Singing, Spieling, and Shvitzing on the Low Cut Connie Live Stream

Springsteen, Obama, Elton John, and a hundred and fifty thousand other fans are tuning in to Adam Weiner’s Mr. Rogers-meets-Little Richard persona.
Adam WeinerIllustration by João Fazenda

Today’s Pandemic Person of the Year started out as a cross-eyed boy in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, with a bullyable surname and actorly dreams. He moved to New York in 1998 to enroll in the Experimental Theatre Wing at N.Y.U. One night, he and some fellow-students were recruited to work as runners at the reopening of the night club Limelight. The naked-but-for-body-paint dance troupe being late, the students, attired in black turtlenecks and slacks, were asked to improvise some moves. Our honoree, dutifully Dietering, looked down from the stage and saw Donald Trump: “He was staring directly at me, with a look on his face that said, ‘What is this garbage?’ ”

This was his second encounter with the future President. When he was nine or so, his parents took him, as they often did, to Atlantic City. “We’re in the Taj Mahal, and Trump shows up, with Marla Maples. And so I—and I don’t remember doing this, my parents tell this story—I stood on my chair and yelled out, ‘Hey, asshole! Fuck you!’ ”

In New York, our awardee worked around town as a pianist, eventually under the stage name Ladyfingers; for a time, he had a regular gig at a now defunct gay bar called Pegasus, across from Bloomingdale’s. They hired him because he looked good, but he could play anything. “I have a very spongy brain,” he said the other day. “If I’ve heard it, I can play it. Until recently, my fans didn’t know I had these skills.”

These fans, who include Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, and Barack Obama, will now guess, correctly, that this Pandemic Person of the Year is Adam Weiner, the songwriter, singer, piano player, and chief showman behind the band—and occasional solo act—Low Cut Connie. His sixth album, “Private Lives,” came out this fall. One track, “Look What They Did,” laments the mess that Trump and others left behind in Atlantic City. The album has had some chart success and has made (and even topped) some year-end best lists. And yet, for whatever reason, Weiner, who is forty, has never had a record deal. (Several albums ago, he started his own label.)

What has enabled him to show off his spongy brain, as well as his chops and his bountiful good vibes—Little Richard meets Mr. Rogers, maybe—is his twice-weekly interactive live stream, called “Tough Cookies,” which he began in March. Deprived of the thrill and the income of performing live, he started broadcasting from the guest room of his row house, in South Philadelphia.

“We had no plan,” he said. He’d driven up to Manhattan to accept the honor, in a midtown pocket park. He had on a black hoodie, a jean jacket, faded black jeans, and a silver mask, which seemed almost to reach the front edge of his Jerry Lee Lewis curls. “We just turned the phones on and hung out. And there was no audience or laughter or applause. I didn’t know how many people were watching or if they’d like it. All I knew was that at the end of the hour I was lying on the floor in my underwear, covered in sweat.” The next stream attracted a hundred and fifty thousand views. Realizing that this was going to become a regular thing, he christened it “Tough Cookies.” “I named it after the people who watch it,” he said. Among them were nurses in Covid wards who pinned their phones, in ziplocks, to the wall, and viewers in more than forty countries, including Lebanon and Afghanistan.

“Hon, it’s not daytime yet. Those are just our neighbor’s Christmas lights.”
Cartoon by Arantza Peña Popo

“Tough Cookies” is a homespun variety show: music, comedy, interviews, spieling, shvitzing, stripping. Dressed in a white tank top, or his grandfather’s maroon Pierre Cardin bathrobe, surrounded by oddments and schwag, Weiner hams it up on an upright piano, accompanied by a guitar player, Will Donnelly, who keeps the beat with a stomp box under one foot and a tambourine on the other. “We shoot it on our phones,” Weiner said. “I don’t even use a mike. There’s no lighting, no makeup, just chest hair hanging out. It ain’t shit.” He interviews guests: Darlene Love, Dion, Nils Lofgren, Nick Hornby. Mathew Knowles, Beyoncé’s dad, came on to talk about the checkered role, in the industry, of skin complexion.

The death of George Floyd, and the tumult that followed, brought some extra seriousness to the proceedings, but the aim remained uplift. After almost seventy episodes, Weiner has played some six hundred covers, sometimes in medley—say, “War Pigs” into “Macho Man”—and a hundred originals. A disquisition on the origins of Cardi B’s “WAP” one night took him back to 1929, to “Wet It,” by the female impersonator Frankie (Half Pint) Jaxon.

“I feel like I left the music business and I’m in the entertainment business,” Weiner said. “I feel like I have my own TV show.” He was sort of amazed that he hadn’t heard from HBO.

The owner of Mimi’s, a piano bar in midtown, let him in out of the cold, and Weiner noodled on the keys, under a plaque that read “What is your favorite song?” He found this one hard to answer. Prince? “Stardust”? “Maybe Aretha: ‘Niki Hoeky.’ ”

Later, outside Mimi’s, a decked-out figure in high heels, of indeterminate everything, strutted past. Weiner’s eyes, visible between mask and pompadour, followed. “That’s what I miss about New York,” he said. “The mystery.” ♦