In part 2 of Clarity, we’re sharing two more stories about the ways the pandemic has brought our lives into sharper focus.
In our first story, comedian Freddy G realizes just how much he relies on his wife’s support when she gets stuck in another state due to COVID-19 restrictions.
Our second story is from Trey Kay, host and producer of the Us & Them podcast. In his story, Trey navigates the contrasting pandemic responses in his home of New York and his home state of West Virginia.
Stay tuned for our final episode of the Stories of COVID-19 series, airing on Friday and Monday!
Story Transcripts
Story 1: Freddy G
I met her through my college roommate. One day, she posted about a charity event on Facebook and I messaged her about it. That's how we started talking.
I mentioned that I was taking a short story writing class. She said, “Oh, Fred, I thought you were just some boring finance guy. That's really cool. Do you want to write the great American novel?”
I said I don't know what I want but I'm enjoying trying stuff out.
On our first date, she told me that since she was 10 she knew she wanted to raise money for the less fortunate, but it's a really demanding job and she has to work a lot of nights. She doesn't know if she even has time for a boyfriend. That didn’t faze me. This is a woman who has a mission. That's the kind of woman that I want to date.
I mention that the writing school has a stand-up comedy workshop. She says, “You should go for it.”
Six months later, I was ready to do my first ever stand-up show. I got so nervous walking to the club that I bought a huge bag of chocolate-covered almonds and I ate them before I walked in the door. Here was my first ever joke.
“Did anyone see Avatar? I'm going to dump my girlfriend when 3D porn comes out.”
This was a terrible joke, but I look in the audience and she's laughing hysterically.
FreddyG performs pre-pandemic. He has also performed on Sirius XM and NPR.
A year later on July 4th I went to Baltimore to watch the fireworks with a friend. I called her up and I said, “Baby, I figured out my life during the fireworks. I'm going to pursue comedy seriously. It's my mission.”
Now, I was drunk and she could have easily dismissed this as drunk talk. And she had every reason to. We're about to move in together and I'm telling her that I'm going to change my entire life. But she doesn't hesitate. “Fred, I think you should go for it. We'll figure it out.”
I never worked as hard at my job anymore after that. I got laid off a year later. It was two weeks after she became my fiancé. Her reaction? “Now, you can help me plan the wedding.”
After we got married I started a stand-up show every Saturday and she came for four straight years every single week. What other woman would let me ruin 200 consecutive date nights? And I never had trouble ruining dates before stand-up.
The reason why I do the show every week is I started staying up late and I'm making up for lost time. I'm never going to retire. I'm going to accomplish so much that when I die, no matter how old I am they'll say it was too young.
Her career is going great too. She gets a big event in Milwaukee in March of 2020. That means she's going to have to go there for a month. I can work 24/7.
Typical night that month was March 11th. My first show was on the upper west side. The show was so Jewish it was literally hosted by an orthodox rabbi. My next show was at a bar in midtown and the host was also the bartender. Before she brings me up, she does five minutes on how she loves to eat ass.
I take the mic right from her and put it right on my chin. When I get off stage, a buddy says, “Fred, they canceled the NBA season because of COVID.”
I say, “You're joking, right?”
He says no.
Then he says the words that make COVID serious to every American. “Tom Hanks has it.”
I listen to a podcast on the walk home and they say that over half of America is going to end up getting COVID. That means it's coming for me. I'm going to need to quarantine. That means staying at home all day, no stand-up. I'll probably get depressed again like when I was a kid. I can't do this without my wife.
Over in Milwaukee, COVID isn't as big of a deal. They just don't have that many cases. When I call her up, she says, “The only difference here is that now, before they sign off, the newscasters tell everyone to remember to wash their hands when they pee.”
That's a reminder everyone needed before COVID.
I've been doing some research and I realized that her event is big enough that if it was in New York it would already be shut down. So I say, “I don't get why you still have to work.”
“Fred, if I stop preparing, the event can't happen.”
I say, “Baby, the event's not going to happen. They shut the whole city down.”
“Fred, this is out of my control. And they're not going to shut down all of Milwaukee because you're yelling at me over text.”
I say, “Baby, you're right. I'm just sad without you.”
I'm emotional, but when I'm emotional I get rational and I just need to figure out a way to get her home before they shut all of New York down and she can't come home. That seems like a real possibility.
I'm emotional because I'm worried that she's not going to be able to get into New York.
I'm emotional because I'm worried that New York is going to get closed off before she can get home and I'll be stuck quarantining alone.
