LOUISVILLE, Ky. — She's the silent partner in Kentucky’s modern-day fireside chats.

For nearly two weeks we've tuned in as Virginia Moore, a sign language interpreter, quietly takes the stage each night alongside Gov. Andy Beshear as he delivers the latest on the COVID-19 pandemic that is plaguing Kentucky, the United States and the rest of the world.

In recent weeks she's unintentionally earned herself some coronavirus-era fame for her role signing the daily press conferences for the 700,000 or so people in Kentucky who are deaf or hard of hearing. She's been in the public eye some over the past decade as the executive director for Kentucky Commission on the Deaf and the Hard of Hearing, but the surge of attention she's seen lately is unprecedented.

Beshear has welcomed an interpreter in his addresses in a way that hasn't happened under previous administrations, she told me. It's unusual to see someone so consistently by a governor's side in tough moments.

And people are noticing.

By the time we talked on the phone Monday afternoon, Moore already had the (admittedly) bizarre experience of signing her way through her own honoring as a Kentucky Colonel, the highest title honor bestowed by the commonwealth, during Friday's press conference. In recent days, she has become a supporting character of sorts, too, on the increasingly popular "andy beshear memes for social distancing teens" Facebook page — they've dubbed her the Robin to Beshear's Batman and the crew to his Captain Kirk.

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For the record, she doesn't really use social media, so she misses most of the meme action. Friends and family have been kind enough to send a few, including that Batman one, her way, and she's glad the community has found some light moments in this very tough situation.

But there's so much more to her role than a few good-natured laughs.

An interpreter is only as good as the speaker, she told me, and fortunately, Beshear's cadence and mannerisms carry the daily broadcast. His own composure helps Moore stay focused.

In the perfect interpreting scenario, she would have a script and an idea of what's to come, but that's not always the case.

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There's no rubric for telling thousands about a pandemic.

She's grateful he starts every press conference with some good news. There are families in Kentucky who can spend more time together. There are businesses dutifully following the restrictions. There are teachers rallying to let their students know they're not alone.

Those uplifting moments help ease the tough ones that come next.

Moore has to keep her hands moving and her emotions balanced as the number of COVID-19 cases tick up daily from the first few we saw in early March to dozens and into the hundreds.

She has to keep it together as she learns that someone has died and that Beshear has ordered the Kentucky Governor's Mansion be lit green to honor the loss.

"You just want to drop your hands and look at him and say, 'Wow,'" she told me. "It’s hard to say that someone has passed today or that a child is sick."

Despite the joy the memes have brought, this pandemic era icon does not have an easy job, but she genuinely enjoys her work with the deaf and hard of hearing community in Kentucky.

Before she was a nightly presence in Kentucky living rooms, she dedicated her career to helping people with barriers to communication.

The Louisville native didn't study signing in school, but in a way, you could say sign language was her first language, she told me. Both of her parents were deaf and so were two of her four siblings. While she had other interests in school, the career eventually called to her. After college, Moore received her National Interpreter Certification.

She joined the Kentucky Commission on the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in 1995 as an interpreter to the executive director, who was deaf. She took over the small state agency of just 14 people as executive director about a decade ago.

She's changed a lot of lives in that time.

There's a stigma that comes with hearing loss, she told me, and she's doing whatever she can to fix it. For some reason, a hearing aid isn't like a pair of glasses. Often people wait too long to get them because of pride, and that causes isolation and even dementia.

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Sometimes intervening means connecting people with the right tools. Other times it's handing a business card to a kid on an airplane, who's listening to his music too loud. You can't tell them to turn it down, she told me, recounting a time she heard it blaring through a headset two seats over. So she usually just passes the information quietly and says "call us when you need us."

Over the years, she's helped people who can't hear find the best way to take their driving exams, figure out what to do when their doctor doesn't have an interpreter and helped them access the right tools to make 911 calls. Moore has coached parents on raising deaf children, and she's eased people who have steadily lost that sense cope with the new normal.

As we talked about the past 25 years, she told me a story about a young boy she met at the agency's DeaFestival-Kentucky in 2004 who thought he couldn'tbe a veterinarian because he couldn't hear. I heard the joy in her voice when she told me the agency was able to introduce him to a successful one, who had very low hearing.

If she could be a vet, he could too.

We talked about a young girl she knew about in Eastern Kentucky who didn't realize adults could be deaf because, isolated in the mountains, she'd never met an older person who couldn't hear before.

She thought she was alone.

That's part of the reason she's so passionate about standing up with the governor every night, she told me. This community deserves this kind of information, and it's important to see sign language on such a prevalent stage.

She'd like to see captioning, too, but for the minute she's counting this as a win.

This is the first time Kentucky's gubernatorial office has welcomed someone to sign alongside them in public appearances, and she's been asking for this for years.

"I can easily tear up at how much this governor has opened the door for every individual to understand something," she told me. "There’s a community out there that needs to get this information as well."

Features columnist Maggie Menderski writes about what makes Louisville, Southern Indiana and Kentucky unique, wonderful, and occasionally, a little weird. If you've got something in your family, your town or even your closet that fits that description — she wants to hear from you. Say hello at mmenderski@courier-journal.com or 502-582-7137. Follow along on Instagram and Twitter @MaggieMenderski. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: courier-journal.com/maggiem.