The Clown Inside


Jeanie Maresh’s spirit was finally beginning to soar. She had moved from Indiana to Oregon in 1990, married Chris three years later and was now busy living out the truth of that redemptive nugget–“the third time’s the charm.” Her happy marriage was especially sweet since she had been single for the previous 13 years–following her second divorce–a period when she wondered if she would ever be able to leave behind the effects of a childhood marred by abuse. She couldn’t seem to shake that all-pervasive stigma. She had chosen the wrong man twice, and each relationship had withered on the vine. But Chris was different–kind, giving, quick to smile. Then, with little warning, she got hit harder than she’d ever been hit before.

This time the blow came out of nowhere–an invisible assailant–but she’ll never forget the moment it struck. “It was March of 1999, and I went down fast–balance and coordination problems, extreme burning in my legs, extreme fatigue, cognitive problems, vision, it was full-blown.” She was no stranger to aches and pain, having dealt with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disease, for more than 30 years. She had put up with dislocated kneecaps, elbows, fingers, and seven knee surgeries, most of that time working, raising two sons, moving about the country. But this attack came from a more powerful foe, one that defied easy labeling.

At the time she was front-end manager at a Safeway store–in charge of checkers and baggers–and all she could do was persevere: “I tried everything, from working every other day, if that would help, to working just four hours, then working just two days a week, until finally I couldn’t work.”

Her co-workers were also taken by surprise. To them, Maresh was not only a manager, she was the person who would come in on her days off to raise money for the annual Easter Seals Relay. Dressed as GiGi the clown, she would entertain kids and customers and raise enough for her relay team’s entrance fee for the 24-hour event. “I would sell root beer floats and hot dogs right in the store and do balloon art. I’d make up ads and flyers and pass them out at the checkstand, telling dates and activities for the relay–‘Come meet GiGi the Clown, have your picture taken with GiGi!'”

Debbie Bliss, the variety manager, remembers those days well. “My daughter Kelly would help her make root beer floats and just have a great time. Both Jeanie and Chris were great as clowns. Jeanie has always been an upbeat, smiley kind of person.”

For the next two years, though, until after she was diagnosed with MS in June 2001, Jeanie’s alter ego, GiGi, put away the greasepaint. “I did less and less clowning when I got sick and finally stopped. I thought I would never do it again. A couple years of no clowning. I really thought GiGi had been retired.”

A Hard Journey
Jeanie was born in Princeton, Ind., the second of three children–“I was Daddy’s little girl.” She was nicknamed Silly, her older sister was tagged Grumpy, her younger brother, Smartaleck. But the family dream didn’t last, and in 1958, when she was 5, her mother remarried. That’s when the trouble started.

“They were predators,” she says of her stepfather and his two sons. “I really think it had been a way of life for them. They came from the back hills of Kentucky and their family had passed it on. It was all-out emotional, sexual and physical abuse.”

And it went on for 10 years. During that period the stepfather and both sons abused not only Jeanie but her siblings and her mother. “I always felt like I shouldn’t be there. I was the only one that stood up and spoke up, and I took the blows for it.”

Finally, at 15 she moved to Brazil, Ind., near Terre Haute, to live with her father. Despite her dark past, she excelled in high school. As if to compensate for unhappy memories, at age 18 she married her high school sweetheart. “I chose the cleanest-cut, most straight-arrow boy I could find,” she says. “But I was so damaged, I couldn’t function, didn’t want to be touched. I wanted out.” The marriage lasted three years.

Jeanie and Chris, happy in and out of costume.
Jeanie and Chris, happy in and out of costume.

She rented a home–now she had a baby boy to care for–and continued working. Health spa, dog and cat kennel, whatever it took. Several months later, in September 1975, she met and married a man who was 10 years older. “He was a motivational speaker, sophisticated, and I fell hard.” She had another son, but her husband, traveling frequently, cheated on her. “I shut down sexually, and we were separated a lot.” In 1980 that marriage ended. Now with two sons and two failed marriages behind her, she began questioning herself: “‘Why am I making bad choices? Why didn’t things work out?’ I knew the abuse was affecting me.”

But life goes on, and over the next 10 years she moved around–Missouri, Illinois, back to Indiana–working for a jewelry company, J.C. Penney, a podiatrist, a collection agency, a country club–raising her boys and feeling the stress of being a single parent. “I got down to 95 pounds, not eating. I was an emotional wreck, numbness in my feet, problems with balance. I was falling apart. I really think that’s when the MS began, but I didn’t know it then.”

A friend encouraged her to move to Oregon. Her boys went to live with their fathers and she landed a job at a newly opened Safeway in southeast Portland. A new chapter in her life had begun, the focus now on spirituality. “I took classes in theosophy, read about Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity. I was searching, on a journey of the soul.” She prayed, meditated and listened for God’s guidance, but chose not to embrace a particular faith. “I learned to listen to my inner voice. I knew that God was telling me we were down here to love. That’s all I needed to know.”

One day, while having lunch with her son Eric and his girlfriend at a local restaurant, she noticed the waiter kept coming over to their table. “He couldn’t seem to stay away. Finally, he asked me for my phone number. Of course I didn’t give it to him, I gave him a phony number. I was still burnt out on the whole relationship thing.”

On another occasion, with a co-worker at the same restaurant, she encountered the pesky waiter again. “He knew my friend, he had made balloons for her daughters, so he comes over to where we’re sitting and says to her, ‘Hey, you know me, tell her I’m a good guy. Tell your friend to go out with me!’ And she says, ‘I can’t tell her what to do.'”