And she'll be stuck in a hotel room in Milwaukee and possibly sick.
So I think it out and the safest way to get her home is for her to just move up her return flight. She can do this if they cancel the event, but no one thinks this is a realistic possibility except for me.
The next day was Friday the 13th. I come armed with ammunition. I say, “Baby, schools have been shut down in Milwaukee. They even closed the zoo, and thank God they closed the senior center.”
She says, “Fred, there's no health directive affecting our event so we still have to prepare.”
I say, “Baby, everything is shut down except your stupid fucking event.”
She explains that they all met and they agreed that they would talk more about postponement on Monday. She's the only one from New York and she doesn't want to be the reason that it's shut down. Because if that happens…
She doesn't want to be the reason that it’s shut down, because if that happens she'll have worked her ass off for nothing and still ruined her relationship. She's going to keep preparing. I can't convince her.
That night, I'm supposed to do my last couple stand-up shows before everything shuts down. But I don't even care because I can't do stand-up alone.
People usually think of us comics as unhappy and unloved, but I didn't start doing stand up till I was happy and loved. She's literally been with me since Joke One.
Then it hits me. I realize that in every set I mention her in the first minute. My act is self‑deprecating and it would be really depressing if I was a sad, lonely comic. Here's a typical joke.
“I met my wife in real life. She never wanted to internet-date because she was worried she would end up with some kind of weirdo. Honey, you really dodged that bullet. Before I met her I was ashamed to be a weirdo, now I'm proud of it.”
On Saturday she made me proud. She moved her flight up. By then, everyone in Milwaukee is really nervous. And the fact that the hard-working woman from New York decided she needed to go home made them realize that they should postpone the event.
I text my best friend, “Dude I got the event in Milwaukee shut down. I'm a hero.”
He says, “No, Fred. You were just lonely and didn't want to quarantine without your wife.”
He's right. What a terrible situation she was in. She had no good options.
She hasn't worked since. She hasn't been able to work since so she's worried that this is how her career is going to end.
On Sunday, I cancelled the stand-up show for the first time ever to pick her up from the airport. We're ready to quarantine by Monday night. On Tuesday morning, she wakes up sick with a cough.
I say, “You're going to stay in the room, I'll bring you food.”
I'm texting my friends, “This is the worst case scenario. COVID’s in my house.”
She feels sick off and on for two weeks. I texted my friends, “I think Miriam's got…” [cut that]
I text my friends…
I say, “Stay in the bedroom. I'll bring you food.”
I'm feeling really intense because COVID’s in the house.
She feels sick on and off for two weeks. When she's not sick, it's really nice. We start playing board games. It's kind of like when we first started dating.
@orangefreddyg Which one are you? ##newYork ##newyorker ##nyc ##oneliners ##standupcomedy
♬ original sound - FreddyG Comedian
I realize I have to try to do comedy from home, so I start posting three jokes a day on Instagram. Then I realize I can make videos of me saying the jokes and post them on TikTok.
The first video I post gets a 150,000 views. The second one 300,000. And these were new jokes because they say don't post your best jokes on the internet. But why not? Stand-up's not happening. What do I have to lose?
Stand-up's not even happening. What do I have to lose? I post my best joke and it gets two million views. Career-changing. That means I can do stand-up from home and more people will see it than ever who saw my stuff before.
The morning after I posted that joke, I woke up sick. Now, COVID’s inside my body. This is the worst case scenario. I'm so sick that I go to bed early. I hadn't done that since before I started stand-up. The next morning I woke up and I'm basically better.
I text my buddy, “I beat COVID in a night. Take that, pandemic!”
He says, “Fred, you're probably just an neurotic Jew who had a cold.”
And the truth is I never had a temperature, neither did she. We never got tested. We don't know if we actually had COVID.
Either way, in April we're super careful. We stay home the whole month. We only have a couple times to buy food.
During that month, 20,000 New Yorkers died of COVID. The streets were silent except for the sound of ambulances, but everyone stayed at home.
By May, the curves flatten in New York and we decide we can leave the house for fun. We drive to a park and sit by a lake. She's already lost six months of work. I haven't done stand-up in a month and I don't know when I'm going to do it again. But we're happy because we've never been closer. She even agrees to be in a TikTok video with me, as long as we keep our masks on.
I say, “Baby, thank you so much. We're going to beat this thing, together. One joke at a time.”
