Although Andrew Cuomo ended his daily coronavirus briefings last month, he’s continued to find opportunities to play up the media character he developed during the peak of the New York crisis. A couple of weeks ago, he gave People an interview about his dating life and soon after held a briefing where he used a foam sculpture of a mountain to convey the importance of flattening the curve.
During a briefing on Monday he tried a new way in, displaying his understanding of New York’s battle with the pandemic in the form of an illustrated poster:
As with most of these self-consciously whimsical maneuvers, the poster is about the pandemic, but it’s also about him. It includes his own quotes and mottos, his own car, his own daughters, his own aides, and something called a “boyfriend cliff” that provided an opportunity to tweet at Chrissy Teigen later in the day. It calls back to his previous posters. It traces the past few months as a narrative arc, beginning with a flame to represent the early New Rochelle hot spot, where he is the protagonist.
In this depiction, and in Cuomo’s overall packaging of the situation, the pandemic was a mountain that New York—and Cuomo—climbed over. But if the mountain has been scaled, we still stand to hear about the journey—his journey—for a long, long time. In a WAMC radio interview on Friday, Cuomo reiterated that he’s single and said that he’s “thinking of writing a book of what we went through…lessons learned.”
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