Memories of Covid Resurface as Hantavirus, Ebola Emerge

Discussions in my household this week have focused on the possibility of hantavirus or Ebola becoming widespread like Covid-19. The grim news from central Africa, compounded by the withdrawal of U.S. international aid, has revived memories of early 2020, when reports of a strange virus in China gradually escalated from a minor news item to a full-blown emergency.

For parents of children finishing primary school, a question lingers: what and how much will they remember about that time? My two children, immersed in World War II as part of their Year 6 history curriculum, speculate that when they are 80, they will be subjects of curiosity—akin to veterans of the Blitz—for having lived through the 2020 pandemic. (I refrain from noting that if Covid remains the worst thing to happen to their generation, they will be exceedingly lucky.)

They were five during New York’s first lockdown and mainly recall unlimited iPad time and sweets, one requiring two fillings before age seven. Six years later, they speak with fond nostalgia, like ancient mariners, but close inspection reveals no actual memories—not of an empty Broadway, the field hospital in Central Park, or sirens echoing through the city. For me, strange memory glitches occasionally surface; this morning, leaving the house, I patted myself down, thinking I had forgotten something, and for a split second my brain supplied: “Damn, where’s my mask?”

We must discuss John Travolta’s beret, worn at the Cannes Film Festival this week. The 72-year-old director explained it as a kind of cosplay to publicize his directorial debut, a one-hour film titled “Propeller One-Way Night Coach.” He said: “You’re an actor [playing] the part of a director, look like an old-school director. I looked up pictures from the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and the old-school directors wore berets, and the glasses. And I thought: ‘That’s what I’m doing. I’m doing an homage to being a director, so I’m going to play the part of being a director.'”

A bit odd, and it does not explain the facial hair, which appeared sprayed on and gave him a resemblance to the canceled director James Toback. Still, Travolta remains a legend, affording him leverage for such whimsy, obliquely connected to other gestures over the years, like parking his Boeing 707 outside his front door and adhering to Scientology.

“Propeller One-Way Night Coach,” meanwhile, sounds like a novel title by Sean Penn; it turns out to be an autobiographical piece based on Travolta’s childhood memoir. Critics have been strainingly nice (The Guardian’s three-star review called it “sweet”), while Variety implied the film’s greatest asset was a pre-roll montage of Travolta’s greatest roles, and the beret, advisedly or otherwise, stole the show.

I have never admired Rachel Reeves more than in this week’s footage of her fighting a powerful urge to tell a heckler to shove it, then redirecting that impulse constructively. It was like watching media training in real time as the chancellor first ignored, then mildly admonished, then fully lost it toward a man in a hi-vis vest shouting “Nigel Farage” at her during a TV interview at a Leeds petrol station.

Smiling with the tolerance of someone who constantly interacts with the public, Reeves, it seemed to me, would have gone full Shabana Mahmood and told the guy to “fuck right off.” Instead, as he ranted about immigration and Englishness, she yelled at his retreating white van: “I love our country! I love our country!” and “one of the things about our country is good manners!”

This was painful to watch, like a person suppressing a sneeze. Toward the end, Reeves says, “it’s not very British,” then overrides an apparent adrenaline-charged malfunction in her persona and snaps: “Right. Very good. You can put that on the telly.”

Reclaiming civility as a tenet of Britishness was a smart save under dire provocation, but she would have risen in voters’ estimations across the spectrum if she had said what we all thought: “Hey, incel, thanks for dropping by and good luck winning a woman’s attention without screaming across a petrol forecourt.”

At the Soho Theatre Walthamstow for the opening night of “End of the Rainbow,” the musical drama starring Jinkx Monsoon as Judy Garland—addled by addiction but still Judy—in the last months of her life in London, it was a joyous evening with the best people present, including Mason Alexander Park, fresh off the West End stage in “Oh, Mary,” and many excited Garland superfans. The play, by Peter Quilter, cleverly positions Garland between her fifth husband, Mickey Deans, and her loyal piano player, Anthony, a fictional character encapsulating Garland’s meaning to the gay community and the limits of their protection.

Monsoon, twice winner of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” is terrific in the role. I saw in her performance the influence of Garland in “I Could Go On Singing,” the 1963 film with Dirk Bogarde, in which she played a lightly fictionalized version of herself, down to her tardy Palladium stage entrance winning over a hostile audience. One scene, apparently extemporized by Garland—”I’ve hung on to every bit of rubbish there is to hang on to in life; and I’ve thrown all the good bits away. Now can you tell me why I’d do that?”—Monsoon inhabited with pitch-perfect attention to the keening intensity and unvanquished charm of an icon in her final years. Bravo!

With 30°C weather and a bank holiday approaching, I feel the urge to introduce my children to a British tradition: buying train tickets, standing two hours in a sweltering, unair-conditioned carriage stopped for unknown reasons, dragging ourselves to a pebble beach and a freezing, iron-grey sea that may contain E. coli from waste overflow, then struggling home sunburned but happy. There’s no place like home.