Lucy Mirigian made it through the flu epidemic of 1918 and she fully expects to make it through this thing.

Mirigian, 113, believed to be the oldest person in the Bay Area, said it’s all a matter of following the rules.

“When they tell you to stay indoors, you have to stay indoors,” she said. “What else can you do? You have to do what they tell you. You have to use your common sense.”

Mirigian spends her days chatting with her daughter and son-in-law, Sonia and Jack Koujakian, in the same Balboa Park home she bought in 1952. She has a glass of white wine every night at dinner, and vanilla ice cream with a banana for dessert.

She is alert and happy and knows a thing or two about epidemics, having made it through the Spanish fluand a couple of smallpox and typhoid fever scares. She spent a lot of her 12th year indoors, during the great epidemic that raged in the closing days of World War I.

In 1910, as a 4-year-old girl, Mirigian left her home in Armenia on the back of a donkey. She crossed the Atlantic by ship, made her way to Fresno and attended Fresno State University. In San Francisco, she raised a family, taught Sunday school, served as a PTA president and had a second career making elaborate wire sculptures. Her husband of 40 years, Ashod, died in 1998.

Until recently, she spent her days working jigsaw puzzles and watching TV, but her eyesight and hearing are taking a well-deserved rest, her family says. Still, Mirigian never complains. She does miss her weekly luncheon at the Harding Park golf course restaurant, where all the waiters call her by name and make a fuss.

In 2018, Mirigian made news when a federal pension agency cut off the retirement benefits that she’d earned from being a secretary at the U.S. Mint in San Francisco. The agency said Mirigian hadn’t returned a form letter saying she wasn’t dead. Mirigian said that she never got the letter, and that it wasn’t very nice to assume people are dead until you’re sure. It took the efforts of Rep. Jackie Speier, D-San Mateo, to get her checks going again.

The other day she looked up from the kitchen table into a cell phone camera and, with a characteristic smile, told a reporter she wasn’t dead in 2018 and isn’t dead now.

Mirigian is looking forward to going back out to restaurants for vanilla ice cream with bananas when the authorities say the coast is clear. But not before.

“That will be nice,” she said. “I hope it’s soon.”

Calvin Kai Ku is trying his hardest to be a clown without a live audience, which is challenging even for the most talented performer.

For years, Kai Ku and the other members of the Medical Clowns Project have visited Bay Area hospitals and senior homes with their puppets, ukuleles, magic tricks, juggling balls and red noses. Not any more.

Patients can’t gather in the lounge. The clowns can’t get close to the spectators. You can’t have the a spectator pick a card, any card, when you’re not there to hold the cards.

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All seemed lost in the medical clown trade, but Calvin the clown can take a pie in the face and get up and make the best of things. He hooked up his laptop, arranged for workers at the San Francisco Campus for Jewish Living to lend a hand on their end, and he and his colleagues have been holding virtual clowning sessions with residents.

Helpers, standing 6 feet away, bring the computers close to the residents for videoconference clowning.

It’s more than a little challenging, Kai Ku said, to interact with his audience long distance. His clowning isn’t the circus kind, taking pratfalls and climbing out of little cars. It’s the personal kind, calling the audience members by name and asking about their day.

“You have to watch their eyes and check their expressions to see what’s working,” he said. “It helps to slow everything down.”

Kai Ku has a plastic dog that does backflips, which gets the same laugh in person or online. He also likes singing “Dock of the Bay” with his audience, which can be tricky because of the lag time in a videoconference means he may be singing “bay” when the guest is singing “dock.”

Kai Ku is doing his virtual clowning from his girlfriend’s house in New Orleans, where he is hunkered down for now. A dozen other members of the troupe are working out of their Bay Area homes. A virtual clown can be anyplace.

“It’s surprising and amazing,” said Rob Sarison, director of programs at the facility formerly known as the Jewish Home for the Aged. “They’re able to do the same sorts of things they do in person. Juggling. Singing. Pulling a flower out of a hat. It’s not a lot of razzle-dazzle stuff, it’s mostly connecting one-on-one with our residents. That’s what makes it special.”

Share with us the ‘good news’ The news these days can be sobering, even grim. There’s a lot of uncertainty and discomfort most everywhere you look. But amid the darkness, there are rays of light: young people helping older neighbors, musicians and fitness coaches offering their talents online, neighbors having outdoor dance parties (using proper social distancing). We’d like to know about examples of good news you have witnessed during this time. You can tell us your thoughts online at SFChronicle.com by using our Assignment Editor tool, or send an email (which can include a photo) with the subject line “Good News” to metro@sfchronicle.com.

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Steve Rubenstein is a staff writer at The San Francisco Chronicle. E-mail: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com