By Mercedes Kane— “For me, the party was over,” said Lori Cannon. “It’s not that there was just death, it’s that people were being allowed to die. Shameful, unconscionable, inexcusable deaths.”
The first thing most people noticed when they met Lori was the fire-red flash of teased hair that rose like the crown of a phoenix above her pale face. But this vivid blaze was no match for her loud personality, her playful grin, or her vast capacity for compassion. Lori was a lifeline for Chicago’s LBGTQ+ community for nearly 40 years, since AIDS began killing her equally vibrant friends, one by one.
Lori was a bus driver back then and made a lot of friends, including many of the chiseled young men exercising their post-Stonewall freedom on the pulsating dance floors of North Halsted Street. She knew that most had been disowned by their families and mocked by their classmates before they came to the big city and could be who they really were. Now they were being ravaged by a mysterious virus that gave society a new reason to shun them.
When the dying started, Lori couldn’t stand back and watch while these beloved men faded away with no one to nourish their failing bodies and spirits.
Lori decided that her friends and others with AIDS needed a Meals on Wheels program. In late 1985, she partnered with a Swedish-inspired restaurant named for its founder, Ann Sather, but now owned and run by Tom Tunney. Tom was a young gay man and a new business owner. For one of their first efforts together, he and Lori worked on December 23 preparing a holiday meal that she would deliver to clients on Christmas Eve.
That morning, however, page one of the Chicago Tribune read, “Weather Puts Chill on Holiday.” The temperatures hovered at 8 degrees, but the 18 mph winds dropped the wind chill to 25 degrees below zero. Light snow gusted in the black air, causing blizzard-like conditions. None of that would stop Lori from distributing the meals she had promised.
First on her list was David Dean, a local activist. Lori walked into the dingy lobby of his apartment building and saw David hunched on the steps of the drafty hallway. He was wearing a tattered bathrobe over soiled pajamas that hung across his thin frame. It was clear he’d had a bad day and was looking forward to this warm meal.
“You didn’t forget me,” David said, before reminding her, “I’m moving this week. Shall I give you the new address?”
“Hallelujah,” Lori said, “I’m happy to take your information.”
And so it went. Lori and her team prepared meals in the Ann Sather kitchen and drove them to people with AIDS across the city, some of whom were dying alone. Over the next eight years, they delivered more than 175,000 meals to 945 clients.
“Oftentimes we were the only humans a client would see in the last 24 hours,” Lori said. “Their friends were dying, their families shunned them. Landlords were trying to evict these patients. Insurance companies were trying to drop them, hoping they would die before they had to deal with them.”
Lori continued to feed hungry community members out of Groceryland, a festive food pantry in the Edgewater neighborhood. Resident regulars came to her for free food, hygiene supplies and a bright red dose of Lori’s famous hair and vivacious charm.
“I’m just a person trying to do the right thing,” Lori said. “That’s how I was raised. The healthy take care of the sick.”
Mercedes Kane is the founder of Daisy May Films and has directed the documentaries
Art and Pep (2022, Peacock), More with Less: The Power of HBCUs in America (2022),
What Remains: The Burning Down of Black Wall Street (2021) and Breakfast at Ina’s
(2016, Amazon Prime). Art and Pep premiered at OutFest before winning the Audience
Award at the Chicago International Film Festival and being acquired by Peacock and
APTV. Mercedes recently received an MFA in narrative nonfiction from the University of
Georgia. Her writing has been published in National Geographic, Gravy Magazine,
Capital & Main, Salvation South and The Takeout.