Between modelling, flying helicopters, radio broadcasting, real estate, and owning a chocolate store, Dianne Pepper has done it all. But, no matter her occupation, there was one side to her that she says was always there — Pepper the Clown.
Officially, though, she only started face painting, making balloon art, and performing magic tricks at fairs, birthday parties, BBQs, weddings, grand openings, and other special occasions as Pepper the Clown in 1990. After moving to Peterborough just last year, Pepper can now be found clowning around at events around the greater Kawarthas region, most recently at the Millbrook and Orono fall fairs.
There, Dianne does exactly what she’s always done.
“I love making people laugh,” she says. “I just want to heal the world one laugh at a time.”
Back in the early 1970s, Dianne had no broadcasting experience when she decided to audition for a role as a traffic reporter with Toronto’s 590AM CKEY Radio. She explains they “loved her voice,” and took a chance training her to fly and get her commercial helicopter license. Even back then, she used her “outgoing” personality to entertain her audience.
“When you work in broadcasting, you’re always entertaining,” she says, adding that she was often “goofing around” with her co-hosts. “I knew how to make people laugh.”
It helped that she had spent her childhood moving around a lot, having lived across Canada from Toronto to Montreal and Vancouver. She explains that constantly moving gave her the confidence to “walk in and just say hi” when it came to making new friends.
Her technique?
“I always made fun of myself, I always joked about myself,” she says. “If you can make people laugh, you’ve got them as a friend.”
After almost a decade of traffic reporting on CKEY, Dianne moved on to flying air ambulances out of Buttonville Airport, just as Ontario was becoming the first Canadian province to offer helicopter-based ambulance services. Pepper, evidently, was the first woman in Toronto to fly an air ambulance.
“We had women paramedics, but we didn’t have women pilots, so that was really cool to be the first,” she recalls, joking that she once “dropped” a guy she was dating in her twenties because he didn’t understand why she would want to fly helicopters. “I’m very much into women doing anything they want to do and going for it and not looking back. Women are very capable.”
Dianne is proof of that herself, having raised two children as a single mother throughout the 1990s and 2000s.
VIDEO: Pepper the Clown
It was during this time, too, that she was fully investing in Pepper the Clown. She had grown tired of flying helicopters and tried both real estate work and running her own chocolate store — which she says she didn’t like because she would rather have control in her work than “wait for clients to walk through the door” — before making a brief return to traffic reporting with CFRB in Toronto,
A friend then suggested that with Dianne’s outgoing, funny personality, she would make a great clown — something she had never given a thought to. After clarifying that she would not have to join the circus, Dianne took the chance and joined the Toronto Clown Alley (now called the Toronto Clown Alley and Family Entertainers Inc. or TCAFE), a network of people from all avenues of entertaining including puppeteers, magicians, and ventriloquists.
Dianne began by putting an ad out in the newspaper and, inspired by her brief stint in real estate, stuck her photo on some business cards.
“Clowns should really do that because that’s what sells you — a picture of your face,” she says, adding she’s had many business cards over the years. “So I started by putting my picture on all my business cards.”
Once Dianne started clowning, it just “took off,” to the point she was doing upwards of 320 shows per year in her “heyday.” She has never looked back.
“I took it to another degree,” Dianne says. “I look at things in a very business-like manner, so I just said ‘I’m going to do well with this’.”
Even after 30 years in business, Dianne continues to attend conventions and events with TCAFE, and other institutions as far away as Washington, in order to develop her craft.
“I’m one of those people that never stops learning,” she says. “I think that’s the secret of everything you do — just keep learning.”
And yet, something she never really had to learn is how to entertain, as she’s often complimented for being “naturally” funny even when she’s not working as Pepper the Clown.
Calling herself “a big kid at heart,” Dianne says it doesn’t stop with the children she’s meant to be entertaining, either. She’s always looking for ways to make the parents, grandparents, and other adults at her events laugh as well.
“If you look at any Walt Disney movie, there’s multiple layers of humour,” she explains. “If there’s adult humour (in a children’s movie), we love it. The innuendo is fabulous. And I do the same thing. I like to play with everyone.”
Though she explains that making people of all ages laugh is one of the best parts of the job, Dianne will also always take the opportunity to empower kids.
“When I do magic, I don’t use ‘abracadabra,'” she says. “I say, ‘Everybody hug themselves and say I love you.'”
Adults in her audience have even come up to her to express their appreciation for her empowering messaging, which she says extends to them as well.
“We need to say it every day in the mirror, and adults need to do it too,” she points out. “I think that’s one of the biggest issues, because we don’t love ourselves enough. I’m a big supporter of saying we need to empower kids. We’ve got to empower each other and be better parents and better, loving citizens. It makes a big difference.”
Though Dianne had lived many lives before clowning took over, she now finds herself unable to escape from the clown inside — and she certainly doesn’t want to.
“I don’t know how many people get to go to work and have their boss hug them and say ‘I love you’, but I get that all the time from kids,” she says. “I’ll do a daycare and all of a sudden everybody wants to come up and get a hug, so I’ll have fifteen or twenty kids trying to hug me at once and it’s pretty cool. That’s why I do it.”
To book Pepper the Clown, visit www.peppertheclown.ca or follow her on Facebook and Instagram.