where he spent 45 minutes making up his face for a party.
He starts with a stencil to draw the eyebrows in. He works on his eyes and his muzzle, the white area around his mouth. Roach is an auguste clown, with a mostly tan face, a little darker than his skin color. “Auguste” means “foolish” in German, and the auguste clown is the jokester, the troublemaker.
An auguste is second in the Shrine clown hierarchy. At the top is the white-face clown, who is in charge during an act. At the bottom is a tramp or hobo clown. The joke is always on him.
This is Roach’s shorthand: If all three types of clowns are present, the tramp gets the pie in the face. If there’s no tramp, the auguste gets the pie. The white face should never get the pie.
Ugly clowns wouldn’t know that.
Roach chose to be an auguste because it fits his personality. He’s the guy who would come home from Iraq with a rubber chicken strapped to his pack. He always carries magic tricks in case someone needs cheering. He had his wife, Nicole, send balloons to Kirkuk when he was there. If Iraqi kids came to the base looking for candy, he made them a balloon dog, or a sword, or a funny hat.
When he’s done putting on his face, he starts on his daughter, Hannah’s. She goes by the clown name of “Little Boo.” She’s 10 and heading into the fifth grade. She helps her father when she can, and she gets a cut of his $100 an hour fee.
“If they’re scared of me, they’ll go up to Hannah, because she’s their size,” Roach said.
Nicole, who keeps a sign in the kitchen that reads “My Next Husband Will Be Normal,” packs the drinks. It’s 90 degrees outside. Zachary, 4, who has been listening to his father talk about being Bug-A-Boo for two hours, says, “I wish I was a clown.”
“You will be,” his father says.
Then he and Hannah are out the door, on the way to the home of Kaylen Gabbidon, who is turning 6, and whose parents found a number for Bug-A-Boo in the phone book.
Bug-A-Boo and Little Boo sneak around the back. The kids are in their swimsuits, playing in a blow-up pool, going down a blow-up water slide, and it’s just like Roach said it would be. They see him and swarm.
“What’s your name?” a boy asks.
“It’s Bug-A-Boo! What’s yours?”
Bug-A-Boo turns on a bubble machine and the children dance through it. A girl on a swing says that she’s scared of the big clown, but she walks up to Little Boo, who stamps a temporary tattoo on her hand.
The kids squeeze Bug-A-Boo’s nose and it doesn’t come off. One asks if he can have it, and Bug-A-Boo says he needs it to smell cotton candy. One boy wants a balloon sword, and a girl wants a princess wand, and another boy wants a hat.
The kids laugh, and Bug-A-Boo couldn’t be happier.