One thing about this pandemic…it reduces the amount of personal “touches” we have in our daily lives. I’m not just talking about the family members you can’t see and hug. I’m talking about all the tangential people in your life that are suddenly gone. For a suburban New Yorker, there are the people you knew on the train into the city every day, the guy at the bagel and coffee cart, your coworkers, the people behind the counter at the place where you picked up lunch, etc. You also did stuff like going out to dinner, going to the occasional ball game, movie theater and Broadway show. Now all of this is temporarily gone. And the people you do run into are all wearing masks. Andy went to the local coffee shop to pick up a 1 lb. bag of beans last week and two people on the six-foot-apart line he was standing on had the following conversation. Larry: Jim, is that you? Jim: Yeah, who’s this? Larry: It’s me, Larry. Jim: Oh, I didn’t recognize you with the mask, (at which point they each pulled down their masks, which kind of defeats the whole purpose). But that incident is a perfect segue into our first comic.

Andy and his wife Joanie took advantage of Whole Foods’ Senior Hour, where the entire store is open only to people age 60 or over, for one hour, from 8-9 am. Once they got going, they heard, from behind a mask, “Andy, Joanie, hi. It’s my first time taking advantage of being over 60. This is great.” To which Andy thought to himself, is he REALLY over 60 or just close enough so he thinks no one will notice? You know, the only thing worse are the people who bring 12 items to the ‘10 items or less’ express lane. But who’s counting? Anyway, that was the impetus for this week’s first comic.

The second as you scroll down comes from the pandemic giving us so much free time, we can get to those projects we’ve been meaning to get to for the last 20 years. This is clearly more of a John thing than an Andy thing, since Andy has a rule that if something stays in a box through two moves and has never been opened, it’s outta here. If you haven’t gotten to the kids’ bar and bat mitzvah books by the time they hit 30, it ain’t happening. John, in contrast, actually gets to those things. And it is there he noticed he had two prints of every photo he had taken, even the accidental ones of his foot. Good old Fotomat. We guess the offer made sense at the time.

So what’s up for future comics? It seems we only go to two types of places, supermarkets and drug stores, and what’s more exciting than that? We will spend the next week washing our hands and coming up with more CITOC (Comics In the Time Of Covid).

Stay safe,

Andy and John