Whether or not you know someone who has tested positive for the coronavirus strain COVID-19, there’s no denying the impact the pandemic is having all over the world. Still, many Americans are wondering exactly how many precautions to take.
Many organizations, music festivals, and awards shows have either been canceled or postponed due to coronavirus concerns. The same goes for movie premieres, as well as production schedules for TV and film. Below, a list of all the major pop-culture entities that have been affected by coronavirus.
Live Events
David McNew/Getty Images for Coachella
A Ton of Concerts
My Chemical Romance, Cher, Madonna, Mariah Carey, Miley Cyrus, Ciara, BTS, Avril Lavigne, Pentatonix, Green Day, and more have begun canceling shows and rescheduling tours. “I AM SO SORRY, BUT YOUR HEALTH IS PARAMOUNT,” Cher tweeted. “CONCERTS R AMAZING FUN, BUT NOTHING IS WORTH YOUR HEALTH.”
If you have tickets to any upcoming shows by performers not mentioned here, we recommend checking the artists’ Twitter and contacting the venue to confirm they’re still happening.
Coachella and Stagecoach
“At the direction of the County of Riverside and local health authorities, we must sadly confirm the rescheduling of Coachella and Stagecoach due to COVID-19 concerns,” reads a statement from Goldenvoice, the production company that runs both festivals. “While this decision comes at a time of universal uncertainty, we take the safety and health of our guests, staff, and community very seriously. We urge everyone to follow the guidelines and protocols put forth by public health officials.” Coachella will now happen in October.
Ariana Grande fans will have to wait until a little later in 2019 to hear her sing live: The “Thank U, Next” singer has had to cancel her New Year’s weekend show, scheduled for Saturday night (December 29), in Las Vegas. Tickets for the performance, which would have seated just 3,200 concertgoers, were reportedly selling for more than $1,000 each. According to TMZ, Grande has been battling bronchitis all week and is still working on recovering from it.
The scheduled concert would have been her first since her breakup with her former fiancé, Saturday Night Live comedian Pete Davidson, in October and, preceding that, the death of her ex-boyfriend Mac Miller. Both exes had a role in inspiring two of Grande’s newly released songs: “Thank U, Next” and “Imagine.”
On Friday, December 28, Grande herself put up a post announcing the concert’s cancellation: “Vegas, I’m currently working through some health issues and am beyond sorry I won’t be able to see u this weekend. I love u and so look forward to seeing u and making it up to u next year,” she wrote.
Instagram
“Due to unforeseeable health reasons, Ariana Grande has canceled her show at The Chelsea at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas on Saturday, Dec. 29,” the venue confirmed to Us Weekly. “Guests are able to receive a full refund on tickets through their specified point of purchase.”
As of now, no makeup dates have been released, but Arianators won’t have to wait too long as her Sweetener tour kicks off in Albany, New York, on March 18. Until then, however, we’ll just keep watching her recent performances on The Tonight Show and at Billboard‘s Women of the Year event. Fingers crossed she feels better soon.
Last week, Carrie Underwood fans in the U.K. found themselves wishing her a speedy recovery after she canceled two performances due to an unspecified “illness.” According to People, Underwood’s record label made the announcement on Facebook, revealing that the singer would no longer be performing at the Long Road Festival or Radio 2 Live at Hyde Park over the weekend.
This week, Underwood shed some light on the health condition that led to her last-minute cancellations. “I don’t cancel shows. Like, I will drag myself on the stage and perform if I have the flu, or whatever,” she told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show Thursday night (September 13). “In the U.K., we had to cancel a couple shows. Basically, I got, like, a viral thing, and I woke up, I had vertigo, and I could not stand up, and it was crazy.”
“I ended up in a German hospital for three days,” she added. “They were so sweet and so nice. And we were, like, in our rooms, like, trying to learn German and trying to communicate with the people….I learned one phrase. ‘Kein fleisch, bitte’—’No meat, please.’ I don’t eat meat, so they would come in—that’s all I learned. That’s all I got.”
Watch Underwood explain this for yourself, below:
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A few months ago, Underwood revealed she had seriously injured herself in a fall last November, requiring 40 to 50 facial stitches and metal screws in her broken wrist.. “I honestly don’t know how things are going to end up but I do know this: I am grateful. I am grateful that it wasn’t much, much worse,” she wrote in a blog post at the time. “And I am grateful for the people in my life that have been there every step of the way…. It’s crazy how a freak random accident can change your life.”
After spending several months in recovery, Underwood returned to the stage in April with a triumphant performance of her new song “Cry Pretty” at the Academy of Country Music Awards, receiving a long standing ovation and later winning Vocal Event of the Year with Keith Urban.
Shortly after winning the Miss America swimsuit competition—and making the top 10 in the pageant overall—I was signed by my first television agent, who was a senior partner at one of the best agencies in the business.
