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Profile: Shelly Lawler finds peace by bringing the garden inside
BY MARCY SHORTUSE - For those who love making things grow, there is only one ultimate way to find peace – in the garden. It is, according to Shelly Lawler, a profound truth in her life. She retreats to a place of soft color and light, in a simple ritual that humans have simulated for centuries.
That sentiment rings especially true during the dark, dreary winter months in Chicago, where she is from. The woman who has become the voice of countless corporations, who found a career in singing after starting out thinking she would be a lawyer and who has had many years in the limelight as a public personality, finds herself retreating to her own little piece of paradise when things become too hectic.
But what do you do in Chicago, when it’s only February and the cloudy days of winter and spring could run on for a couple more months?
You bring the garden inside.
Shelly will be speaking on that subject at a lecture to be given on Wednesday, March 10 at the Boca Grande Community Center auditorium sponsored by the Boca Grande Art Alliance. The focus of her discussion, “The Art of the Garden – Bringing the Outside In” – is a topic that even residents of Boca Grande will find useful as we experience a much-colder-than-normal winter.
At some point in time a few years ago, Shelly’s hobby of photographing her garden turned into a sort of profession. It all started when her husband, award-winning photojournalist Val Mazzenga, returned from Wal-mart with some of her developed photographs.
“He looked at those pictures taken with my little point-and-shoot camera and told me they were pretty good,” she said. “Then he went downstairs and came back up with a Nikon, one that he had used for work. It was like being given a typewriter that your grandmother had wrote with, it was exciting.”
That 200 mm lens and that Nikon opened up a whole new world for Shelly. Suddenly everything in her garden could be seen in a different light.
“All of a sudden I saw my garden, which I knew intimately, in a different perspective,” she explained. “I already knew about light, as a gardener you plant according to and understand light. Suddenly my eye for composition to create a garden became an eye for composition to photograph the same garden.”
Shelly’s personality dictated that she wouldn’t just put those pictures in a box to look at on a rainy day. She made prints and hung them in her dining room. In an instant that nook in her home, made gray and dreary by a Chicago winter, turned into an indoor garden filled with color.
A small collection of photos suddenly took center stage, floor to ceiling.
“At first it was just for me, for my mental health,” she said. “I liked to go there in the winter, have my tea, read and feel like I was in the garden. One day a girlfriend and her husband came over and Val showed them my work. They had just moved into a home and were planning an open house, and asked if I would showcase some of my work there. At the end of the day, it became pretty apparent that my work resonated with some people.”
That was the beginning of a whole new adventure in Shelly’s life … and she’s had many.
Born as the oldest of seven children in Glen Ellyn, Ill., her sense of responsibility developed early. There were younger brothers and sisters to take of, and as a typical eldest child she took the challenge head-on.
“It was very wonderful in some ways, and there was certainly never a dull moment,” she laughed. “I had two brothers and four sisters, two of which were twins.”
Shelly still found time to become a part of the Glen Ellyn Children’s Choir, and her gift for performing was recognized when she was young. It was her first passion, and the strong emotion showed as she was chosen to sing with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra while still in grade school.
In fourth grade, when she was cast in the school’s production of “The Wizard of Oz,” she felt just as comfortable.
“It was my first-ever role, and I played a Munchkin,” she said. “Had I known then what I know now …”
When Shelly graduated from high school she wasn’t sure which path to take. She still loved to sing, and to act, but pragmatism won out.
While she started out as a voice major, her primary focus had always been opera. When it became apparent to her she would become an opera star, she thought about switching her major to something a little more mundane, but was unsure where to turn.
In her junior year of college she was chosen to participate in an Oxford University program for half the year. She loved the teaching methods employed by her professors.
“When you’re in the program you are tutored by someone who leads you down the path by asking questions,” she said. “Part of the teaching is to overwhelm you with something so large, you have to figure it out. There were only six students that went, so I was lucky. The end result was that I learned how to figure things out, and how to stand on my reasoning and explain it to someone else. It’s a great exercise for an independent thinker.”
When she came home, her thought was to go to law school. Having put herself all through school financially, she started waitressing again and, through serendipity, started meeting people that seemed to point her back to her original love … music.
“Before I started singing again, my heart was dead,” she said. “My passion, my heart was about music.”
Shelly made a living as a singer through her 20s, working everything from night clubs to cruise ships. Corporate convention gigs from Chicago to Las Vegas, even the Far East, weren’t uncommon.
From there she started to appear on Chicago television shows such as “AM Chicago,” and found a knack for voice-over work.
Since then she has hosted telethons, numerous television shows, and was involved with the Emmy award-winning documentary titled, “Underage Smoking.” After a time she branched out into corporate work, teaching executives how to give presentations, and was soon giving those presentations herself.
As if that weren’t enough, she also started writing magazine articles, with pieces appearing in such publications as PBS’s “City Talk” and “Woman’s World.”
Her current garden photography book, “In the Garden Collection,” rounds out her repertoire.
She was still a confused scholar attending DePaul University when she first met Val, though.
Shelly was waitressing in a popular Chicago venue when he first appeared. Shelly worked the night shift, which meant spending a lot of time folding napkins and doing busy work. Val would come from his office in the Tribune building and sit and talk to her.
“He would sit and drink coffee, he would tell me where he’d been that week, and we were just good friends,” she said. “When I got out of college two years later, I was on a date in that same restaurant when I saw him again. I had just been named Miss Chicago at the time, and was feeling pretty good about myself when all of a sudden he walked in with a girl that was, as I put it, ‘falling off her shoes.’ At some point she went to the bathroom and my date was talking to someone else when Val said he wanted to photograph me. He got my phone number, and about a week later he called me. He had tickets to a play and asked if I wanted to come.”
Shelly, who at the time was feeling as though her life was already mapped out and that nothing was interfering with her plan, declined. When she told her mother later on that he had called and asked her out, she was told she was crazy for not going out with him.
“So we go to the play, the name of which was ‘One Shining Moment,’ and Val had forgotten to call the public relations person for the theater to tell them he was coming,” she said. “They had no seats left that were together, so I ended up sitting next to two little old ladies and he ended up sitting next to someone else. After intermission, though, they let us sit together.”
She laughed, then said, “It’s kind of a metaphor for our life, because one of us is always traveling.”
The couple has now been married 20 years, and this is their third year wintering in this area. They have tried different places, such as Port Charlotte, North Port and Rotonda, and love to find some warmth and light in the winter.
But that metaphor that Shelly referred to is still mirrored in their house in Chicago’s suburbs, where they stay for most of the year, still mirrors that same “yin-yang” metaphor she referred to. When you walk in the front door and turn to the left, Val’s stark news photography covers the walls. Photos of Jonestown, of the killing fields of Cambodia, of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.
To the right, Shelly’s garden photography lights up the walls.
“When you walk in that part of the house all you see is his work, the grit and grime of the world, mainly tough stuff because that’s what he did for a living,” she said. “To the right it’s all my stuff; color, soft and beautiful. For me, it all began with the garden. I needed the true piece of mind it gave me, and when I reflect on that it’s what resonates with the pictures, my peace. It is truly part of the fabric of who I am.”
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