Patch Adams: Don Quixote in a Red Nose…but Not on Red Square

By Justin Lifflander

Patch almost on red square

Even the Russian winter has fallen victim to global warming. Barely a smattering of snow and record high temperatures create anxiety and a sense of imbalance.

But each year one reliable harbinger of the season appears.  In mid-November barricades go up around much of Red Square. The authorities maintain they’re necessary for assembly of an ice-skating rink across from Lenin’s tomb. But those in-the-know know better. Patch Adams is in town.

At 74, the clown-doctor made famous by the eponymous 1998 movie starring Robin Williams, is alive and kicking…hard.

Patch loves being arrested, preferably in grand public places. Twice in the early 2000s he and several of his cohorts were detained while street-clowning in the shadow of the Kremlin.  They were eventually released, having charmed their jailers. A few properly placed phone calls by Patch’s local charity partner, Maria Eliseeva probably helped.

Every November Patch, thirty international volunteers and a dozen Russian friends are on the loose in the city—visiting orphanages, hospices, homeless shelters and hospitals.  They work with marginalized people: the ones you don’t see, the ones you don’t want to see, the suffering you can’t see.

At first Patch hated the Robin Williams movie. He thought it left audiences with the impression he had fulfilled his dream: building a free medical clinic in West Virginia where no insurance is accepted and doctors and janitors get the same salary. In reality, the clinic shut down in 1983.

Patch partner in Russia Maria Eliseeva working with disabled orphan

Is it clowning?

Patch hit the road to stay close to the needy and to raise funds…lecturing and organizing “clown trips” that take him annually to Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Cost Rica, Peru, Morocco and Russia.

Patch attempting to entice passersby to join him in his giant underwear. Photo credit Natlia Lifflander

 It’s not about juggling skills, Patch insists, it’s about going to dark places and learning to connect. “Clowning is a trick to bring love close,” Patch says.

Laughs and smiles are preferred, but weeping is ok, too. Sometimes eye contact is enough.   The work takes courage — especially now that Stephen King and Joaquin Phoenix have fomented belief that clowns can be menacing.

Valor is boosted by the red nose. The world’s smallest mask. Clown etiquette allows us to remove it if we come across a coulrophobe. And we eschew makeup: it tends to smudge when hugging.

Why Russia?

Patch’s first visit to Moscow was in a beatnik-filled bus which penetrated the Iron Curtain in 1974.  In 1985 the two-meter-tall figure with the Dali mustache and multicolored ponytail joined a “peace” tour with actor Mike Farrell. He has returned every year since.

Clown group photo on the edge of red square

Seduced by Dostoyevsky and Rachmaninoff at an early age, Patch’s attraction is to the Russian people, who, he says, “give back a wonderful response” to clowns. Although Patch tends to be critical of politicians, he makes an exception for the presidents of Costa Rica and Ecuador, who have both joined him for a dance inside his pair of giant underwear.

Building a tribe

A clown trip is a week or two of informal group therapy. The bond remains after the clowns have boarded flights home. The WhatsApp group never goes silent.

Dutch clown Marleen Van Os with disabled orphan

Clowns, like Dutchwoman Marleen, now on her tenth Russia trip, are nurturers.  At home, her job is attendings young adults with mental disabilities. In her free time, she earns a few extra Euros caring for disabled people. “And, inevitably,” she says with a grin, “when I go out to dinner, I wind up sitting at table next to Downs kids….”

The first-timers are often concerned about their lack of clown skills. But by the end of the first day they are rolling in the hospital aisles, blowing bubbles on balloon-bursting brats – while onlookers squeal with delight from wheelchairs and gurneys.

It is a transformative process. I used to be a suit. Now I’m a nose.

Many clowns are orphans in a broader sense, rejected or denied by loved-ones through tragedy, prejudice or the natural ebb of life. 

Weston, a gay actor from California, was cut off by his parents when he came out. “They abandoned me, and so I abandoned myself,” he said. Clowning helped him to learn to love himself – another of Patch’s precepts.

Patch calls the “nuclear family” one of the biggest mistakes society has made since exiting the cave.

“We need a tribal life, bound to nature, influenced by the arts,” Patch says.  “There is a collective healthiness in the group, though you won’t find much in the med-school literature to describe it.”  It’s not surprising that many of the volunteers are medical students and professionals, driven to clown by disillusionment, rage and burnout.  

