Pop icon Mariah Carey and her longtime boyfriend, choreographer Bryan Tanaka, each posted social-media videos Saturday of them receiving their first dose each of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Sitting on a doctor’s examining-room table, dressed in black from her knee-high boots to her face mask, the Long Island native addresses the camera as off-screen medical professionals talk. “They’re having a medical narrative,” Carey, who turned 52 on March 27, says to the camera, “but I am here excited and nervous a little bit about getting this shot.” The cellphone video, she concedes, “is distracting them from doing their job, but you know how I am: I just talk and don’t really think about it. OK, so I’m calming down, a little nervous, about to get this shot.”
Wearing a black Louis Vuitton Icon T-shirt — which retails for $350 and up and shows the fashion label’s name stacked as “Vuitton Louis” above the word “icons,” all rendered in deliberate mirror-image — Carey notes that a year has elapsed since she posted a video of herself and her now 9-year-old twins Roc and Roe demonstrating proper hand-washing techniques to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
With the camera whip-panning to show Tanaka, 38, in a Prince “Purple Rain” T-shirt, Carey says, “Look who’s here in spirit with us! So anyway, I guess, here we go. Hopefully we’re going to edit this because there’s a lot of me talking over people, but, y’know, we’re all used to that!” With a laugh she adds, “So. Oy!”
After an edit, the pink-gloved hands of a medical professional hold a hypodermic needle and an off-camera voice advises Carey to relax her left arm, which the singer has jauntily placed on her hip. “I’m in, like, my filming stance,” jokes Carey, who was born in Huntington and raised there and in Melville, Northport and Greenlawn.
As the shot is administered, she jokingly mock-screams — possibly explaining her video’s caption: “Vaccine side effect: G6,” the musical notation for four-note chord G major sixth. Following some friendly off-screen applause, Carey says to the camera, “Look, it’s only part one. It’s only part one.” She then examines her arm and says, “No blood. OK. Is that normal?” and jokes, “See? I’ve proven my point. I am actually a vampire.”
After another edit, Carey tells viewers, “Here we are — hoping for the best, encouraging you guys to do it when you can and we’re all in this together, as we’ve said. Love you much”
The vaccinations evidently took place March 11, Tanaka’s birthday. In his own Instagram video of himself receiving the shot, Tanaka asks an off-screen medical professional, “Is today the 11th or 12th?” A man’s voice replies, “Today’s the 11th,” causing Tanaka to exclaim to Carey, who is shooting, “Today it’s been a year!” “Yeah,” Carey agrees, after some crosstalk, “today is one year.”
It was unclear to what they were alluding, since the couple has been involved since 2017. Carey posted her hand-washing video on March 13, 2020, but it possibly could have been shot two days earlier.
Among those posting supportive comments on Carey’s Instagram version of the video were Destiny’s Child singer Kelly Rowland, modeling legend Naomi Campbell and actor-comedian Billy Eichner.
