Saratoga News

Photograph by Robert Scheer

Mackenzie Soldan, 4, shows off her favorite blanket for her teacher, Linda Levine, director of the Saratoga Parent Nursery School, who clowns around professionally and teaches fun and creativity seriously.

Clowning Around

There's a rainbow at the heart of this nursery school director

By Sandy Sims

Linda Levine lives life as if it's a playground. She loves everything she's doing most of the time, and her mission is to empower as many people as she can to do the same. Here in the fast-paced Silicon Valley, Levine is weaving her magic because she's focused, she's creative and she's loads of fun. She expertly juggles her work as a teacher/ director at Saratoga Parent Nursery School (SPNS), as a teacher at San Jose State University and as the family education teacher for Congregation Shir Hadash in Los Gatos, and she reaches people in the community by teaching creativity classes in industry and parenting classes in public schools, on the radio, and through her own entertainment business, Surprise Enterprise.

In recognition for her work at SPNS, she won the California Council of Parent Participation Schools 1997 Teacher/ Director Award, nominated by the parents of SPNS. She also won the California Parks and Recreation Society Play Award for outstanding contribution to the field of recreation, leisure and play.

At the heart of this 35-year-old dynamo is her alter-ego, Rainbow the Clown. Rainbow is so central to who Levine is that she often signs her name Linda "Rainbow" Levine. Rainbow was born when Levine first took mime lessons at age 8. "You have what it takes to be a great mime," her teacher told her, and at age 13 Levine joined a professional mime group, Intuition Mime, and performed with them in Cincinnati until she was 18 and went to college. But Rainbow continued to evolve.

At first Rainbow was silent and mainly performed juggling acts. When Levine went to college, Rainbow earned the spending money. When Levine worked with stroke patients who needed to learn to talk, Rainbow added dialogue, and later when Levine was working with the deaf community, Rainbow added sign language. Then when Levine moved to California, Rainbow added magic. It's through this whimsical, funny character that Levine weaves her magic.

"Rainbow is always empowering other people," Levine says. Her magic never works unless all the children do the dance, sing the chant or say the magic words first. Rainbow needs the children's encouragement to do her magic. "Rainbow, you can do it," they say. This makes them the boss, the leader, "which is what I think it's all about," Levine says.

"I love center stage," she adds, "but as a facilitator, I use that stage to give people confidence in themselves and their own creativity."

One of the ways Levine empowers people is through her classes on creativity. "Creativity can be learned," she says; "however, it's important when dealing with creativity to tell people how close they are getting to success rather than pointing out all the problems with what they've done." She does this playfully in corporations like Applied Materials by hauling a large batch of Hershey's kisses with her. She throws Hershey's kisses out to those who participate. "Hershey's kisses are chocolate; they're sweet, and they have the image of a kiss and a hug, and it makes people feel friendlier and like they know the answer, too," she says.

When working in the corporate world, to demonstrate the point that creativity comes from problem solving, she shows off her two "designer" denim shirts. One has fabric cowboy boots appliquéed over the lefthand pocket, a couple more on the right shoulder and some funky buttons down the front. She explains that she left this shirt in her car on a hot day, and the plastic pin on the front melted and ruined the shirt. Determined not to give up on this $25 nicely fitting shirt, she figured out a creative way to cover the stains. The other shirt was the result of a turmeric spice stain (Levine loves to cook Indian food) and a botched bleach job. What she wound up with after she got creative is a denim shirt with white clouds all over it and little trains artistically sewn on. "These are the only two shirts in my entire wardrobe that people stop me on the street to compliment," she says.

Levine uses lots of humor to empower. When she gives her talk titled "They're out of control. What do I do now?" to the parenting class she teaches at Congregation Shir Hadish, she asks the parents to describe an out-of-control person. Of course they feed back images of their children screaming and throwing tantrums. "OK," Levine says to them, "now we've covered an out-of-control parent; what does an out-of-control child look like?" They laugh and get the point that parents model behavior.

To demonstrate to her classes the important idea that "creativity is seeing things from a optimistic viewpoint," Levine writes nouns and adjectives on little pieces of paper and then puts them into separate piles. Groups draw a word from each pile and put the words together. They might come up with "grumpy car " or something equally silly. The group then brainstorms several positive things about grumpy car. This creates a positive view of grumpy car and an optimistic point of view for problem solving.