Story 2: Trey Kay
It's late March 2020, and I'm driving around Charleston, West Virginia. My sister has just called me to see if I'm OK. Apparently, Governor Jim Justice has just announced in his daily COVID-19 press briefing that he's ordering West Virginia state troopers to pull over any cars with license plates from New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. Even though I was born and raised in West Virginia and spent a great deal of, and still spent a great deal of time in the state working, I'm feeling like an outsider.
And that's because I'm a New York resident and my car has tags from that state.
And since the New York metropolitan area has had a frightening number of COVID cases, and at that time West Virginia had very few, Governor Justice and other West Virginians are very nervous about guys like me, and perhaps they have a right to be scared.
I mean, one of the last things I did in New York City before driving down to West Virginia was attend a party for the radio show Studio 360. They were wrapping up after 20 years of broadcasting. And I was there with old friends and colleagues chatting, drinking wine, and breathing the same air. After all that, I piled into my car and made my way down to West Virginia and started up with work on the radio podcast show that I do that's called Us and Them. And we were learning more at that time about how the virus was transmitting. And my editor, Kate Smith, encouraged me to attach my microphone to a seven-foot boom pole and wear a mask and gloves.
And she says that I needed to protect myself and the people that I'm interviewing. When she first made these suggestions, I confess that it seemed like an overreaction.
But I trust and respect Kate's opinion. But I was a little annoyed because her suggestions got in the way of the scenario that was in my head about this heroic journalist working in dangerous conditions.
But my interviews went well, and the next day I was supposed to drive down to Williamson, West Virginia, and do some more interviews, but when I got back to where I was staying at my mom's home in Charleston, I started to feel a little scratchy, like a cold was coming on, and I remember thinking to myself. Is this the coronavirus?
I mean, I've got a lot of work planned and man, if you get sick, you're going to screw up everything that you've been working on for months. And I mean, you don't know if you have COVID or not. You know, maybe a cold? What if you just push through and go and get these interviews, and if you find out later that you have COVID and maybe you had some warning signs before, that could be your little secret?
I tossed and turned that night with uneasy dreams about being sick and getting others sick. And when I woke up that morning in March, I flipped on the television and the main story in the news was about hospitals fearing that they may not have enough capacity to take a surge of COVID patients and that there was a shortage of respirators. And my mind shifted to a scenario that my sore throat was going to progress to respiratory distress and hospitalization and a need for equipment that wasn't available. And then I started to think about the fact that I'm in my mom's basement. And she's 81 and clearly in the category considered most vulnerable, and I didn't want to be responsible for getting her ill.
I started thinking about her on a respirator, and I began to ask myself, "What the hell are you doing?"
And then I remembered being at a Trump rally in the media section when he would refer to all of us in the press area as enemies of the people. I hated his media bashing. But as a journalist, and I'm out there doing interviews, what if I unknowingly was spreading this dangerous novel coronavirus to people? Would that make me an enemy of the people?
I wanted to make sure that I did not give President Trump any ammunition for his specious claims about the news media. If you don't know my show Us and Them, it's a podcast where we tell the stories about the things that divide Americans. And the fact that I live in a urban blue state, in New York, and I spent a great deal of time in my home state, red rural West Virginia, I feel like this gives me a unique perspective on these culture war divisions in our nation. But as this COVID pandemic was playing out, my team was having to pivot away from many of these culture war issues that we typically follow and focus on this newer us-and-them division that this microscopic virus was creating. We interviewed all kinds of people who told us about how COVID was significantly changing their lives, but one of the interviews really struck with me. I found this medical doctor, Damir Huremović. He's a Bosnian American who specializes in psychiatry and psychosomatic medicine. I wanted to see if someone could break down the stages of a society's psychology during a pandemic, the same way that Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross had broken down the five stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Dr. Huremović had published a book called The Psychiatry of Pandemics, and he researched just about every pandemic you can think of -- Ebola, SARS, the AIDS crisis, the 1918 flu pandemic, the black plague, and even a pandemic going back to the time of the ancient Greeks. And one thing that he said that was in common in every one of these scenarios, and how it affected their psychology, it happened at the end of the process, after all of the tribulation of the disease and the pandemic was over. Kind of like when the lifeguard blows the whistle and says, "OK, everybody back into the pool." That time when we're on the other side of the danger. Dr. Huremović says there's a collective reaction in society where we say, "What pandemic?" A collective amnesia sets in, and any of the lessons learned that could be helpful just evaporate into the ether.