It was 2003, and back then—before Instagram, YouTube, and the sheer volume of reality TV we have now—talent scouts all watched pageants to suss out the next big thing. At 37, I am among the most senior of the millennials. Coming of age in the nineties and early 2000s, before social media existed, a surefire way for a young woman with no celebrity connections to make it on TV and get her voice heard was by having a title like Miss Virginia or Miss New York. Pre-Twitter, the pageant was one of the few remotely feasible outlets that let you “go viral” in a positive way.
Thus, ambitious, talented young women across the country, myself included, saw parading around in high heels and a swimsuit as a semi-inconvenient hurdle to jump over to achieve our life goals. We were future award-winning journalists, rocket scientists, esteemed actors, lifesaving oncologists—and we all thought that spraying our bikinied behinds with “butt glue” to keep wedgies at bay and painting our teeth with Vaseline to keep lip gloss from staining our bright white smiles was a great way to move toward these goals.
Nancy’s first wave after being crowned Miss Virginia
Over time, with the rise of social media as a platform, and especially over this past year of #MeToo and Time’s Up, that age-old system has officially stopped working—last week the Miss America Organization canceled the swimsuit competition.
“We are no longer a pageant,” Gretchen Carlson, the organization’s new board of trustees chairwoman, announced. “We are a competition. We will no longer judge our candidates on their outward physical appearance. That’s huge.”
It is huge. While its clout has been diluted over the years, and despite rebranding efforts, the Miss America title is still synonymous with a beautiful, hot body. Rebuking swimsuits, as Miss America has done, along with nixing the evening gown competition, means that essentially the original purveyor of American beauty standards is saying #EffYourBeautyStandards.
It is an unexpected enigma, to say the least, and I welcome it wholeheartedly.
When I competed for Miss America 15 years ago, 10.3 million viewers watched ABC as I was called into the top 10 (about 5.6 million watched last year’s show). As I tottered gingerly on high heels that I never fully managed to dominate, Bachelorette sweethearts Trista Rehn and Ryan Sutter excitedly told the audience that I had won the preliminary swimsuit competition, which to the world meant that I had the best body in my group.
I did not, not by a long shot. In preparation for the pageant, I lost over 50 pounds during my senior year at Harvard, where I majored in women’s studies and wrote my junior thesis on minorities in the Miss America Pageant. While I looked great, even my youthful 21-year-old skin hadn’t fully snapped back from the weight loss without some sagginess. Nor did my weight loss cure my self-esteem issues—I hated my body as I walked that stage, a fraught discovery that became the impetus for my career as the best-selling author of photography-driven health books Pregnancy, OMG! and Body Drama, which feature tons of un-air-brushed images of women of all body types.
And I definitely didn’t have the best walk; in fact, I stumbled and nearly fell on the nationally televised Miss America stage—a nightmare fuel that haunted my dreams for months.
What I did have, however, was the “best” #thinspo story, which I honed for months with an interview coach who reminded me constantly that the Miss America swimsuit competition was won “from the neck up.” (Meaning that if the judges liked me in my interview and wanted me to do well in the pageant, they’d be more forgiving of the spray tan streaks and stretch marks.)
When the time came, I squeezed into a perfectly tailored $400 gold-plated sunshine-yellow size zero bikini and pranced around the stage for about 20 seconds in heels purchased from a quirky Manhattan store that seemed to cater exclusively to drag queens and pageant girls. My performance was enough to snatch that coveted diamond-shaped Lucite award and $2,000, which was, ironically, about half of what I had spent on personal training, spray tanning, seaweed wraps, and body waxing to get my body “swimsuit ready” for the Miss America stage.
PHOTO: Debra Morrison
Nancy with her husband, actor Rupak Ginn, and their two children, August, six, and Nancy, four
Despite my many substantive accomplishments since, even today as a grown woman with a legit mom bod who rocks an XL bathing suit, I am often introduced to new people, whether in auditions or at wine nights with friends as “a beauty queen.”
I didn’t just win a onetime swimsuit award; I had won a lifetime of societal acceptance.
I am extremely proud of how I’ve used my smidgen of social capital to stand at the forefront of the body-positivity movement and help many women, and myself in the process, find self-acceptance. During my reign as Miss Virginia, I marched for choice, performed in The Vagina Monologues, and visited countless schools across the state, where I spoke to thousands of young women and men about a variety of topics important to me, including the then revolutionary concept that feminism wasn’t a dirty word and that boys could be feminists too.
The only reason any of these kids listened to me was because I had a crown on my head, the 2003 version of 150,000 Instagram followers. Would I have been just as successful as I am in my adulthood even if “Miss Virginia” and “swimsuit winner” weren’t in the first paragraph of my biography? The answer is probably no. But for this next generation of young, ambitious women, it’s different.
