From the highs of her successful show "Mama's Family," to the lows of a cancelled daytime talk show, Vicki Lawrence said time and a lengthy bout of depression taught her, "Life is much too serious to be taken seriously."
The 30th Annual Women Aware Conference set out Thursday to live keynote speaker Vicki Lawrence's motto.
It succeeded, according to attendees, from the morning's opening act by Tracy Bonner to Lawrence's afternoon address.
Both were frank and funny as they discussed life with the approximately 500 attendees and vendors at the Black River Coliseum.
"I always love it when I walk into a room full of fans and I walk out with a room full of friends, because we're all going through the same things," Lawrence said. "When I was young, I always used to think I was weird.
"I've found as I get older, there's nothing particularly unusual about me at all."
Lawrence shared stories about how she entered show business and how she met her current husband while married to her first husband.
It might sound like a torrid Hollywood movie, she said.
"I can take every single one of you girls in this room, and you have a bad 'B' movie in your past just like this," said Lawrence, who will celebrate her 43rd wedding anniversary in November. "You just don't find a lot of people that stand up on a stage and tell you all about it."
The first marriage, to a song writer named Bobby, ended after Lawrence made a success of the song, "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia."
Bobby wrote the song and said it wasn't worth recording, Lawrence shared. She disagreed and took it to Hollywood, where it hit radios 8 1/2 months later.
"It was the ultimate demise of an already doomed marriage," she said, of the song that earned her a gold record in 1973.
A decade later, Lawrence was staring in "Mama's Family," originally written for Carol Burnett by two men who hated their mothers.
Mama: "Tennessee
Williams on acid"
"They considered it kind of like a comic exorcism to get this horrible woman out on paper," Lawrence said.
Burnett decided instead to play Eunice, Lawrence's daughter on the show.
It was Burnett who decided Mama would be southern.
"She (saw) the whole piece as Tennessee Williams on acid," Lawrence said.
Lawrence added the socks to Mama's costume.
"My only contribution to that entire outfit was to push those socks down because they reminded me of my own grandma. Southern Missouri, Cape Girardeau. Just saying, I'm in the hood," said Lawrence, who recalled looking in the mirror for the first time as Mama, and saying with that familiar accent, "Well, good lord, I'm dysfunctional."
From her early days filming the Carol Burnett show in Studio 33, Lawrence said she got to know the heart and soul of comedy in front of America.
"I feel like I got to touch the golden age of television," Lawrence said, describing how Sonny and Cher filmed next door, and Glen Campbell down the hall.
She remembers clearly the night "All in the Family," premiered.
"Back in the day, they had a switchboard at CBS and they put a gazillion extra operators on it that night, because they just knew the **** was going to hit the fan when America met Archie Bunker," Lawrence laughed.
Lawrence returned to television in 1992 with her own daytime talk show, something she said was meant to be fun. The show filmed more than 190 episodes a year.
In its sophomore season, a verbally abusive relationship with her boss became physically abusive, Lawrence said.
She took the problem to his bosses in New York.
"It never occurred to me that they would fire me. It never occurred to me that they wouldn't fix the problem and save the show," Lawrence said.
It sent her life into a tailspin and a nearly three year bout of depression, feeling both angry about the circumstances, and guilty for losing her job.
Lawrence: "I lost my sense of humor."
"If you have ever dealt with depression at all, it's like a hole that you just can't crawl out of," Lawrence said. "I didn't want to get up in the morning. I could not wait for it to get dark so I could go back to sleep.
"I lost touch with all my friends and I lost my sense of humor."
A moment of clarity came on a trip with her husband, when Lawrence said she realized she needed to do something good for herself, before she did something real bad to herself.
With a vow to get her act together, Lawrence said she turned to reading, exercise and a new puppy named, Hannah.
"I found out through all of this that a sense of humor is a horrible thing to lose. I found out that my motto is much truer than I ever knew. Life is much too serious to be taken seriously," Lawrence said.
Life must be taken one day at a time, she said.
"You must laugh, you must hear and find the humor in your every day life, and you must pass it on," Lawrence said.
Conference director Christy Frazier-Moore watched attendees faces light up during the day's performances.
"You could tell, it's nice to have a break from the daily grind with other women that have shared some of our experiences, and the ups and downs," she said, adding Lawrence had the same message as a panel discussion, to support and encourage each other.
Women Aware is an amazing event, Bonner said during her morning performance, which helped kick off the day.
She joked about weight loss, shopping with her husband and Lawrence, her "best friend that doesn't know she's your best friend yet."
"You can't just go shopping for Vicki Lawrence, so I stalked her ... I mean I watched her on Facebook for a while," said Bonner, who described the pitfalls of shopping with her husband. "It's like taking the game warden hunting, you just don't do that. It's just wrong."
Poplar Bluff resident Merle Ann Caldwell said the many breakout sessions also provided new and important information, such as resources for children who experience bullying.
Rhonda Belcher used the event as a way to help her daughter sell baked goods and fundraise for a school trip to Washington, D.C. The Poplar Bluff Junior High student is trying to raise several hundred dollars before a deadline at the end of the month, after a summer spent working odd jobs.
For Jessica Wrinkle and Stephanie Pennington, it served as a networking opportunity and a way to introduce people to their home-based business. The pair are representatives for LulaRoe, a women's clothing company.
"It's been really awesome," said Wrinkle, 31, of Poplar Bluff.
It can be challenging getting the name of a new business out and finding ways to set it apart from others, she explained.