by Elaine Durbach
NJJN Bureau Chief/Central

March 06, 2008

Calmly going about his business recently, picking out a first car for his 17-year-old daughter and getting his taxes done, Barry Lubin attracts no more attention than any other dad about town.

Hardly anyone would recognize this short, gray-haired guy as someone whose job entails goofing off to roars of laughter, dressed up as a little old lady.

That’s just fine by Lubin, better known as “Grandma,” lead clown of the Big Apple Circus. He settled in Garwood with his family back in 1992, and much as he delights in all the attention he gets in the ring, he relishes the contrasting quiet of his private life. In addition to his teenager, he also has a 23-year-old daughter.

His is the face — in makeup — on posters, in newspaper advertisements, and on the Web site of the New York-based, one-ring, big top circus. While that brings high expectations and some stress, he is passionate about the Big Apple Circus.

“After 33 years, I adore it more than ever. It’s an incredible way to make a living,” he said in a phone interview at the end of February, a few days before starting a three-week run at the Commerce Bank Ballpark in Bridgewater.

“I used to think of my performance as something apart from me,” he said, sounding totally down to earth and not the least bit ditsy like the old dame his fans love so much. “Now I know this is my real life, just in a heightened form, and more enjoyable than doing taxes — not that I’d normally start lip-synching to ‘The Best of Barry Manilow.’”

Just like a plumber or any other worker, you have to get the job done no matter how you’re feeling, he said, adding that it has gotten easier.

“I used to tell everyone to stay away from me before a show. I felt I had to get into character,” Lubin said. “I’d take deep breaths and try to center myself. Now, I just pray — to be present, to be grateful, and to go with the flow.”

Working out what’s funny is still a serious challenge, even after all these years. “This is the best and the worst of it — that the only way you know if something’s funny is if the audience laughs,” he said. “Much as you want the approval of your peers, in the end, it’s between you and your audience. The question is: Are they digging it? And that’s the same for every artist.”

As a Jewish kid brought up in a Conservative home in Ventnor, just outside Atlantic City on the Jersey shore, Lubin said, he still sometimes feels like an outsider in the circus world. And he is still amazed by his luck and by the talent and the warmth of the people he meets.

His dad gave up his own dreams of being a film director and was a businessman instead, renting out film and audio equipment. Barry worked with his father, helping him screen movies at the big hotels in Atlantic City. In the process, he fell in love with movie comedy greats like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy.

But, he said, he still expected to follow the steady, responsible example of his big brother, who went into insurance.

With those good intentions, Lubin studied television production and journalism at Emerson College in Boston, but, he said, it just didn’t feel right. He dropped out and in 1974 opted to do the one-year course offered by Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College.

At the end of the course, he and 10 other trainees were selected to join the team of 28 clowns working for the two traveling units of Ringling Brothers’ “Greatest Show on Earth.” He evolved the Grandma character then, while performing with the show in Florida and inspired, he admitted, by some of the people in the audience.

“Working with 28 other clowns, I wanted to set myself apart in some way,” he explained. While everyone else was in garish garb, he chose a drab dress and pearls, and while the others cavorted, he went slow and quiet. It worked then, and it continues to work — though, ironically, as he has come closer to his alter ego in age — he’s now 55 — Grandma has gotten more sprightly and outrageous.

As he became more successful, Lubin’s own family became more accepting of his strange life. “In the beginning, my mother would ask me when I was going to get a real job. But then, when I started appearing on national TV, and suddenly I had some credibility, she would boast to the neighbors and tell them when I would be on,” he said.

But it wasn’t the steady living his parents would have wanted for him, even after he connected with the Big Apple Circus in 1982, about four years after its founding.

He and the other circus workers “worked other jobs all year, so that we could afford to work for the Big Apple Circus,” he said. He had other jobs all year, including lots of office temping, so that he could afford to spend a few weeks each year with the circus.

These days, things are a lot easier — financially at least. Big Apple Circus revived interest in the tented, one-ring circus. Lubin works the 36 weeks of the Big Apple season and also serves as creative consultant to the Big Apple cast. To recharge his batteries, he does stints overseas, like a recent one at a massive show in Monte Carlo, or gives talks. He has created and directed shows for television and served as a consultant on others.

In 2006 Lubin won the Special Prize at the Sixth International Circus Festival in Budapest, Hungary, and is a member of the International Clown Hall of Fame.

Lubin and Big Apple founder Paul Binder are still friends, and he still regards the circus as his perfect milieu — an intimate one-ring venue that blends classical circus tradition with relevant innovativeness.

“This is our best show ever,” he says of this season’s lineup, for all his seriousness, still sounding like a star-struck kid.

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See the show

“Grandma” and the rest of The Big Apple Circus has come to town, performing at Bridgewater’s Commerce Bank Ballpark through Sunday, March 23. Tickets are on sale at the Somerset Hills YMCA in Basking Ridge or from Ticketmaster, 212-307-4100.

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