Laughter is the best medicine
By SANJAY TALWANI Independent Record helenair.com | Posted: Friday, September 24, 2010 12:00 am
Dylan Brown Independent Record DeAnna Jones, or Pinky Dinky Doo, laughs with Jacob Hartford-Corpron, a 4-year-old patient at St. Peter’s Hospital, while coming out of the cancer treatment center at St. Peter’s Hospital Thursday. Jones feels that staying positive is a very helpful way to recover from anything.
For patients in the Cancer Treatment Center at St. Peter’s Hospital, a little good cheer can go a long way.
And for many of them, from little children to the very old, a three-minute visit from a clown named Pinky Dinky Doo brings laughter and hope, an example of someone believing in a better future even as she battles cancer of her own.
Pinky Dinky Doo is DeAnna Jones, who one might spot in the halls of the hospital, or in an area nursing home, at a local festival or even outside Costco on Child Safety Day, wielding a vast array of tools and a spirit of seemingly endless optimism, all just to get some smiles on the faces that need them the most.
She’s a great-grandmother who looks a lot younger than her 72 years, often wearing a hat with the word “Believe” written in glittery letters.
A Billings native, she’s always been a dancer and dance teacher, but after closing her last dance school in Townsend about three years ago, following some surgery related to her cancer, she wasn’t sure what her next calling would be.
She ended up in clown school.
“After I closed the school down, it was quite depressing to me not to be able to work with children,” she said. “So I prayed and prayed until I could find my purpose, and I guess my purpose was finding that little ad in the paper in Billings, and going to the clown school. And it’s been the joy of my life to give to others, and try to make other people see that there is a reason for living, and that being old is actually being young at heart, and to be able to do something for somebody else.”
She learned the art of clowning, including the lesson that it’s hard to do balloon tricks with long nails. (Hers are now short.)
She started spending time in the cancer center with patients, having fun, she said. And she learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t with cancer patients.
“One of the first things I found out is you don’t paint your face white, because a lot of people are afraid of clowns,” she said.
She’s steadily helped not only sick children, but also the healthy children of patients. Her urge to give seems to never stop: While she was having a conversation in the hospital café, a mother and small boy passed by; she stopped the pair, opened a frog-shaped handbag, and took out a small frog to give the boy.
The frogs are among the many props and costumes a good clown has. Her collection includes a nurse’s uniform, but with a toilet plunger at the end of a stethoscope and a giant thermometer. She gets a kick out of entering patients’ rooms and saying she’s going to take their temperatures — orally, they hope.
“Most people think it’s a death sentence,” she said of cancer. “I don’t look at it that way. If you’re positive and active and look to the future, you’re going to have a long life. And helping people is the most important thing.”
One of her top priorities now is helping little Jacob Hartford-Corpron, a 4-year-old with Gaucher’s disease, an enzyme disorder for which he receives treatment at the cancer center. Thursday, she pulled him around the hospital in a wagon she gave him along with an oversized teddy bear. She’s also trying to raise money for playground equipment for Jacob, who needs a steady regimen of exercise.
Hospital volunteer coordinator Peggy Stebbins said many patients in the cancer center are struggling, but most welcome Pinky Dinky Doo, and she always asks permission before interacting.
“She just brightens their day,” she said.
She even has permission to bring her border collie, Sugar (rescued from the Humane Society), into the hospital. Sugar has his own clown collar, and around Christmas his name changes to Sugarplum. She has a life-sized talking Grinch, plus a puppet, Dr. Winner, a send-up of Cancer Treatment Center oncologist Thomas Weiner, setting the stage for comic sketches.
She has other costumes, like a gorilla suit. She’s entered patients’ rooms wearing a chicken suit and carrying hard-boiled eggs — freshly laid, she told them.
“She knows when to be funny and hilarious and when just to be thoughtful,” said Mary Thomas, a nurse in the Cancer Treatment Center.
And then there are the wigs. The center’s collection was once in less-than-perfect shape, with used ones mixed in with clean ones. Jones took about 350 of them home, washed and sterilized them, and had shelves built in the little wig room. Now, the wigs are neatly arranged, some on mannequin heads, and Jones helps those who have lost hair pick wigs and even cuts and styles them.
“That’s a huge help,” said Thomas. “She’s got a system that works.”
In Jefferson City, the Fairy Festival at Tizer Botanic Gardens raises funds each year for the 21st Century Learning Center in Boulder, an afterschool and summer program for kids. Among the highlights is Pinky Dinky Doo, in fairy mode with wings attached to a clown suit.
“She just loves to laugh,” said Tizer Gardens co-owner Belva Lotzer. “And for someone who’s been through all that she has, what better therapy is there?”
Jones does a program two or three times a day with song and dance, and her sister does face-painting. She also brought the Grinch this year, dressed in pink and with fairy wings, and had kids photographed with it.
Jones also brought an ancient, silvery-grey juniper tree, the remnant of a long-ago fire, urging the nursery to make it into a wishing tree. It’s now part of a recently completed children’s garden.
“She is an inspiration,” said Lotzer. “For someone to be as sick as she’s been and to come back, and just want to make people laugh, there’s something special about that.”
Jones has deployed her talents for Camp Mak-a-Dream and other non-profits. She’s been spotted in what she calls a dune buggy, actually a Volkswagen Beetle painted bright pink that shows up sometimes in area parades. She’s had key roles in organizing Octoberfest in Townsend.
Her desire to perform goes back to her childhood. She’s been dancing since she was about 3 or 4, and at age 15 finished third among more than 800 contestants in a travelling competition that came to Billings (along the lines of “American Idol,” she said). She said there’s almost never been a time when she wasn’t teaching dance and working with children. She has a photo album filled with many patients she’s helped (many of whom are now deceased) as well as numerous children and dance classes, including a group she led in the Rose Bowl parade in the early 1970s.
She doesn’t have to rely on dancing and clowning. She described taking a couple to dinner just last week, just before the 49-year-old husband was to leave for military duty in Iraq. She brought a cake decorated like an American flag, and her daughter sang “America the Beautiful.” Surrounding diners spontaneously stood up and sang along, and received pieces of cake — just another example of Jones’ philosophy that laughter and positive thinking goes a long way, and is contagious.
Being Pinky Dinky Doo is not easy. To prepare for a public or private event takes about a day, packing costumes, props, stickers, musical instruments and other things that delight and amuse. Driving from her home in Townsend to St. Peter’s takes about 45 minutes each way. She carries a $200 electric pump for the balloon tricks, a vast improvement over the hand pump she’s used. After four or five hours of making balloon hats, her arms would get tired, she said.
And now she’s walking with a limp, thanks to a lifetime of tap-dancing on hard floors, and is scheduled for a knee replacement in November.
“If I could do this 24 hours a day without getting tired, I would,” she said. “At my age, it gets a little overwhelming. I think I’ll be better when I get a new knee.”
Reporter Sanjay Talwani: sanjay.talwani@helenair.com
