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<\/a>The restaurant opening I was at right before the world lost itself. Photo by Karen Salkin, as is the one of a deserted 2020 Times Square at the top of this page.<\/p><\/div>\n
The following morning back then, I cancelled going to a planned event for the next night, (which was eerily Friday the 13th!,) and took a nap on the couch. I woke-up to a local LA press conference urging us all to stay home for the next week or so. Boy, did they underestimate that time frame!<\/p>\n
Then slowly, all my very fun events for the next month+ began getting cancelled. And that was the beginning of our new multi-year reality.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Tom Hanks’ Covid tweet five years ago this week. Photo by Karen Salkin.<\/p><\/div>\n
Getting back to this current\u00a0<\/em>week, the realization that it had been five years<\/em>\u00a0since that day\u00a0jarred me. I woke up the next morning, March 12, 2025, wondering if we, (Americans and<\/em> the world,) had learned anything from that horror show. Anything at all.<\/p>\n And this is some of what I realized:<\/p>\n I realized that we learned that there are idiots out there who still\u00a0<\/em>don\u2019t believe in vaccines. I actually lost two (what I thought were) very close friends because of it. It appears that at least one of them is for sure a crazy anti-vaxxer, which I never would have guessed. I would have thought that all<\/em> my friends were more-or-less normal people. But when the world started opening-up again, I invited that one to a big theatre opening with me. In the email invitation, I had mentioned that we all needed to be masked, (and stay that way throughout the show, of course,) and show proof of vaccination. Those responsible conditions set-out by the theatre were the only reasons I\u00a0<\/em>was taking the risk of attending the show myself, and I put it in the invite just to make sure that my friends knew the theatre was taking the risk seriously and looking out for its patrons, to put my pals\u2019 minds at peace. To my shock, that good friend wrote back to ask why I would demand vax proof! I responded that it wasn\u2019t me<\/em>\u00a0who required it, but the venue. And then the only thing I\u2019ve ever heard from her again was a nasty-ish phone message in which she very defiantly told me she would never<\/em>\u00a0get the shot! I was shocked!\u00a0I left her a nice message back, very calmly asking her to call me and explain her point of view.\u00a0 And\u2026I have never, to this day, ever heard from her again!<\/p>\n I also haven\u2019t heard from the friend through whom I met that confirmed anti-vaxxer, (except to keep bugging me with public newsletters about her business,) so I assume she\u2019s one of them, as well.\u00a0 (I did not even mean to tell you all that, but once I got started\u2026)<\/p>\n Exactly. You tell ’em, Linus!<\/p><\/div>\n I also learned that there are still tons of morons among us because they re-elected that absolute danger to society who told us to drink bleach<\/em> during the pandemic! I really wish that Orange Hitler had done just that himself, to demonstrate what a \u201cgenius\u201d he was! That would have been something, wouldn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n On this date in 2020, in my first column (of many) about the pandemic, I wrote, \u201cThis is not about politics for me, but if we had a non-moron for President, I don\u2019t think the danger would have gotten so prevalent in this country. That disgrace of a human being has only made things worse. Much, much worse.\u201d Yet, here he is again, leading America to ruin.<\/p>\n On a different note, later on in that same article, I optimistically wrote, \u201cI just hope this virus will be contained before the Summer Olympics! Tokyo is trying desperately to not have to cancel it.\u201d But, of course, they did have to postpone the 2020 Olympics until 2021, and then still had no spectators, which could not have been fun for the athletes.<\/p>\n So again, here it is exactly\u00a0five years after we understood the seriousness of the pandemic, and even the people who didn\u2019t<\/em>\u00a0get Covid, or lose someone to it, have been forever affected. I know no one whose life has ever been the same as it was before. (I refer to that easier time as \u201cBP,\u201d meaning \u201cbefore the pandemic.\u201d)<\/p>\n Remember all these empty shelves from back then? Photo by Karen Salkin.<\/p><\/div>\n Using just Mr. X and myself as a brief example, life was way different BP. In some ways it\u2019s a bad thing, and in some ways it\u2019s an improvement. Back in normal life, I was going out just about five nights a week. Mr. X has never been a fan of going out, so I went everywhere with different pals all the time. But during the pandemic, I got so used to staying in all the time, and hanging with only Mr. X, that social life even now has become so much less. I limit it to only about one or two nights a week and an occasional daytime event. I turn down waaay more invitations than I did BP.<\/p>\n I\u2019m also less of a workaholic. Back then, I published a new column in this e-zine all five weekdays. But, without any actual events<\/em> to write about for those three years or so, I got down to two or three columns per week, and I\u2019ve kept it that way ever since. So that\u2019s one good thing the lockdown did for me\u2014I don\u2019t torture myself to write 24\/7 anymore.<\/p>\n I also learned to stop washing my hair every day, which makes it much healthier. And we had time to exercise every single day! It had been almost two decades<\/em> since I had time for that! (The bad thing about all that activity, though, is that we both messed-up our knees. And it took several doctor visits\u2014and those only after my exhaustive search to find a new<\/em> orthopedist because our long-time one had retired during the lockdown!\u2014and beaucoup bucks to get them to even a semblance of lesser pain now.)<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>