Steve Moore: The Jokes On Us

by Charles G. McGuigan 04.2009

Charmed lives lack for something. If you’re born in a state of nirvana or somehow privileged as a member of the elect, what’s the point? It’s only through trials, and the very worst kind, that we learn if we’ve got the right stuff. And that right stuff invariably seems to be the ability to laugh death and disaster in the face, send it on its way to where it rightfully belongs. That’s what Steve Moore owns. 

Stevens Spencer Moore, the man with three last names, was born in Danville, Virginia to Skeets and Wilma and raised in a fundamentalist tradition. Skeets worked at Liggett-Meyers Tobacco Company; Wilma was a line worker at Dan River Cotton Mill. They later bought a little hot dog stand called the Dairy Heart, which is where Steve worked through high school.

We’re sitting in his living room which is thickly peppered with the nostalgic. And there are reminders of an eternal Christmas, including a fake tree that’s up in time for Christmas in July celebrations. Steve tells me that as soon as he graduated from high school he dusted Danville off his heels and moved to Richmond where he began studying theatre at Virginia Commonwealth University. 

“Growing up I was raised Southern Baptist and had to go to church every Sunday, and every Sunday night, and every Wednesday night for prayer meeting and then I was the organist for the choir for about seven years, I guess,” says Steve. “And then I turned eighteen and came to VCU and I never went back to church again. Well I went to other churches but never Southern Baptist. You know like in L.A. I was a Buddhist for two weeks and then my ride quit.”

After two years at VCU, Steve headed up to the Big Apple. “At VCU you lie on the floor and you breathe and you learn exercises and you build sets,” says Steve. “And I went, ‘You know I’m not going to be a teacher and if I want to be an actor I’m going to get out of here.’ It’s not like I could be up for a sitcom in L.A. and they’d go, ‘Whoa, a BFA in acting from VCU. Why didn’t you say so? It’s your part.’ They want to see what you’ve done.”

Things didn’t go so well in New York. About the only job Steve could land was playing piano at a silent movie house in Brooklyn. He returned to Richmond in 1975 and went to work as an entertainer at Kings Dominion. During the summer he played a villain in a melodrama and in the fall he was singing in a Broadway revue. “Ironically,” Steve says. “I sang ‘California, Here I Come.’”

Which, of course, is where he went. After two months at Kings Dominion, Steve had managed to save $600 and with this modest bankroll he headed west. “In California I was like a kid in candy store,” he says. “All the queers, the most beautiful men in the world. Which wasn’t good for my self-esteem.”

His first job in Tinsel Town was delivering the L.A. for 75 bucks a week. He later became a busboy and then bartender at the Old World Restaurant in Hollywood. And then he started playing piano for Dee Anne McEnistry. They did an act called Beauty and the Burger, later played the Ice House in Pasadena, opening for Gallagher. 

But things got better. Dee Anne’s boyfriend was a member of a comedy team called Granite and Pallazo. Steve played piano for them which led to a job at the Comedy Store. “And what happened was I was playing piano all night long watching comedians one right after the other five or six nights a week and I saw how so many comedians got work on sitcoms and TV shows and when they worked they made good money,” Steve says in one long breath. So Steve changed his plans of becoming an actor and honed his skills as a comedian. 

 “I was playing piano and then I started singing and I’d write funny songs,” he says. “The first funny song I wrote was a parody of ‘He Touched Me’ and I wrote, ‘I Touched Me.’  I touched me, I touched me – and presently I watched myself grow. And then I started talking to the audience from the piano and that parlayed into me emceeing a lot of times. And all of a sudden I had this act I could do anywhere. So I pretty much crawled my way to the middle. Opening act, middle act, head liner.”

Working at the Comedy Store, observing stand up comics night after night, taught Steve the essentials of the trade. And he learned, too, that many comedians made their real living as warm up acts for sitcoms that were taped live. 

“Like if you went to see the taping of ‘Third Rock From The Sun’ or ‘Ugly Betty’ and you’re an audience member when you get there there’s a comedian that’s hired to get you really up and energetic. You’ve got to be like a cheerleader. You’ve got to make the audience feel important.”

Steve fell right in step. “I was really good at playing with an audience because of those years at the Comedy Store,” he says. “Sometimes you’d be there five, six, seven hours and I did that for twelve years.”

