Gov. Andrew Cuomo, addressing the clueless maskless: “Health-care workers wear masks for five-plus hours nonstop. You can wear one for 45 minutes.”
Jefferson County Public Health Director Tom Locke: “We now have a mask requirement,” and the county officer add, “Arguing that you have a right not to wear a mask when in close proximity to others is arguing that you have the right to expose them to an infection that can have deadly consequences. It’s not us versus them. It is only us.”
Would that every heedless wonder without a mask would read that.
OK, maybe we haven’t said it often enough: Wearing a mask isn’t to protect YOU. It’s to protect everyone else. (Not that some care about helping others. This country isn’t built that way.)
It’s as uncomfortable for me wearing a mask as it was putting on and wearing stage makeup each night when I was a chorister in a Gilbert and Sullivan opera down in the Bay area.
But many locals here apparently didn’t get the memo. So to verify, I took an unofficial poll, or survey, in the Safeway parking lot here the other day.
Occasionally I hang out in the car while my wife is shopping inside, biding my time doing things like counting how many dogs some people can fit into an SUV (I counted six one day).
I sat out there recently with my notebook for a half-hour and counted the arrivals entering the north door. The results:
Wearing masks: 49 shoppers.
Barefaced: 17.
Not good, but I’ve seen even more maskless wonders in Sequim during the pandemic. (Not in Costco, which cruelly requires that all shoppers wear masks.)
Grocery store employees have been on the front lines of this COVID-19 pandemic, and I must assume that most of those people without masks couldn’t care less about protecting the intrepid souls who work there, leave alone us other shoppers.
I’d suggest local stores begin posting signs reading, as Gov. Cuomo might put it, “Would it Kill you to Wear a Mask?”
— During the recent Phase 1, one comic observed, “Santa Monica is in lockdown, and 10,000 vegans have been forced to eat their yards.”
— I once had the misfortune of briefly living down in El Lay when I wrote for TV Guide, and maybe only someone who’s lived there can appreciate comic Steve Kravitz’s observation: “L.A. is the only city in the country where the police will pull you over if one of your speakers goes out.”
— Sincere apologies for my jokefests to my wife Jean, who, inexplicably, wed yours truly 52 years this week. (When I had cheerfully announced to my father earlier, “We’re engaged!” He replied, “In what?”)
— The Hamburglar: The Onion is still cranking out great headlines, although it would be hard to top their classic “Balsamic Terrorists Bomb Hidden Valley Ranch.” One recent Onion headline showed Donald of Orange stepping out of a fast-food place, dripping Secret Sauce: “Trump Throws Garbage can Through McDonald’s Window Before Looting $2,000 in Big Macs.”
Speaking of fast food, my friend San Francisco comic Fred Reiss tells me, “My first job in high school was spray-painting the grill marks on the burgers at Burger King.” Have it your way.
— Comic Mike Dugan, on the White House killing the lights and Commander Bonespurs bunkering down: “Melania didn’t go into the bunker. Someone told her about Eva Braun and what happened to her when SHE went into a bunker.” Speaking of craven presidential behavior, this headline comes from peerless humorist Andy Borowitz: “Trump Hides under Desk after Diet Coke can opens Loudly.”
— Along those lines, here’s humorist and former GOP operative Rick Wilson on his The New Abnormal podcast: “I’m not saying Trump is Hitler. Hitler had normal-sized hands and could read.”
(PT humorist Bill Mann has been a columnist at CBS MarketWatch, four major daily newspapers — and one great small one. Newsmann9@ gmail.com).