Time is up for the pedestaling of an individual based on looks. I recount my experience not to lambast the Miss America pageant of yesteryear but to showcase how far the organization has come.
Options to inspire and motivate young people have expanded infinitely. We don’t need a Miss America anymore—the many screens we are tethered to show us a diverse array of wonderful female role models like Tarana Burke, Issa Rae, Gabi Fresh, Michelle Obama…the list goes on and on.
Time is up for the pedestaling of an individual based on looks. I recount my experience not to lambast the Miss America pageant of yesteryear but to showcase how far the organization has come. The first Miss America was crowned in 1921, a mere 11 months after American (white) women gained the right to vote. Increasingly, the nearly 100-year-old event, which started as an Atlantic City tourist draw, has often seemed like a societal anachronism, flying in the face of each new wave of feminism. But it is important to not discount the fact that the diversity of its 91 winners is evidence of its incremental and meaningful evolution. Long before the commercialization of the body-positivity movement and corporate-mandated inclusive advertising, back when the peach crayon in the box was almost always called “flesh,” the Miss America pageant introduced the world to the idea that deaf women, black women, women with short hair, Asian women, opinionated women, children of immigrants, and more could all be considered “beautiful” and “successful” on a global scale. For hundreds of thousands of women from all walks of life, the pageant’s influence on beauty ideals, while nowhere near perfect (considering the limited range of body types), was and remains mind-boggling powerful.
Nancy won the Miss America swimsuit competition in 2003.
Even if Miss America’s rallying cry for a new era of equality turns out to be a swan song for the competition at large, they have determined that it is better to go out in flames on the right side of history, and this is an honorable and brave call.
The loss of a tradition is worth a future of possibility.
GLAAD-award-nominated on-air personality Nancy Redd is the best-selling author of the new book Pregnancy, OMG!, the first-ever diverse photographic guide for expecting women. Nancy’s other books include Body Drama and Diet Drama. Two weeks after graduating from Harvard with a degree in women’s studies, she won the title of Miss Virginia and became a preliminary swimsuit winner at Miss America 2003. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children.
Make some room in your heart, because Emma Stone and Jennifer Lawrence’s friendship is going to need the space. Last week brought us the pair’s delightful joint interview with W, where they discussed memories like their pet turtles and a shared stalker (believe it or not, much funnier than it sounds). The only downside is that it took until now for the two to get on screen together, especially when you see the dynamic we’ve been missing out on. But on the upside, they just gave fans an inside look at the their Golden Globes night. As expected, it’s gold.
According to a video Lawrence posted on Facebook, the two were supposed to meet up after the ceremony to go to some after parties together. As celebrities do, Lawrence called in a glam squad to prep her look for the night—so when Stone texted that she’d rather just hang out at home instead, as good friends do, Lawrence rolled with the change of plans.
That meant stopping everything and sending her squad home for the night, and that meant the Internet got an fantastic video of Lawrence wearing exactly one-half of a full-on look.
“What happened tonight?” Stone asks Lawrence, who’s shown in profile. “Well. You had told me you wanted me to be your date to the after parties, so I got us tickets to some after parties, and booked a car, and was halfway through glam when you told me told me that you didn’t want to go,” Lawrence slowly says, turning towards the camera. “That you just wanted to come over to my house, so I sent my hair and makeup team home. And now this is what I look like.” She stares at the camera with one pitch-black smoky eye. The woman knows drama, and that is some impeccable comedic timing.
On a recent trip to Los Angeles, as my fiancé and I were exploring the Venice Canal Historic District with friends, I realized how much we both wanted to move to the West Coast. He wanted warm weather, I wanted to have more opportunities as a full-time freelance writer, and we were both frustrated by the lack of fun culture in our current suburban Florida location. Plus, after the election in 2016, we realized that our very red county in our red state just wasn’t for us anymore. We were ready to pack up and move, but there was one catch: Money was tight, and we’d already started planning a wedding.
The idea of moving to California together had come up shortly after we began dating almost two years ago. I had recently left New York City, my home of 12 years, to relocate back to Florida temporarily, and he had moved from Chicago to our suburban town a few years earlier for a job opportunity. After our first moving talk, we set our sights on relocating permanently by mid-2017. But as the year began to draw to a close during our October visit, and a job that would pay to relocate us seemed more and more out of reach, we realized that we needed to rethink our strategy. We quizzed friends who had recently moved to California, and their success stories had one thing in common: They made the move on their own dime, typically after already connecting with companies and recruiters on the West Coast, and were all able to find jobs within a couple of months.
We realized we needed to move across the country on our own, but there were still those pesky wedding plans to think about. And weddings, just like moving, are expensive.