He worked on ‘Designing Women’ for four years, then ‘Roseanne’, on an off, for five years. Of Roseanne Barr, Steve says, “I knew her when she first came to town. I knew all those comedians when they first came to town. I was the piano player at the Comedy Store. I saw her when she auditioned to be at the Comedy Store. I used to go play bingo with her and go hang out with her and the kids. And then she did the ‘Tonight Show’ and she was like this huge star. It happened overnight. Trailer trash with millions and millions of dollars. It makes you a little crazy.”

Roseanne, as you might guess, wasn’t the easiest person in the world to work with, but the pay was good—about $1,500 a pop. “I’d do the warm-ups for her show and she fired me five times, I guess,” Steve remembers. “Tom Arnold fired me once.”

Steve also went on the road with the pair, playing huge arenas across the country. “Tom Arnold opened the show and then Roseanne came out and I played the piano for her for twenty minutes, which only needed to be about 3 minutes,” he says. “The truth is she can’t sing. They love to sing when they can’t sing.” He was amazed at her crassness toward fans. 

After he had been fired the fifth time Roseanne’s producer called Steve. “It was the last episode of the ‘Roseanne’ sitcom and Al Lowenstein called me and said, ‘You know she’s really vulnerable and wants her old friends around her and we wondered if you would come and do the last warm-up for the show.’ And this is where I learned the power of the word no. I thought about it and said, ‘Al, you know what, she’s fired me five times and I’m really not interested. Five is enough.’”

A couple hours later Lowenstein called Steve back. He offered him $5,000 for one show. Steve told him, “I’ll see you at three.”

“It had to be the easiest of any warm-up I’ve ever done,” he tells me. 

One of the hardest days Steve ever had was in 1989 as he was preparing for an interview with his agent. “I had my eight-by-ten pictures and my resumes with me and I swung by the clinic to get test results,” he says. “Back then, to get your test results they had a therapist tell you, especially if it came out positive. I went in there and what he said to me was I was positive. Then I had this interview with this big-time agent. I remember I was driving a Suzuki jeep, which was the gay vehicle at the time, and the cassette tape I played was ‘This Time I Know It’s for Real’ by Donna Summer.”

He pulled off the interview without a snag in a state of absolute denial. But later at home things fell apart. He called his folks back in Danville and started crying into the receiver. Wilma cried as well. “All I knew about it was that it was killing people and there was no cure and there was only one pill that you could take,” Steve tells me. “So I am truly one of the lucky ones. I mean I went to funerals every week – sometimes two of them. And somehow I just kind of tipped toed over the cracks and they’d have a new pill come out.”

Health insurers then were pretty much what they are now—slime bags and miscreants. Steve found out that his co-pay for this new wonder drug was much higher than he could ever afford. But there were physicians who remembered their Hippocratic oath. “I went to this doctor and told him my story and he gave me a big brown bag full of AZT,” says Steve. “And doctors would do that. And so that kept me alive.” 

Out of this immense tragedy, Steve drew on humor, gallows humor, the darkest and most rib-tickling sort that works its way out up from the marrow. He began making jokes about AIDS and HIV, coming out of the closet, so to speak, and breaking new comedic ground.

“All of a sudden I was the AIDS guy,” Steve says. “People would say, ‘Oh my God this guy has AIDS. He’s a comedian and he’s telling jokes about it. I did every talk show that you could imagine.”

He tells a few jokes from that time in rapid fire. “Well my parents in Virginia think HIV stands for homosexuals in Virginia,” he says. “I started talking about it like it was no big deal. And then I’d say, ‘AIDS – God I hope I never get that again. You guys got to be careful out there – don’t mess with me or I’ll open a vein and take out the whole front row.’”

All of this led to an hour-long HBO special that gave Steve instant international recognition, but more than that, it allowed him to be who he really was and it gave him a sense of self that he had never known before.

“I think a sense of humor kept me going,” he tells me. “And the fact of going on stage and just being who I am. That helped a lot. The whole thing was freeing in a lot of ways. If I think I’m going to die soon, I don’t care what you think about me. This is who I am like it or not. I’d always had a low self-esteem. I think it’s because I lived in Hollywood where the most beautiful people in the world live and I saw nothing but the most attractive people in the world and I couldn’t compete with that.”

