FORT WORTH, Texas — Imagine sitting there when all of a sudden an ambulance pulls up and out pops, a bunch of clowns?
“When we pull up at stoplights, I have gotten some crazy reactions,” said Amber Munoz, also known by her clown name Miss Pickles.
“They kinda look at you strange like, ‘I don’t know about this,’” said Nitro Stat, a.k.a Jimmy Aycox.
“We reassure them that it’s going to be a whole paramedic and an EMT that’s gone come to their emergency when they dial 911,” said Anita Meadows, who goes by Pink Star. “It won’t be a clown. We’re just there to teach.”
They call themselves safety clowns and although they’re zany, this is more than just funny business.
Whenever they’re not clowning around, they work for MedStar in Fort Worth and they say it’s their job to get people the help they need.
However, in an emergency, kids don’t always know where to turn.
“We want them to know exactly how to do that so if something happens to mom or dad and they’re the only ones there, they know what to do,” said Munoz, a systems status controller.
They’ve always taught those lessons, usually in uniform and usually with mixed results.
“I think the kids can probably relate to a clown versus a paramedic and an EMT in their uniform,” said Meadows, MedStar’s operations scheduler.
So, more than a decade ago, they took a different approach.
Employees interested in being a safety clown were put through clown college—still a part of the process today—and then sent out to health fairs, schools and festivals to teach the importance of being prepared.
And this kind of schtick made it stick.
“One of my first calls dispatching was an 8-year-old little girl,” Munoz said. “She knew her address, she knew her phone number, she knew her mom’s name, she knew all that information because she had been taught that.”
Clowns, like emergencies, can be scary, but these clowns have broken through that fear.
They say nowadays, kids are actually excited to learn about safety.
“They run up to me and hug me because they saw me last year,” Meadows said. “And they remember what I taught them last year and, ‘I want you to teach my cousin, teach my friend.’
“Nothing beats going up to a kid who’s scared to death, not knowing what’s going on, looks at you strange, and by the time you leave they’re wanting to hug you,” said Aycox. “You can’t beat that feeling.”
And that’s no joke.