The Oscars was a religious holiday to Peggy Lohr.
“When [my sister and I] were really little, we dressed up in my mother’s clothes and had our speeches ready as if we were winning the Oscars,” she recalls.
“In high school, she traveled to Europe for choir and made connections that would eventually land her a full-time singing job.” Almost a decade into the business, she met her husband, Bill, a pianist working on a musical theory book.
“We met on a jazz gig in LA in 1985 and got married about a year later,” she says. “I call us the original La La Land couple. Now, because of our age, we can’t find the remote or the cell phone or keys. Now we’re the La La Land couple like that.”
The couple began performing together around Los Angeles, eventually becoming close with a group of composers that were on the board of directors for the Academy Awards. In 1988, they asked Lohr to book afterparty entertainment for the show. By 1990, she was the entertainment, singing on a rotating 360 degree stage with her husband and an orchestra backing her.
“I had a pencil and paper on my music stand to keep notes so I could call everybody back home,” she says. “I was still that little girl from Texas that loved the movies.”
She worked the Oscars until 1993, before a devastating earthquake hit Southern California.
“I turned 40, I had two babies in diapers,” she says. “The combination of all that was getting to be tricky. Working at night was okay, until my boys started getting to the school age. Then I started thinking, what was the purpose of having children if I’m going to be gone at night and they’re going to be gone during the day?”
Sensing the moment, Lohr and her family moved to Branson, Missouri, where she began her first non-entertainment job as a substitute teacher. She taught in Branson until 1999, before moving back to Plano where she would teach for the next 17 years. She and Bill continued to play jazz gigs all the way through her retirement in 2016 and COVID-19 in 2020.
“I said to myself, ‘number one, do we have enough toilet paper? Number two, do I have a mask that I use for vacuuming the house? And number three, are you going to write that memoir?’” Lohr says.
Lohr began compiling the best stories and anecdotes collected over a career in showbiz. Three years later, Howdy Hollywood was complete, featuring her stories along with interviews with women in the industry that faced similar challenges as she did.
The book is billed as “Music, Movie Stars and Mischief from Texas to Tinseltown.”
“I started going back and examining, who am I, individually?” she explains. “Who is Peggy Lauren Lohr, and where did this come from?”
Howdy Hollywood is available on Amazon and select retailers.
