Enterprise woman clowns around

By Carole Brand
Published: November 26, 2009

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Maggie McPherson’s laughter is contagious. With a smile and a joke, she encourages her audience, whether adults or young students, to laugh with her. McPherson, at 73, continues to make her audience love her as she has for more than 50 years.
Growing up in Hollywood with a mother who loved to dance and loved the theater, McPherson said she followed her mother to dance lessons.
“I grew up in old Hollywood in the years before Bob Eubanks was on “The Newlywed Game.” He and his wife were once professional skaters and it was at his house with his wife Emma, that we made our costumes in the Spanish Ballet Company,” McPherson said. “The Eubanks lived next door to Bo Derek.”
Performing as a flamenco dancer for the ballet company, the short, but fiery, McPherson, honed her crafts of dancing, acting and writing.
She left Hollywood for a short time and attended clown college in St. Petersburg, Fla.
Today, McPherson teaches a younger generation how to act, dance and perform clown skits. She teaches an after-school clown class at New Brockton Elementary School, where the students are excited about their next performance.
Fifth-grader Molly McDaniel said she chose to take the clown class.
“I loved Miss Maggie’s class last year, and I wanted to come back and learn more because it’s so much fun,” she said.
Ashley Simmons, an eighth-grade student who performed in last year’s production “I Wish I May, I Wish I Might,” which was written by McPherson, said she loved performing in the musical.
“We did a play and musical and it was such fun. Miss Maggie is a great teacher,” she said.
Sixth-grader Austin McWaters said he loved the clown class “because I like to make people laugh.”
During the class, McPherson explained the three clown types — hobo, Auguste and white-face.
“The students got to choose which type of clown they wanted to portray and they designed all of their faces,” she said. “Each one of them wrote a persona of the clown they wanted to be. We even had a makeup session with kids’ makeup. We sent the makeup home with them to practice.”
McPherson said the upcoming lessons before the clown skits will include how to perform jokes and riddles and how to use props correctly.
“There is a lot in learning how to make people laugh,” she said. “These students are getting the opportunity to be someone other than themselves to make people smile and laugh. That’s what I have basically done all my life and I hope to do for a long time.”