The Clown Prince
Now he knew where she worked. He showed up at the Safeway one day in his clown costume with a bouquet of balloon flowers. “He stood at the end of my checkstand and said it loud for the customers and everyone else to hear: ‘You have to go out with me!’ Everyone thought it was so cute, but I still didn’t say yes.”

So he came a second time. “All my coworkers were saying, ‘Give him a chance!’ So I did. I went out with him. I was seeing someone else at the time and so was he. But we eventually weeded them out and developed a full-blown relationship. Seven months later we went to Reno, Nev., and eloped.”

What happened to that wary resistance? “I had my guard up for the first couple of years after moving to Oregon. I just didn’t expect happiness for me, but he’s so considerate and loving and gentle and kind, I would’ve been an idiot not to fall for him. I hadn’t had that before. I trust him, I love him, I believe in him. And he believes in me.”

They became fishing buddies, something Chris had done since childhood. “I caught my first salmon at 5,” he says proudly. “And she showed me she was serious about fishing.” Following Chris’ lead, Jeanie donned hip waders and chased steelhead and salmon through frigid winter waters. They took their fishing boat out on the Columbia in search of sturgeon. She likes to tell of the time she caught five sturgeon while he got skunked.

One day when they weren’t fishing, Jeanie asked Chris if he was ever going to teach her how to do balloons. “He didn’t want to teach me–he lacks the patience. He said get a book and learn. So I did.” The next thing she knew they were at a clown convention in Portland. Over 500 clowns attending seminars–juggling, facepainting, balloon art, magic. “I bought a costume that day, a wig, makeup and everything else and created my clown person–Gigi.”

Her first time in public dressed as a clown she went to a mall and walked around. “I just watched the kid’s reactions and interacted with them, seeing what it was like being on this side of the clown.” Before long, she was dressing up as Gigi, raising entrance fees, and putting together a team of 20 for the Easter Seals Relay fundraiser.

People began to ask if the two of them–Chris and Jeanie–did parties. Chris’s clown character is named Gabacho, so they got business cards made up and started doing birthday parties as Gigi and Gabacho. “We were a very popular couple,” she says.

Every year for three years Gigi and Gabacho did the Easter Seals fundraiser, right up until March 1999, when her first major exacerbation hit. Several months later she had to retire her clown wig and give up her job.

“The first MRI in ’99 showed old scars, so I had had lesions before that.” But the neurologist was hesitant to make a diagnosis because he couldn’t find protein when they did a spinal. “Everybody knows with MS you get in there and treat it the minute you see brain lesions,” she says. “I went two-and-a-half years untreated, other than with Neurontin, for symptom treatment, not the disease. Finally, I got a second opinion and the neurologist found active lesions that glowed. By the third visit I was on Avonex. That was August of 2001.”

On the Comeback Trail
Learning how to deal with a disease so unpredictable posed a real challenge. “They can’t just tell you you’ve got MS and you take a pill. You have to change everything. Some days my balance is so bad I can’t do anything. Some days my vision’s bad so I do something that requires less visual attention. There’s just a lot of adjusting and adapting.”

At first the doctors thought her MS might be progressive, but it settled into a relapsing/remitting pattern. Anticipating the next attack taught her to make efficient use of her time. “Like buying a FoodSaver, cooking up meals on my good days and freezing them for use on my bad days.”

When she started falling and getting frequent cuts and bruises, she tried using a manual wheelchair, usually on nature walks with Chris or to a mall, but not around the house. The first time she went out in public in a chair, to a zoo, she asked her visiting sister, Tresea, if she would ride in one, too. Their husbands provided the push power. “I wasn’t ready for ‘the look,’ you know, I wanted someone to go with me.” She noticed the exaggerated avoidance response of adults right away. “If a child looked at me, a parent would say, ‘Don’t look,’ or ‘Quit staring.’ What kind of message does that give children?”

Missing the contact that Gigi had with kids, Jeanie started easing back into clowning by sitting and making balloons. Sitting in a patio chair by a table, sitting on the floor, sitting on the lawn, Gigi and Gabacho would sit and make balloons together at kid’s-eye level.

After an evaluation ordered by her doctor cleared the way for her to use a power chair, she took the next step on the comeback trail. GiGi made her first outing in a power chair at MS Day at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in 2002. “I took the focus off the chair by going right up to the kids and in my brightest and cheeriest face going, ‘Hi! Want a balloon?’ That first experience they have with someone in a chair is a long-lasting one. If they think it’s pretty cool, they’ll always look back on it with a smile. And the parents–their behavior is entirely different.”

Gigi has done four MS fundraisers and her power chair is now part of the act. Gigi and Gabacho do skits that teach kids how important it is to be flexible and ready to change plans if someone in their family is feeling fatigued. It’s a good idea to have plan B in your back pocket.

Out of costume, Jeanie spends her days staying busy around the house and writing. “I’m writing a book on abuse, how to recognize it and how to stop it. No matter who you are, a neighbor, a mother, a brother, a sister, a friend, anybody, if you’ve seen someone being abused, or if you know it’s going on, do not keep quiet. Speak up.”

Scratch a clown’s happy face and you may find tears underneath, comedy and tragedy flowing from the same well. Jeanie Maresh sees truth in that paradox: We learn to cherish happiness and joy, she says, by not having it. “When you’re a child and you’re abused and happiness is swept away from you, you learn to value it. It’s so important.”

And she’s put the hard-earned lesson to good use: “The only way I’ve found to handle life is with humor. I couldn’t have handled MS that well if I didn’t have that clown inside me. What a commodity a smile is!”


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