At any given moment between 3 and 4 p.m. on some Mondays, Laura Meagher can be found holding in her hands a heart or some other human organ, muscle or bone.
She is doing this as the host of a television program called “Body Parts” that is intended to delight and comfort the children and families who are spending time in Lurie Children’s Hospital.
She is lively and energetic and sincere as host of this interactive, bingolike game show. The kids fill out game cards, matching the organs/muscles/bones that Meagher displays with squares on sheets of paper. A few children and family members watch live in studios on the 12th floor but most are watching from their rooms. When they have filled in their game cards they can raise their hands or connect to Meagher by phone. They then select a prize from a huge pile on the set, including books, games, art supplies, dolls and stuffed animals.
“It is so wonderful,” says Meagher. “Everybody gets a prize.”
This shows airs on Skylight TV, the hospital’s closed-circuit television station. But watching Meagher in action, it is possible to feel the years slip away and remember her when she was a TV star in Chicago.
That was a long time ago when she was the co-host (with local actor Will Clinger) of the immensely popular “Wild Chicago” on WTTW-Ch. 11. That show’s creator and original host Ben Hollis, citing the need to recharge after 400 “WC” segments, announced in May 1992 that he would be leaving the show. There was a lengthy audition process for new hosts. More than 250 applied, including local actors, high school students and one hematologist, sending in tapes of themselves, and Clinger and Meagher won the jobs.
Before “Wild Chicago,” Meagher had been working as a freelance stage manager and associate director for most of the television stations in town, something she continued to do even during her “WC” run. She was working at Channel 5 on the fateful May 5, 1997, night that Jerry Springer began appearing as an on-air commentator, a move that precipitated the quick exit of co-anchor Carol Marin and later co-anchor Ron Magers. “It was my professional responsibility to seat Springer in his chair on the set the night Ron and Carol refused to sit in theirs,” she says.
After her “WC” years (she won two local Emmys), she did some feature reporting for WFLD-Ch. 32 and hosted radio programs for WLS-AM and WLUP-FM. She then took off for Miami where she spent two years on-air for a TV station (winning another local Emmy for a story about typewriters). Then she was off to New York and more on-air work for a station there.
She was there on Sept. 11, living close to the carnage of the Twin Towers. “That was unreal, surreal, an indescribable tragedy for all of us” she says. “The windows in the building across the street from mine were shattered. I felt frozen. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t talk. I lost my apartment and I knew it was time to go and I had my whole life wanted to live in Paris.”
And so she went, not knowing a soul there and not speaking the language.
But she made friends, learned French well enough to start teaching, married for a second time and pieced together a successful do-it-yourself career.
“I started teaching English as a second language at corporations and eventually found my way into the French media,” says the 62-year-old. “I worked with print and television journalists and executives in need of developing their skills in English to write and conduct interviews, attend or participate in press conferences or give interviews and speak publicly. And I also taught TV news production and had some amazing private clients, including an 80-year-old Iranian attorney who had once been imprisoned by the Shah.”
She would return here about once a year to see her parents, who lived in Skokie, where she was raised. But she was in Paris on Jan. 7, 2015, when two armed brothers/terrorists forced their way into the offices of the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people and injuring 11 more.
“I lived a short walk away and a fear mushroomed inside me and I tried to carry myself as strongly as I could,” she says.
Her marriage was starting to unravel and early in 2016 she came back home for the funeral of her 88-year-old father and realized “that I was able to get so much more emotional support here than in Paris. This was a comfortable place for me.”
She moved back to Chicago last November and since then has found a lovely, loftlike apartment in the South Loop, been reconnecting with old friends and beginning her latest chapter.
“I do think I am on more websites for dating than for work,” she says.
She had a great time at a recent reunion/party for former television colleagues.
“Laura is like lightning in a bottle,” says Joan Esposito, the former TV anchorwoman. “She is bolder and braver than just about anyone I know, and that is true personally and professionally. I can’t imagine moving to Paris with no command of French and no job. But Laura made it work.”
“Body Parts” came her way when she noticed an online ad for a producer/director for Skylight TV. She emailed her resume and, understandably, it impressed the folks at Lurie.
“Laura has been a wonderful addition to our team of hosts for the show,” says Susan Ruohonen who, as senior director/family services at Lurie, runs its Skylight network. “Our longtime host Tracey Ellert, who had been with the show for 17 years, has been living in Los Angeles for the past year and so we are so appreciative of Laura, and other local talents, who are sharing their time and positive energy.”
It is hardly a full-time job but the experience — Meagher has hosted the weekly show six times — has been revelatory.
“This is the most highly formatted show I have ever done, and the only live show,” she says. “I know that I am talking to some very sick children but I love it. I really think of this as a great gift to me.
“Before, my television work was all about me. Now I have to be so present, focused on my feelings knowing that I am trying to bring good feelings to other people. It’s about trying to bring the children and families an experience that will allow them to forget that they are in a hospital.”
She has a few private clients to whom she teaches all manner of communication skills, especially verbal communication skills (www.parisfromher.com). She has been talking with radio and television stations about possible work. She seems happy, content, a star reborn without the glitter and the hey-I-know-you-from-“Wild Chicago” recognition.
“I have a great life,” she says. “I would be the last person to ever complain.”
Twitter @rickkogan
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