Day 117…
We had a late breakfast yesterday, in a little diner in a small town in Connecticut.
We ate outside and were the only party of people there at the time. Our server was young - either late teens or very early twenties at the most. It is a place that we’ve eaten at before when we’ve visited out there - the food is excellent.
The server was not wearing a mask.
Well into the meal, the owner came out and said hi. The owner wasn’t wearing a mask either.
In the county that we were in, there have only been about 100 overall deaths reported from the coronavirus so far. That’s from the entire county so the number of people in the actual town who have be affected is a much, much smaller number.
The owner said that they had remained open throughout the crisis so far and had had no problem. Older customers had eaten inside the small indoor space and been fine. As far as they were concerned, the whole pandemic thing has been overblown. Mask wearing wasn’t a law so there wasn’t any reason to do it.
The owner told us a story. A nurse had come there to eat one day. The nurse said that they weren’t doing anything to treat COVID-19 at the hospital where they worked. An argument between the nurse and the owner ensued. Somehow, this encounter got construed in the owner’s head to mean that the virus wasn’t anything to be worried about. In essence, that the whole thing was a hoax that for some reason was being used to target small businesses.
For the last 95 days, all of us in the theatre business have been following the story of Nick Cordero. He’s not someone I knew personally, but a huge number of my friends did.
I may not have known him, but I certainly knew of him. I saw him in the musical version of Bullets Over Broadway in a role that won him a Tony nomination. I also saw him, several times, in the musical version of A Bronx Tale. The latter show was produced by the same office that did Jersey Boys, so I was able to see it at several points over its developmental process.
On March 20 of this year, Nick got sick. He was originally diagnosed with pneumonia, but later, testing revealed that he had COVID-19.
The pneumonia became serious enough that he was put on a ventilator within a short time after being admitted to the hospital. He was also placed in a medically induced coma to help him survive.
He began having issues with his kidneys, so he underwent dialysis. His heart stopped briefly, and he endured a series of small heart attacks and sepsis, so a specialized heart-lung bypass machine was employed to help keep him alive.
Blood clots developed and the doctors had to amputate one of his legs.
A tracheotomy was performed.
A few days ago, his wife tweeted that his lungs were so debilitated by the ravages of this virus that he was going to need a double lung transplant when his body became strong enough to handle it. His lungs reportedly looked like those of a person who has been smoking for 50 years.
At the beginning of June, a woman in her twenties whose lungs had been ravaged by COVID-19 was the first person in the United States to receive a double lung transplant. Three weeks ago, it was reported that she was in stable condition, but I can’t find any follow up reports to see how she’s doing now.
For many of us, Nick Cordero was the face of this virus. If you didn’t know him, you certainly knew plenty of people who did. A Go Fund Me page that was set up to help cover his medical expenses has already raised nearly $800 thousand dollars. We all followed his progress every day on social media - Amanda, his wife, tweeted regular updates. People recorded songs for him and taped messages of support that were played for him as he slept. They recorded songs for his baby son, Elvis.
For months, Amanda couldn’t even see him because of the virus. 79 days into his ordeal, however, he was finally clear of the virus, itself, and she was able to be in the room with him and hold his hand.
Yesterday morning, after more than 90 days on a ventilator, Nick passed away at the age of 41.
He leaves behind his wife and his son, who just turned 1 last month. He also leaves behind all of the rest of us who have been pulling for him for three months. He was going to beat this thing - he lasted so long through so much.
But he didn’t.
Florida reported 9,999 new cases of the coronavirus yesterday. 31 other States are seeing their numbers rise. 12 states, including New York are seeing their daily case numbers hold steady. We here in New York are clocking in at about 800 new cases a day. Kentucky, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Connecticut are seeing their numbers decline.
The first 5 days of July have seen 250,000 new cases of the virus appear nation-wide.
The owner of the diner where we ate yesterday was supremely confident that the virus would not touch him in his little town in his downward-trending state.
It’s hard to blame him, really, for that. He hasn’t yet been impacted by the virus in any way except financially. He works HARD. He’s in there at the crack of dawn, cleaning and prepping and cooking. He does that all day.
He’s not sitting at home watching the news. He’s not sitting at home surfing through the internet comparing one news story to another. The information that he’s getting is coming in isolated flashes. He genuinely thinks that he’s safe and protected in his little corner of the country. The virus is “out there”. It’s a big city problem, not a small-town problem.
That he was speaking to two complete strangers, guys from a big city who were sitting directly across from him, did not seem to occur to him for a second. We could easily have brought it with us.
Mask wearing by restaurant workers in Connecticut is actually a law, by the way. I looked it up. Oh well.
I know that I am largely preaching to the choir here. The President in his speech at Mount Rushmore referred to the people opposing his views as part of a “new far-left fascism” that wants to wipe out the nation’s moral values and erase its history. There was little or no mention of the pandemic that is threatening to completely overwhelm parts of the country in the next week or two.
Then there was a spectacular display of fireworks.
Most of us can see this rhetoric for the nonsense that it is, but if that’s all that the owner of the diner in Connecticut happens to catch on the radio on his way to work, then that’s what sticks.
Within two weeks, we are likely to see a significant rise in hospitalizations from the huge numbers of newly infected people we are seeing now. People who are not in nearly the good shape Nick Cordero was in are going to find themselves hospitalized for, potentially, a long arduous stay. Thousands of people are donating to Nick’s family’s Go Fund Me page. That’s unlikely to happen for anybody who’s not that well known or so universally beloved.
It was glorious being out in the country. The breakfast that we had at that diner was delicious. We headed to a farm stand afterwards and got some of the most amazing tomatoes you can imagine. Big, red and beyond flavorful.
As gay men, Michael and I have had to live most of our lives visiting places where, on the surface, we were welcomed, but underneath, maybe not so much.
We’ve learned to avoid topics and adjust our behavior, not only in small towns in the US, but also in other places around the world. It’s part of how we get through our daily lives and it’s not anything that we usually consciously even think about. The only time we really notice it, oddly, is in places like Provincetown and Fire Island where we don’t have to adjust our behavior at all. In places like that we can just relax and be ourselves. Act silly if we want to and not worry that someone might take offense and beat us up. Gay bars can provide the same kind of respite from the burden of having to live under cover.
We discussed COVID-19 with the owner of the diner, but we didn’t fight about it. At some point, we just let off so that we could enjoy the wonderful meal.
The way around having to behave that way all the time is not to get into fights one on one. The way around it is to change what’s happening above us. With our leadership.
When we unite our voices, we are heard.
Look at the reforms that are starting to happen around the country in terms of social justice. We were heard.
As we move forward, all of those that we’ve lost will be there with us. Every single one of the people who’ve died from this virus is somebody’s Nick Cordero.
So many of these lost lives were lost unnecessarily. Countless thousands of them could have been saved by the unified messaging from health professionals without the fatal consequences of putting it all through a political filter.
Two gay men from New York are not going to change the mind of a diner owner in Connecticut. Two gay men from New York, however, who join their voices together with the voices of millions of people all across the country who are tired of all of this, well that’s a different story.
Under those circumstances, two gay men from New York can help change the world.
RIP Nick Cordero.
RIP Nick Cordero 💔