Lori Moore, RIP: Kalamazoo will miss your magnificent self.

BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Editor’s note: This tribute first appeared in Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Substack “What’s a Writer to Do?!” and is reprinted here with her permission.

Kalamazoo’s Grand Dame is no more. RIP, Lori Moore.

Lori Moore took on cancer twice and triumphed, but this third time she must’ve been blindsided. Lori Moore has been Kalamazoo’s own Dolly, part Dolly Parton, part Dolly Gallagher-Levi, from Hello Dolly in which she starred at Kalamazoo Civic Theatre’s 2018 season opener. (The production was declared “a feast for the senses.”) She was also part Mae West, and part drag queen, a woman who knew how to perform the feminine as well as live it fully, voluptuously.

Lori was gorgeous, generous, gregarious. She would burst out in song in your living room as naturally as on the stage (A reviewer marveled that such a “belter” could be so melodious.) When she showed up at your party, you knew that the party had finally begun. She dressed with a sense of joy, sometimes in costume, always in colors, with bright lipstick that brightened any room. Even after cancer treatments, even after losing her hair, she glowed with her own private color from the spectrum, a personal shade of purple that was hers alone, and now Kalamazoo has now lost this hue.

She attended KVCC, then Hope College (BA) and Notre Dame (MBA). She was smart and full to the brim with history, particularly aware of both local history and women’s history. She was local women’s history. She was the prime mover in creating Kalamazoo’s annual Do Dah Parade back in 1984 creating the unique parody‑style event that we still love. She was the original director and was largely responsible for establishing the parade’s fun spirit. Maybe we should celebrate her by having a Lori Moore float in 2027!

Once, when some of us women from the “Bitch and Wine” group of cancer survivors were drinking wine in her living room, she told us why creating the parade had been so important to her. She was the first female morning radio host at WKMI (and later WKZO), and she observed that most of the activities that the male DJs schemed up were sexist, particularly their “Miss Skimpy Contest.” So she took inspiration from a Pasadena Do Dah tradition. Her focus on humor and satire was here and elsewhere a way of bringing up the tone!

After three decades in radio, Lori moved to television and hosted The Lori Moore Show on Channel 3, where I was lucky enough to appear as a guest. She was perfect in this role: professional, funny, nobody’s fool, and always kind. However, when Sinclair Group bought the station, they demanded she relinquish her editorial independence and tow a more conservative line. Instead, Lori quit. She could not sign a binding contract with a company whose higher-ups had told Donald Trump, “We are here to deliver your message.”

Even without money in the bank, even after cancer and other personal troubles, she continued to be a bright light in Kalamazoo’s landscape. She spearheaded food drives, literacy campaigns, and more; for fun, she took part in the Edible Book Contest and was a favorite reader in the annual Poetry Can Be Funny reading put on by Kalamazoo Friends of Poetry. She’s been given the YWCA Woman of Achievement Award (2010), the Michigan Association of Broadcasters Community Involvement Award, and the Southwestern Michigan ACLU Philip S. Denenfeld Award. Governor Jennifer Grandholm declared Lori Moore Day in 2006. It’s time to reinstitute that!

Lori had a way of making her life simultaneously fully authentic and also a brilliant performance. She lived a love story—she was in love with the outrageous life, she was in love with her daughter Emma and brother Gregory for starters. (She also fell in love with a new man in the last years of her life.) Her life was also a comedy, starting long before the Do Dah parade and her appreciation for Randy Rainbow, and you couldn’t be in her company for a minute without cracking up. She should have lived to be a hundred.

A few years ago, I dreamed about Lori. This was when my mother got her own second breast cancer. My mother and I were going to Lori’s place to mourn her — for (in the dream) Lori had supposedly died — but when Mom and I got there, Lori appeared from behind a curtain, she was alive, gloriously alive! And maybe that is another reason that this seems so unreal — surely she will pull aside the curtain and reappear for us, to remind us how to live fully joyfully.

I wrote RIP above, but it doesn’t necessarily mean rest in peace. I would love to think the p can stand for something else. Rest in Party, our fantastic friend.

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