She climbed out of tiny cars and wore red noses. Now she lives the life of a retired clown

To her fellow residents in a Tempe retirement community, she is known as Lida Mainieri. But what most of them don't know is that she once went by another name.

Rainbow the Clown.

It's an unusual past, one that you don't expect to tumble forth from your neighbor. But retired clowns live among us, people who once capered about with a white face and huge red lips and an enormous colorful wig in the service of making others laugh. Most now quietly go about their lives, encountering people every day who have no idea about the absurd antics of their past.

This is the life Mainieri lives at Friendship Village, where she and her husband John moved 1.5 years ago. She mentioned her clowning history once, at a welcome event for new residents.

"Everyone laughed when they found out I had been a professional clown," she says. "They said, 'you? Really?'"

Mainieri, who is 78, hasn't really brought it up since. She isn't sure why.

"It's a good question," she says, after a long pause.

She's sitting in an otherwise empty lounge in the Village Center, the community's social hub, holding a colorful bouquet of flowers and a rainbow-shaped helium balloon, a makeshift clowning kit purchased earlier that morning at a Fry's supermarket.

It's not that she doesn't want to reveal she was a clown, Mainieri says, though people do tend to react in shock. Her eclectic work history, she explains, is more than just a fun piece of personal trivia.

Clowning helped make her the Lida Mainieri she is today.

'A wallflower type'

Born in New York and raised in Sarasota, Florida, Mainieri was an introverted child.

Once, she recalls her mother dropping her off and watching as she crossed the street with her shoulders hunched and her head slung low. Her mother got out of the car and chased after Mainieri.

"Always hold your head up," she instructed her daughter.

"I was just sort of there," Mainieri says. "A wallflower type."

The city where she grew up had a rich circus history. In 1927, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus had made Sarasota its winter headquarters, and plenty of circus performers called the southwest Floridian city home.

Sarasota High School had a circus, a real one, with a big top and rings and a trapeze. In her senior year, Mainieri decided to check it out.

She thought she might venture onto the high wire, but ended up as a clown. She rapidly became enchanted by the prospect of disappearing into a wacky new persona.

Local professional clowns trained the students in the art of clown makeup, taught them physical comedy and even lent them their costumes.

"I enjoyed it, putting on all the make-up and being a completely different person and acting wild and crazy, which was something nobody else saw me do," Mainieri says. "I got a big kick out of that."

From the safety of her colorful clown suit and full makeup, teenage Mainieri worked the circus crowd, playing tricks with flowers on unsuspecting toddlers.

One memorable night, she sprang out of an orange Volkswagen Beetle with about 20 of her peers.

The tiny clown car had been stripped of all interiors, keeping only the necessary stick shift and a backless seat for the driver, who was actually one of the trapeze artists. The students had been taught how to pile in, four of them lying flat one way, another four stacked on top the other way, and so on.

It was a Jenga tower of teenage clowns. As the trapeze artist drove a loop around the ring, they lay there, limbs and heads and torsos smushed together, trying not to giggle or smear their makeup.

Then one jumped out. And then another, and another, and another. After an improbably high number of clowns had left the vehicle, Mainieri recalls, they feigned pulling hard on a thick rope to reveal the car's final — apparently very heavy — occupant.

Out popped a tiny chihuahua. "The audience just went wild," she says.

An unfortunate allergy

After graduating, Mainieri did not run away and join the circus.

She donned elaborate costumes to play pranks on her neighbors, or play the part of an interjecting witch inexplicably attending the accounting class her husband taught at a community college.

In 1980, she and John moved to Arizona. A couple of years later, with two children and in her 40s, Mainieri enrolled in a clowning course at ASU.

As it turned out, a neighbor had a friend who ran a clown business. Was Mainieri interested in putting clown makeup on kids? Sure, she said.

Her return to professional clowning started with a real estate grand opening, where she and two others transformed hordes of kids into mini-clowns. Eventually, the owner wanted out, and Mainieri took over the business.

Armed with her own helium tank and a business card reading "Rainbow the Clown," Mainieri did birthday parties and work events, employing her flower tricks and contorting slender balloons into an astonishing array of animals.

She loved it.

Entertaining children and adults, making them laugh, she felt like she was spreading joy, doing something good for other people.

Occasionally, she'd meet a baby perturbed by the makeup.

But surprisingly, she almost never encountered people who were afraid of clowns.

"This was pre-clown fear," she says. "Before the movies came out."

The business fell victim to the liability insurance crisis of the 1980s. Mainieri's premiums climbed so high that the insurance cost more than she could possibly make as a clown.

So after about three years of doing it professionally, she threw in the wig. She kept the clown gear, though, bringing it out now and then for family or friends.

Then came another blow: She discovered she was allergic to the makeup.

At first, when it started to make her eyes sting and turn them a bright, irritated red, Mainieri thought she was painting it too close to her sensitive corneas.

But then her eyes started flaring at any makeup. Today, she can only wear a little stick blush before eliciting an angry reaction.

"So that kind of put the kibosh on my clowning," she says.

'Would you like a flower?'

Mainieri had hung on to the clown gear for years, stowing it in a box in the closet. But it all got thrown out when she moved into Friendship Village.

"So this is what I have left," she says, gesturing to her little bouquet and the rainbow balloon. When she walked into the grocery store to buy flowers, the balloon felt like a sign, a nod to her former name.

So she bought it. "It made me feel good inside," she says.

"I couldn't blow up one of those long balloons and make balloon animals anymore if I tried," she adds, laughing.

"I can barely blow out the candles."

Mainieri isn't sad that liability insurance and allergies ended her clowning career. By the time she left it behind, it had well and truly given her what she was looking for.

"It was sort of a new me," she says. "And I found that I was comfortable with myself."

It shifted how she saw herself, from a resolute introvert to somebody who, yes, could be very quiet, but who was a lot of other things, too.

"Since I've been a clown, I've always been a little bit more… I don't want to say fun to be with," she says. "That sounds like I'm patting myself on the back.

"But I tend to try to be a little funnier. I can be very sarcastic at times. And I don't think I would have done that, if I hadn't had the experience of being someone else."

Now, she says, "I like being here and doing the things I want to do and saying the things I would like to say and just being a clown on my own."

She holds out the little bouquet, the multi-colored flowers cut short, their stems placed in striped paper straws.

"Would you like a flower?" she asks.

As a flower is drawn from the bouquet, she motions smoothly upwards, taking the blooms with her and leaving behind only an empty paper straw.

Mainieri grins. It's an old trick, one she learned back in Sarasota. She'd do it to little kids, always feeling a little guilty taking the pretty flower away from them.

And today, at least, she is bringing it back, for her fellow retirees.

They don't know her history. As she sat in the Village Center waiting, someone noticed her flowers and balloon.

"Is it your birthday?" they asked.

"No," Mainieri replied, not explaining any further.

Then the old instinct kicked in. "Here, have a flower."

Reach the reporter at lane.sainty@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Twitter @lanesainty.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: In a Tempe, a retired clown looks back on her career