Clowns mixing with locals at Sheremetyevo. Photo credit Natalia Lifflander

Activism

The work is done in civilized cities and war zones.  In the 2002 documentary Clown in Kabul, Ginevra, Patch’s diminutive Italian sidekick and a Russia-trip regular, holds a young girl’s hand, another clown  plays the fiddle and  a doctor peels charred flesh from the child’s body as her parents look on.

French clown Helene Monsigny comforting an elderly woman in an old folks home

Patch and the clowns have been stoned while working in refugee camps in Bosnia and the West Bank.  He nearly got killed in Chechnya as he strolled through a market.  The conservative Muslim society might have accepted the fuzzy chicken hat on his head and the dental lip-spreader in his mouth, but raising clown pants to expose naked legs violated all cultural norms.

Though Patch still hopes to get the free hospital built, he’s added more causes: battling child sex trafficking, hunger, climate change and suicide among US veterans.

The Russian clown trip accelerated the healing process of US Army doctor George Patrin, who fell into deep despair from PTSD and the suicide of his son. It inspired him to sponsor the first veterans’ clown trip with Patch to Guatemala.

Prescriptions

Patch’s medicine pouch also contains tough-love.

Clown making portrait of hospice patient

A high school student once asked Patch what the secret to happiness was. “You got food? You got at least one friend? What do you have to complain about?” he replied.

For Patch, happiness is a decision. “At 18, having been thrice committed to a mental institution for depression, I decided to never have another bad day. I want to be the person I create.  Humans are smart enough animals. I can decide to be a selfish bastard, or I can decide to be happy and loving.”

He see’s depression as a state of disconnection, to be cured by actively pursuing interaction

“Mental illness is a diagnosis made by pharmaceutical companies,” Patch says.

At a clown rally in Italy this summer, Mi-el-Lui, a Veronese hospital clown, announced he was stricken by self-loathing and melancholia.  Patch summoned him to the stage and obtained a commitment that he would follow his doctor’s prescription: wear an underwear hat for the next 30 days.

“Medicine has to be fun,” Patch says. You want a photo with him? You have to assume one of three poses: finger in nose; lips spread / tongue out; or head tilted back and jaw wide open—so he can dangle his silicone snot in your mouth.  The result is not a selfie. It’s an anti-depressant.

Mi-el-Lui and friend

Dreaming

 The designs for Patch’s hospital look like they were made by Dr. Seuss and Rube Goldberg, with an entrance framed by two giant feet.

Patch holding hand of hospice patient

For now, his Gesundheit! Institute in West Virginia has a few minor structures but no functioning medical facility.

Why no major donations to facilitate construction? “I guess there is a certain unbelievability to what I am trying to accomplish,” Patch replies.  

A security officer at the Moscow airport, who was trying to help locate a missing bag at the start of a clown trip a few years back, asked incredulously, “You mean those people pay to come here and work with our orphans?”

Then there was the “Clown One” project of the 90s: an airplane with a bright red circle on its nose, with teams of doctors around the world ready to be ferried to disaster sites on short notice. Annette, a Patch volunteer, asked Patch who was going to pay for the plane. “The Templar Knights,” he responded.  They never coughed up.

Marleen and Weston visiting a sick child at home in Moscow

Rejected dreams are part of the clown shtick. It’s no coincidence that one of the clowns’ best friends was the late St. Petersburg hermit and Beatlemaniac Kolya Vasin. Kolya couldn’t understand why the city government wouldn’t grant him prime real-estate and millions of dollars to build a cathedral dedicated to rock & roll, love and the Fab Four.

Patch combats rejection by swatting it away with a wave of his rubber fish.

By his own admission, 22 years after the film, his popularity is waning. Speaking gigs and donations are dwindling. But he’s undaunted.

“Happiness is the platform I stand on when I am near suffering,” Patch says. He claims there’s a “vibe” —the radiance which emanates from him and the clowns as they go about their work.

He has no plans to stop touring. “I’ll do this trip from a wheel chair if I have to.”

Justin Lifflander is a writer and journalist who has lived in Russia for 32 years. His memoir, “How Not to Become a Spy,” is available from Amazon.com