“Really, right after it happened, I didn’t think about it a lot because I was just distracting myself,” says Cohen. But now, “it is interesting to be in a place of constantly thinking about it. Usually, what comes forth is extreme gratitude. Like, holy shit! I cannot believe it wasn’t worse. I’m so lucky. That’s the takeaway: The more I live it, I’m like, I’m so lucky. I’m so lucky. I’m so lucky.”
She admits that she’s also having more health anxiety than usual recently, likely due to reliving the story multiple times a day, in rehearsals and then in her nightly performances. Medical shows were never her bag; not even a high school dalliance with Grey’s Anatomy stuck: “It just sends me down a place I can’t—I’m already there. I don’t need to go further down the rabbit hole. I’m trying to crawl my way out of the rabbit hole.”
After a lifetime of health worry, sometimes founded but always real, she’s banned herself from using WebMD but admits to still googling symptoms. (“It’s almost worse.”) She wears an Oura ring (“humiliating”) and is too nervous to eat the salads she’d usually be mainlining, thanks to the recent cyclospora outbreak. She isn’t drinking in an attempt to stay healthy for the run of the show, and the positive feedback she’s gotten from her health tracker as a result is, she says, “really upsetting.”
Still, don’t expect to see a sober, somber Cohen onstage at the Lortel, free of neuroses and determined to deliver life lessons to her audience. She’s still her, wrapped in another sparkly, poofy custom Kelsey Randall creation, just as she has been in her other major projects, still twirling and bragging about being “young for [her] grade” as if it’s a resume-worthy skill, still gently heckling her audience in ad-libs throughout the show. The scary part (or, at least, one of the scary parts) is over. The hole in her heart has been repaired; she lived through it. And the person she was most nervous to see the show, Dr. Barry Love himself, has already attended a preview performance.
Cohen, who had gotten an email from his nursing team saying a group was coming, “was trying not to look at him the whole time.” They took a photo together afterward, and he didn’t medically fact-check her account, which she admits she’d been a little nervous about.
“I asked him a medical question, and I was like, Is he gonna bill me for this? He gave me an answer. He was very, very generous. Yeah, I think he liked it. He was like, ‘That was great.’ I was like, ‘You’re my muse.’”
Though she’s graduated from checkups with Dr. Love (brag), the health-obsessed Cohen is still in regular touch with the team.
“I emailed them a bunch over the years, being like, ‘Can I do a cold plunge?’ They’re like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ I’m like, ‘Can I go on a roller coaster?’” She can. What isn’t she allowed to do?
“Cocaine,” she says. “It wasn’t a huge part of my life [before], but.”
She shrugs. After all, what can you do but laugh?