After three months of this pandemic, and summer started to bloom, I, like many others, had an acute case of cabin fever and I was dying to get out. And then in early June, there was an event that presented an us-and-them moment for me. My brother invited me to a party. He and all of his friends were going to gather on his back patio for his birthday, and I have to tell you, I was really looking forward to this. I mean, I really wanted to connect with people and I figured that that we could do it safely outside without masks. And I don't know, this just seemed like it would be balm for the soul. But to get back on his patio, I had to walk through his house. And to do that, I put on my mask and I quickly realized as I was walking through his kitchen that I was the only one wearing one. And noticing my mask, my brother's girlfriend said, "Are you really going to wear that?"
And I answered sheepishly, "Yeah, I am."
And I went back onto the patio and I started talking to people and I had a great time. But as much as I enjoyed the party and seeing people that I love and care about, it kept eating at me that I seemed to be the only one there taking this COVID thing seriously.
Now, before I say another word, I don't want to come off as someone who's in the business of shaming people for not wearing a mask, I mean, I think based on advice of knowledgeable epidemiologists, it's a good idea for everyone to wear a mask. But I don't want to get in everybody's face about it.
That said, I couldn't stop thinking about Dr. Huremović's "what pandemic?" comment. Was I at a party with people who thought this pandemic was over? Did they not think it was serious? Was this a political thing, like many of the things we explore on my program? My brother and I, we love each other, but we're on different sides of the political spectrum. I align more with progressive blue staters, and he considers himself a Reagan conservative. And he watches Fox News and all that stuff.
But for him and his friends, I was wondering, was wearing masks akin to bowing to using politically correct terms or phrases? Or was it just that they were exhausted from this oppressive pandemic and they just wanted a few normal hours of socializing?
My family has a camp in West Virginia and we gather there in the summer, but this past summer because of COVID, I chose not to go. One day I was clicking on Facebook and I noticed a group of family and friends were all gathering there at the camp. And they were crowded around this table, elbow to elbow, eating crawfish, no masks, no social distance, just chowin' down on spicy crawdads.
And I thought, "Maybe this is a picture from last summer," but I checked the dates and know this was taken in 2020, the summer of the COVID era. And the photos prompted a range of reactions. On one hand, I was a little hurt that they didn't invite me, but I figured they concluded, you know, Trey wouldn't come anyway. He's just too far gone with this COVID paranoia stuff. But later that summer, I learned there was a COVID outbreak from another gathering at the camp. And I felt like I made the right call not to go.
I had a relative who was visiting from another state and he came to the camp and he was carrying the virus. He didn't know it. And several people contracted COVID. Now, these folks who got infected at the gathering, they were treated and they avoided passing the disease on to anybody else, and I'm really grateful for that. But some of the people who emerged from this ordeal, much in the same way that Donald Trump did, concluded that this wasn't such a big deal. They felt a little crappy, but that was it. And they were proud not to let COVID rule their life.
I mean, that may be fine for some people. But when I heard this, it seemed like they were talking in a way that sounded like the people who died of COVID, I don't know, that they hadn't been doing enough push-ups. Maybe these survivors from our camp incident hadn't really known anyone who'd died this terrible death. I know I got sobered up about COVID when I learned about a guy my age who I used to play music with in New York clubs. And he was happy and healthy on one day, sick on the next, and then dead on the day after that. And I knew a book author who needed knee replacement surgery early in the days of the pandemic, and he caught the disease either in a hospital or from his physical therapy. I had a friend whose mother was an invalid and she contracted COVID from a caregiver and she died. And a traveling nurse from West Virginia who I had helped find an apartment in New York City because she wanted to go there and help work in the hospitals during this crisis, and she told me about the agony of families and the people dying, separated from them. It just sounded horrible.
And thinking about these stories, I realized I wasn't necessarily letting COVID rule my life. But I was letting it affect me.
Years ago, the great program This American Life reported about a division in the United States Army called the Center for Army Lessons Learned. Ira Glass and his awesome producer, Nancy Updike, made a program back in 2007, and that was when the army was considering the things they did in their 2003 invasion of Iraq. And this Lessons Learned wing of the Army considers the unsuccessful initiatives with the hope that they can learn from their mistakes as we live through however long this pandemic takes.
Will we learn lessons that can help us in the future? When I spoke with Dr. Damir Huremović back in March of 2020, he seemed to think that COVID-19 might be an important dress rehearsal for a more serious pandemic in the future. But I'm wondering what's in the cards for us. Are we destined for a round of post-pandemic social amnesia? Can we benefit from the Center of Lessons Learned, if, like my brother and I, we're dealing with two very different sources of facts, I don't really know. But for me, ike everything with this pandemic, it's about breathing. And waiting to see what happens next.