Vocalist from Jameson to perform at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum

Singer Kimberly Lord of rural Jameson will be giving a concert at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum in St. Joseph on April 19. The concert “A Celebration of Rainbows…The Miracles…The Promises…”is a tribute to life — to what she herself describes as an amazing journey to self discovery.

Between 1993-94 Kimberly was faced with an illness that threatened her life. Doctors gave her no hope of recovery. Kimberly refused to give up. She found a doctor in Arizona who could offer her both an explanation of the disease and a course of action. She planned to take the treatments and friends and the community raised funds to make it all possible.

One morning, just two days before the family left for Arizona, it poured rain and then suddenly the sun came out. Kimberly was sure there would be a rainbow. Her children were small, aged nine and five. They helped their mother get out of bed and go outside.

They looked, but there was no rainbow.

“My son had never seen a rainbow. My daughter said, ‘I’ve seen them before, but we probably won’t see one today.'”

Then, on a hill past a field and above a tree line, a rainbow suddenly appeared.

“The rainbow just seemed to paint itself,” recalls Kimberly. “It stretched from one side to the other, it was so wide. The kids were jumping up and down. We called my husband, Jack, to come out and look at it. It was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen.”

That rainbow came just at the right time for Kimberly.

“It gave me hope. It meant I was going to live. Whatever journey was ahead of me, I was going to accomplish it.”

When Kimberly was 11 years-old, her sixth grade class put on a musical play called “Young Abe Lincoln.” She played Abe’s girlfriend, even though she was four inches taller. She has been singing professionally ever since. She has performed leading roles in major theaters from New York to San Francisco and appeared in concerts through North America and Australia. In addition to performing, Ms. Lord has produced and directed such shows as “Quilters” and “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat.”

In 1998 the Lord family moved from their home in New Jersey to Missouri. They bought a farm a little north of Jameson.

“After my illness, my focus changed,” said Kimberly. “I felt like we needed to move to a place less hectic. I didn’t need to be near New York. We wanted to be fairly close to a cosmopolitan area like Kansas City but far enough away for peace and quiet. We fell in love with this land.”

Within a week of moving, Kimberly came to know Deborah Freedman of the St. Joseph Symphony, and they booked her first concert at the Missouri Theater for September of 2000.

Then, just one month before the concert, Kimberly discovered a lump in her breast.

“By the time of the concert I had lost a lot of weight and my energy was sapped,” she says. “This after waiting two years for this opportunity! It hardly seemed fair. I knew I had to wait until after the concert to really confront the problem, so it was a hard month.”

Despite everything, Kimberly sang well at the concert. No one else realized that her energy and therefore her voice was not what it had been just a few months before.

During this time Kimberly had also begun the production of her new Christmas CD. Now suddenly it all came to a screeching halt.

I fell into a deep depression and felt more alone than I had ever been in my life. My year became the year from hell.”

Kimberly and her children became homesick for the family and friends they’d left on the east coast. They missed the ocean, the isolated farm became a “deserted island” and not all the community proved welcoming.

“I started asking my husband, ‘Why did you bring me here?’ even though I had pushed him to come.”

Fear and sadness became unrelenting and only thoughts of her children kept Kimberly from doing anything rash.

“My husband was wonderful,” she says. “He kept me alive on more than one level.”

Even through her illness and depression, Kimberly was never one to stay in bed. She continued to record her music, including the Christmas CD “Welcome Child,” at Chapman Recording in Kansas City.

“I had no energy to drive there or to sing,” she says. “I had the most tormenting thoughts. I was sure I was going to give the worst representation of my life. But somehow I did it. It was God’s gift. He was saying ‘You don’t think I’m here. You can’t see me or hear me. But you will know I was with you always.’ I realized I had something to give through my music, instead of always being on the taking end. I finally knew God and I were of the same will.”

By December of 2001, Kimberly had reached a crucial turning point.

“It took over a year to discover that I was meant to live and not die and I had to begin to search for the way to do that,” she says. “Whatever I was going to do medically had to make sense to me. So far, all the options that I was offered in Kansas City made no sense whatsoever after all I already knew about cancer.”

Kimberly began taking treatments at the Hufeland Klinik in Germany.

“The bottom line is that I’m going to be very well and healthy once again,” she says.

The focus of her recovery is her music and she is ready to begin again to do her work of presenting benefit concerts, especially for children. She is already booked to go to England to raise funds for a little boy who is being successfully treated for an inoperable brain tumor.

A few years ago, she and Jack formed their production company, “The Lightworks Combination,” for this purpose.

“I’m very keen on fund raising organizations that actually give most of the funds to the beneficiary,” she says.

Kimberly collects only a minimum fee to cover her concert costs and a small fee that will go to begin to cover her own medical expenses.

“Some people sing for their supper,” she says. “Others sing for their lives.”

Kimberly’s soprano voice has been compared to that of both Julie Andrews and Barbara Streisand. She will introduce some new songs at the concert, including “Inch by Inch,” a song she wrote about rebuilding your life. This song is recorded on the CD “Let Freedom Sing,” an album produced by KSHB, NBC 41, for the victims of September 11.

The day after her concert in St. Joseph on April 19, she will be in the recording studio to record her original songs “Michael” and “Looking for a Rainbow” for her new CD “Happy.” She plans to use these first two songs as part of the promotional package for the concerts.

In the meantime, Kimberly will be performing at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art at 7:30 p.m. on April 19. Her special musical presentation follows the opening of the exhibition of the MidAmerica Pastel Society. She will be joined by her pianist/arranger, Lois Gutierrez, who has flown in from New York City to accompany her. Though the two have collaborated for over six years, they have just met for the first time, face to face, in Kansas City.

“During the past four years, I’ve made the best friends of my life,” says Kimberly. “I’m glad to say we live here. I don’t have arms big enough to hold the good things we have here.”

Her children, Samantha, 17, and Kelly, 13, are enrolled at Gallatin R-5. Samantha will be attending Missouri Western in the Fall. Samantha, who will join her mother on stage this Friday, plays the violin and son, Kelly, plays the piano.

“People tell me when I start to sing it doesn’t really seem like me,” says Kimberly. “Which is fine. I’d rather be an instrument that heaven is playing.”