On the plane back home, we started to discuss the difficult question: How would we afford to move to California and plan a wedding? Although our parents are very supportive of our union, we decided to pay for our nuptials on our own. It was going to be a small, intimate affair, but even the smallest of weddings (ours would be no more than 50 people) can still cost thousands of dollars.
According to The Knot, the average cost of a wedding in 2016 was $35,329. Our budget was a third of that number and even that isn’t cheap. I couldn’t wrap my head around how we could be considering spending $10,000 or more on a one-day affair when we had the rest of our lives to worry about. I estimated that we would need about twice that amount in order to take the risk and move to L.A. without jobs secured.
It quickly became clear that the math just wasn’t in our favor, so we had a choice to make: wedding or marriage? And by marriage, I mean “elope.”
It’s maybe unsurprising—what with student debt at a record-high and wages surprisingly low, among other factors—that other millennial brides have faced this dilemma. According to Tracy Brisson, owner of Savannah Custom Weddings & Elopements, she saw “an extraordinary amount of cancelations in 2017.”
“Even after a non-refundable retainer was submitted, couples decided that they just needed to put off getting married for a while because of health or work or other personal reasons,” she told Glamour.com. “This never happened in past years.” Because she works primarily with elopers and small weddings, she saw a fair share of people who “abandoned their bigger plans in their hometown and ran to me in Savannah!”
But the biggest reason for canceled weddings appears to be financial.
“Being completely free of all debt is something that really matters to us,” says Stepfanie R. “We couldn’t justify spending thousands of dollars of our savings on a party or a piece of jewelry. All told, between a bottle of wine and a meal for our witnesses, new clothes, and a round of drinks for friends, we spent less than $500.”
While some couples decide to cancel their big wedding plans in order to save money, others simply decide that they want to spend money elsewhere—like buying a house. “Once we went through buying the house, I just couldn’t understand how spending money that would otherwise be spent updating our home for years to come on one day made any sense,” says Brittney C. “We’re in our 30s, we want to have kids—we didn’t want to wait and save money until we ‘had enough’ for a ‘dream wedding.’ So we said, ‘Screw it! Let’s elope!’”
For Lauren L., she and her partner realized only after booking a venue that they didn’t want a big wedding after all—nor the pressure that came with it. “We don’t have large families, and we were having a really hard time meeting the 120 guest limit [at our venue],” she says. “We were adding people from work, friends-of-friends that we had hung out with a few times, etcetera. Eventually, we questioned why: Why are we doing this huge thing with people we know we probably won’t talk to in a few years?” Instead, they cut down their guest list, picked a nearby destination, and put the money they saved on foregoing a big wedding toward “our dream honeymoon to Africa for three weeks, which became a huge priority for us.”
Prioritizing travel over a big wedding isn’t unusual, says Monique Wilber, owner of Sierra & Sky Weddings in Shingle Springs, California. “Couples I work with have ditched plans for a big traditional wedding,” she said. “The main reason they’ve given has been the expense, that they could use the money to pay off student loans and bills or to travel instead.”
Case in point: Anja and her fiancé decided to take a 10-month honeymoon rather than plan a wedding. “We are focusing on the long-term investment of getting on the right track together through 10 months of quality time,” she says. “We will never have such an amazing opportunity to bond and take time off.”
Even if almost a year of travel isn’t your thing, it’s not hard to understand where they’re coming from: By my current estimate, it will take Adam and I about that long to save up the money we’ll need to make the cross-country move from Florida to California. And since that’s our priority, the choice, for us, was clear: We had to cancel our wedding.
So on a Friday night just before Thanksgiving, we called our family and told them the news. We would be canceling our plans to get married in April 2018 in Chicago and, instead, elope at the end of 2017 in our current hometown in Florida. A few days later, we sent a big “Un-Save-The-Date” email to all 50 people on our guest list who had already received notice that we were getting married a few months earlier.
It took a few weeks to get used to the idea, but like when we met each other, when we knew, we knew.
At first, I battled feelings of guilt over disappointing friends and family that were already excitedly telling me they couldn’t wait for my “big day.” But I knew we were making the right decision for our marriage. We were starting our lives together in the place we truly want to live, we weren’t putting ourselves into debt, and we realized that one special day couldn’t possibly mean as much as the countless special days we would have in our new hometown.
Although none of the brides I spoke with regretted canceling their wedding, Stepfanie R. said it best: “My wedding day was a loving and joyful one, but honestly it’s not one of our favorite days together. It’s not the wedding that matters; it’s the marriage. We reminisce about our first international trip to Spain, where we skinny-dipped on New Year’s Day in the Mediterranean. We talk about our honeymoon in Vancouver, the long hikes in the mountains, and the antics of our three cats. We have never regretted eloping.”
As I look through photos of how our life in California has been so far, I know that we won’t either.