"Using this same process," Levine says, "imagine looking for the positive aspects of your child's hyperactivity or shyness or intelligence or even serious physical challenges like blindness or deafness." Suddenly the focus changes from what your child can't do to what he or she can do. This opens up all kinds of creative possibilities.

Levine's playfulness as a way to reach people has been reinforced by her education and training. After earning her bachelor's degree in therapeutic recreation, Levine worked with people with special needs. This is when she learned to use recreation as a tool. Some of her clients had spinal injuries or strokes. "These people were working so hard to learn to feed themselves, wash themselves, care for themselves, that they had lost sight of things that give quality to life--things that are done for the love of doing them." Instead of doing traditional therapy, Levine was able to help them through play. For example, if a person was learning to talk again, she set up a singing group or a card game, some playful activity to motivate the person to talk.

Levine eventually became curious about how people without special needs were learning and growing and how they were finding quality in their lives. So she got a master's degree in education with an emphasis in early childhood development.

She was offered the directorship of a therapeutic recreation department in Cincinnati. Her future looked bright. She could remain in the loving community where she grew up as "Ben and Dolly's kid." She would find a nice Jewish boy, settle down and live happily ever after. Well...

While this was a "wonderful cocoon to grow up in," Levine says, she wanted more. Perhaps it was because she had traveled as a child with her parents, who are international tour guides; perhaps it was because, since she was very young, people told her she should move to San Francisco. ("I guess it was the creative spirit they saw in me," she says.) Perhaps there was just something Californian about Levine. After all, she became a vegetarian when she was 13, which is a very California thing to do.

"I just decided to go for it," she recalls.

She moved to California and got a job at Agnews Developmental Center. She also got a job teaching part time at SJSU in the recreation and leisure department. After 10 years, Paul Brown, the department chairman, says, "Linda is still a breath of fresh air."

In addition to courses for students majoring in recreation and leisure, Levine teaches a class called Leisure Education for Life. It's not surprising that the purpose of this class is to help people understand the importance of leisure, to find balance and passion in their lives. Her students include retired people, workaholics, athletes and students from other majors.

To explain what "leisure" is, Levine holds up three fingers. She gives three definitions. Most people define it as free time, that is, unobligated time when they don't have to brush their teeth, clean their floor or be on a job. The second definition is the recreation you choose, like Jazzercise or tennis or clowning. "The last definition," she says, "is my favorite. It's my definition. Leisure is a state of mind, anything you experience as joy. If you experience flow, if you experience a love of doing it, that's leisure. So I consider most of the time I'm here [at the preschool] leisure time even though I get paid for it. Most of the time I'm clowning or making dinner is leisure time, but never when I'm doing the dishes."

Levine's job at Agnews was not feeling like leisure, so for her 25th birthday, she decided to give herself a present--a new job. She applied for a position teaching 4-year-olds at the Saratoga Parent Nursery School. It seemed to fit all her training and skills, and she liked the idea of working with parents and children. (Imagine Rainbow the Clown teaching nursery school.)

Levine has been with the nursery school for 10 years and has made quite an impact on the students and the parents, and this year she became the director. She's even developed a creativity club, and interested parents come to her house on Tuesdays to mess with glue, scissors, scraps of paper, rubber stamps, paint, beads--whatever they want--at her dining room table. "This is also a way for them to get to know each other," she says.

Levine has also been married for 10 years. "It was love at first sight," husband David Buseck says. "We got to know each other because of Linda's chutzpah." They had talked across the table at a Jewish singles event in Palo Alto, and she was the one who came around the table and introduced herself. When asked what it's like living with Levine, Buseck says, "There aren't enough good things to say." Then he laughs. "It's living with theme-based directions and supporting the postal service. Linda sends out a gazillion homemade cards to people." Then he talks about her as a clown. "I am amazed at how intuitively she reads and responds to a crowd. It's fun to watch the kids react and exciting to watch Linda work."

Both Levine and Buseck say time is their biggest challenge. Maybe that's why they sat down last Thursday to coordinate their calendars through the month of February. They made sure to plan eight date nights. "We put a lot into our marriage," Levine says.

Levine puts a lot into everything. She is getting back as well--from all those people she empowers who send her little notes of appreciation, become her friends, give her awards, and come back to see her over the years. It's the audience applauding this clown with a mission.

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