And as he became himself, his vision cleared and he began to understand that beauty, in an odd sort of way, deforms the beautiful. “I know all about beauty,” says Steve. “It’s only pretty people that get plastic surgery. A pretty person looks in the mirror and all they can see is the one flaw and they go, ‘Remove this, I need a nose job.’ All they can see is what’s wrong with their face. Pretty people have it a lot easier, though. I don’t care what you say. It is easier to be pretty. You get a lot. I’d rather be pretty and rich.”

Though the HBO didn’t make Steve rich, it did give him a good chunk of change—75 grand. And this money drew forth from the Hollywood-work as many false friends as anyone needs. “All of a sudden I had a hundred best friends,” he says. “They were suddenly all such close friends, but I hadn’t heard from them in years. That’s why I have three friends that I’ve known for 30 years and that’s all I need. It’s hard to meet people and make lasting friendships in a place like Hollywood.”

With money in hand, Steve decided to move back to Virginia. He laid money down on a house, made double mortgage payments each month and owned it outright in three years. And he returned to acting, most recently appearing in the Henley Street Players’ production of “One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest.”

Two years ago a lasting grief entered Steve’s life. His brother and only sibling, Dale Moore, was found dead in the James River. He was an avid kayaker and knew the waters well. 

“It’s always been me, my straight older brother and my mom and dad,” says Steve, lowering his voice. “We’ve always loved each other so much. Now I’m the one that has to step up to the plate. Because he’s gone. And he’s got the three kids. His daughter’s having a baby today that he’ll never see that baby.”

He remembers the day his brother died vividly. “It was horrific,” he says. “We never thought anything about him kayaking because he’s done it his whole life you know. He’d always come back the next day at four, so we didn’t think anything about it. He would go to river for peace.”

Steve and his family called the police and the body was found by search teams. “Kayaking was something he did quite often,” says Steve. “And this time he just never came back.”

One of the local news networks botched things badly as they often. They flashed a photo of Dale and announced his body had been discovered on the James. And Dale’s children, who didn’t yet know their father was dead, saw it. “The kids start screaming,” Steve recalls. “And then detectives come over and says, ‘Is this your father’s watch?’ It was a picture of his dead arm and the watch. And then they ask, ‘Is this your father’s necklace?’ And the kids are screaming, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ All of us went through a tailspin with that.”

He tells me a little bit about his parents and the love they’ve always shared as a family, perhaps even more pronounced now with the death of Dale. Many years back, Steve, when he was visiting from California, decided tell his parents that he was gay. “So Dale took Skeets out to the garage and I told Wilma in his bedroom,” Steve says. “And I started crying, ‘Mom I’m queer,’ I said. And she said, ‘You see me crying? You think I love you any less?’” At the same exact moment Dale was breaking the news to Skeets. “And this is what Skeets said,” Steve tells me. “‘Well, I reckon they’re born that way.’ Just like that and that was it.”

When Steve first started taking certain medications he would feel nauseous and about the only thing that would make him feel better was smoking a little pot. When Steve told his father that marijuana at the time cost sixty dollars for an eighth of an ounce, Skeets decided to do a little home grown. “He worked at Leggett Meyers Tobacco Company so he went to the K-Mart and bought lights and dirt and I gave him seeds and he was growing pot for me in his basement in Danville,” says Steve. “No matter what they believe or what their religion is or how much they hate queers, they love me to death and I’m their son and I’m gay.”

Steve minces no words, does not try to paint reality in rosy hues. No lies; no denial. He tells the truth and maybe this why his comedy always worked so well. Maybe this is the essence of true comedy.

And then Stevens Moore tells me this as he sits on his couch in the living room. But it’s as if he’s on his feet up on stage before a live audience. It’s how he used to close his act years ago. 

“Wouldn’t it be awful to die when you’re feeling overly perky,” he says. “Oh God I’m just so glad to be al----. Thank God the doctor said it was beni----.” The he goes into song, “Don’t stop thinking about tomor----.” Then his words loose melody. He remembers an incident that occurred about twenty years back when an airline stewardess was sucked out of the fuselage of a jumbo jet as she worked the aisle. “So I’m in some comedy club and it was relevant because it was in the news,” says Steve. “And I said, Like that poor stewardess on the airplane. She didn’t know it was gonna be her last day. I’m sure she was going, ‘If you’ll notice the captain has turned on the no smo------.’ GO TOWARDS THE LIGHT, BETTY. And after the show this guy came up to me and said, ‘That was my sister and I don’t find that funny at all.’ What are the chances of that happening? But that’s what happened.”