Kelly Hone spends her workdays with Chico the chinchilla, Badger the ferret, and Snowflake the hedgehog. Mice, chicks, bunnies, red-footed tortoises, Petunia the pot-bellied pig, and Nigerian dwarf goats round out her retinue. Hone, fifty, is Colors the Clown, the creator and star of an act that has entertained area kids for twenty-three years.
Scooter, an occasionally potty-mouthed thirty-year-old Australian sulphur-crested cockatoo, greets visitors to Hone’s charming 1940 brick home south of Chelsea. Like most of her animals, Scooter was rescued. “He speaks fluent English,” Hone says. “He watches TV and will tell you to ‘close the door’ or ‘knock it off’ if company gets too loud.”
A large Hallmark poster of affirmations hangs prominently on the dining room wall. Hone says she picks one each day. “I’ll be ‘full of possibilities’ or ‘brilliantly unique’ then ‘freakishly talented’ or ‘ridiculously amazing’ or ‘curious and awestruck.'” Today, she says, laughing, “I’m ‘wonderfully quirky.'”
The kitchen window frames a view of her outdoor menagerie. “I have chores in the morning and chores at night,” Hone says. “To discourage coyotes, I have Harley Davidson, an Australian blue heeler cattle dog on watch.” Her only losses since Harley took up guard duty are a few baby chicks Hone suspects were eaten by the neighbor’s cat.
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Hone’s skill as an animal caretaker and trainer stems from growing up on a farm raising “everything from horses and ponies to cows, chickens, ducks, and rabbits,” she says. “I now adopt animals from people who don’t want them.”
One of eight children–she has six sisters and one brother–Hone got her start clowning for her mother, Lynda Collins, and the Girl Scout troop Collins led. “Colors” soon became her alter ego. One of her early animal co-stars, Snow White the dove, performed for Hone’s sister’s wedding more than twenty years ago. Snow White still tours with the troupe today.
“I am a whiteface clown,” she explains. “In the art of clowning, a clown is a personality”–in Colors’ case, “a caring, perfectionist personality.” Another popular clown character, she explains, is the Auguste clown, “more of the rabble rouser and trickster type.”
After settling on her Colors character, Hone designed her look and signature costume. Colors’ dress is made of black-and-white checkered fabric, which is considered appealing to the eye, and doesn’t have much red, which is considered a scary color. Instead of Prada heels, her closet is filled with a dozen oversized custom clown shoes costing $400 a pair. Makeup and details take an hour before each show. More time is always needed to round up all the animals and transport them. “My own three kids helped when they were little,” she says. Now her fiance, Dave Tiihonen, and his children, Emily and Jacob, help pack and unpack the animal family as well as the equipment for another Hone enterprise, a petting zoo she calls Miss Kelly’s Kelihari Safari.
Most clowns today are balloon twisters, ventriloquists, puppeteers, and jugglers. Colors juggles light-up balls and creates balloon animals, but the live animals are her signature, interacting in magic tricks and working with the kids. Sunny, a Jack Russell-Chihuahua mix, rides in a baby stroller. The three “blind” mice play on a small Ferris wheel. In a moment of magic, Colors turns a tiny white mouse into a large white rat.
Colors doesn’t scare anyone. She does not play pranks but draws in the kids with other techniques. “I play dumb, and [the children in the audience are] smarter than me. Kids will scream, ‘There’s something on your shoulder’ when the chinchilla appears. I’m like a big doll.”
She says the audience constantly reinvents her act. “Kids come up with comments like, ‘Why are your eyelashes so long?'” Hone answered that one with “because I eat my vegetables.”
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Clowning can be serious business. Hone performs about 250 shows a year, at $150 to $275 per hour. Denise Murray, director of business and marketing development at Briarwood Mall, says Colors is always part of key events like the Boo Bash in October. “Kelly is very cognizant of how to manage kids. When Kelly is Colors, she has that magical way, almost Disneyesque.”
Colors appears at the Chelsea Community Fair each August, and each December she performs for “Shop with a Cop,” local law enforcement’s fundraiser for low-income children from area small towns. Last year, the event raised money to give dozens of kids $125 Meijer shopping sprees. Sergeant Keith Flores of the Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Department calls Colors “an outstanding asset” for the cause.
During the economic downturn in 2008, Hone says, “I lost some of my company picnics, then started picking up more shows that I used to pass up [from groups that] needed a clown during the gloomy recession. University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan lost their budgets too. But, in turn, people would book me at their workplace or family parties for good morale.”
Aside from clowning, Hone, an art major, does freelance artwork. This winter she painted a series of famous snowmen, including Frosty, the Abominable Snowman, and Olaf, on the windows of Thompson’s Pizzeria in Chelsea. She also holds a part-time job as a certified nurse assistant for health insurance purposes.
Like many of her clown colleagues, Hone worries about the declining interest in clowning acts. At the Midwest Clown Conference in Lansing, most attendees are Ringling Brothers clowns who have retired and turned to teaching. “Hollywood hasn’t done us any good either,” she says, with characters like Batman’s Joker and serial killer Twisty the Clown on TV’s American Horror Story.
Hone thinks those negative portrayals are part of the reason why “not many are picking up the art anymore. I can count on two hands [the clowns] who are left in Michigan.” She was asked to teach her act at the Midwest Clown Convention but is not willing to give away her secrets of magic with small animals. Most are trained using food treats; some acts emerge from an animal’s innate tendencies. Red-footed tortoises, for instance, are attracted to her red shoes.
Hone loves what she does with her company of animals: “I will never stop being a clown.” The kids in the audience often ask if she is a real clown. Her answer is always, “If you remember me tomorrow, then you will know I am a real clown.”
