Simone Biles takes her pants off…the hard way. There must be something this woman can't do…

Here's another one of those Cirque du Soleil specials…

The most interesting thing I have to think about today is probably that Instacart says they'll deliver my big grocery order either today or tomorrow…and the suspense is killing me. When will it be, when will it be? I also can't wait to see what they'll be out of. I ordered 18 different items and will consider myself fortunate if I get three, especially if one of them is eggs.

I'm continuing to avoid politics and D.T. as much as I can. But someone let me know when William Barr announces the investigation to prove that Joe Biden personally invented that coronavirus thing that Donald Trump personally cured.

I've been having some very nice phone (and occasionally, FaceTime) conversations with friends…and occasionally friends I haven't spoken with for some time. There's an odd silver lining to Shared Suffering and it has to do with the "sharing" part.

Today, I'm working on an article for the souvenir book for this year's Comic-Con International. Like you, I'm skeptical there will be a this year's Comic-Con International, at least in July, but it has not officially been canceled or postponed yet and I promised to have the article to them in a few days. We always try to meet our deadlines, at least when we have zero social engagements on our calendar.

I'm also playing around with Zoom because I'm thinking of hosting some online chats and interviews. If anyone out there is really facile with this program and wants to tutor me a little, I just might accept. At the moment, the main thing I don't like about it is the feeling of obligation to shave I have every time I'm in front of my webcam. You can almost see my beard growing and I look like those time-lapse close-up shots of Lon Chaney turning into the Wolfman.

Last night, I got to thinking about a time when Howard Hughes was living in near-isolation on the top story of a Las Vegas hotel he owned. Hughes loved watching movies but in those days, to see one at home meant watching them on TV — which meant you were limited to what was on when it was on — or finding and buying 16mm prints of the ones you wanted to see and threading a projector.

Neither really worked for Hughes so he bought one of the local TV stations and he'd call up or have an aide call up and tell them what to air. He'd actually phone the station and say, "I'm bored with the film you're running. Stop it and put on Ice Station Zebra again!" And the movie that some Vegas residents were watching would suddenly stop and Ice Station Zebra would just start with no announcement or anything.

He might even tell them to skip the commercials and once he reportedly called up and asked them to stop the movie for ten minutes because he had to go take a dump. Now, with DVRs and pause buttons, every one of us can feel like a billionaire.

When I get really rich, I'm going to buy Turner Classic Movies and do that. I'll call up and yell, "Who the hell wants to watch Lucille Ball in Mame? Take it off at the end of the next song and start showing Ace in the Hole with Kirk Douglas…and yes, I know I've had you run it four times this month already. Just do it!"

Yes, I have all my favorite films on DVD but this would be so much more fun.

A baby panda with a sense of distrust…

Chris Juricich wrote me an e-mail with the subject line "Do you think you're funny?" and followed it with this…

I don't mean that as a challenging statement; merely a general question. As a writer, one isn't always necessarily called on to write humor per se, and at your young, tender age of 18, had you any general preferences as to what kind of writing you wanted to do?

Were you initially enamored of becoming a comic book writer/scripter (wouldn't surprise me given your "roots") but as it would "seem" that a lot of your writing for TV ended up being for variety shows, animation shows where gags were somewhat requisite. Did you have that self-confidence to believe "I can write comedy?" I am curious!

It didn't work exactly like that. I decided around the age or six (maybe seven) that I wanted to be a writer. At the time, my skills for reading and writing were way more developed than my skills at anything else and that pointed me in the direction. I don't recall ever seriously angling for any other profession, though there was a time when I aimed to be more of a writer-artist than I have been. I more or less abandoned drawing in the eighties as I became more proficient at computers.

But for a long time, I wasn't sure what I wanted to be a writer of. I always loved the idea of writing comic books but various things I read about the business made me feel that (a) I couldn't succeed in that line of work unless I moved to New York which I didn't want to do, and (b) the business didn't treat people all that well. It's a long, long story but I kind of stumbled into comic book writing because of an unexpected chain of events starting with the fact that Jack Kirby moved to Southern California the year I graduated high school.

I guess I thought I could write comedy but it was not with a huge amount of confidence. I knew I'd written and said things in fanzines or at school that had made people laugh but I also knew that that didn't mean I could write comedy on a professional level. I guess my attitude was, more or less, "Well, I'll try to do it and see how it goes." And it worked out.

One thing that I learned early-on was that it really doesn't matter if you think a joke is funny. What matters is what the audience thinks and even if you become the greatest comedy writer who ever lived, you will still write a lot of stuff that doesn't get the reaction you think it will.

There's a reason Neil Simon did heavy rewrites on most of his plays after they were first seen by audiences. When I hear a comedy writer say, "I always know what's funny," I think, "If Neil Simon didn't, neither do you." Overconfidence is dangerous in this profession.

As mentioned here, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber is making available online videos of his shows but each is only on YouTube for 48 hours. As I post this, you have about 46 hours to watch Jesus Christ, Superstar below.

This is a production staged in the U.K. in 2012 and it stars Tim Minchin, Ben Forster, Spice Girl Melanie Chisholm and Chris Moyles. Sunday night, NBC is rebroadcasting last year's concert/production which starred John Legend, Sarah Bareilles, Alice Cooper and others. I'm not a huge fan of the show itself but I thought the NBC version did it about as well as anyone could ever do it. Watch either one, both or neither. Here's the version from 2012…

On April 29, 1979, a new play opened on Broadway at the Palace Theater. It was called Break a Leg and it was written by Ira Levin whose previous play, Deathtrap, had been a fairly substantial hit, running 1,793 performances followed by touring productions and regional mountings. That's a damn good run. For comparison, the original version of The Odd Couple ran 964 performances and the original Death of a Salesman ran 742.

Break a Leg starred Julie Harris, Jack Weston and René Auberjonois and it was directed by Charles Nelson Reilly. It did not do quite as well as Mr. Levin's previous play. Break a Leg opened and closed the same night — Sunday, April 29, 1979. The following Thursday evening, Mr. Reilly appeared as a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson…

Interesting to note that if they hadn't cancelled WonderCon, I would have been down in Anaheim right now getting ready to mingle with tens of thousands of people all weekend. (Well, actually I wouldn't have gone and neither would anyone else with a lick of sense in their well-masked heads.)

Not much has changed where I am. I'm sleeping odd hours, which is what you tend to do when you have no appointments to be anywhere and no plans to leave your house.

Hey, I'm usually not a fan of chain Italian restaurants but I like Maggiano's Little Italy, which has 52 locations throughout 22 states and the District of Columbia. The one near me is my third-favorite place to eat pasta in Los Angeles…and for those of you who care, my favorite is this place and my second-fave is this place.

But Maggiano's is fine. They have this deal…when you dine-in and have one of their "classic pastas" (spaghetti, lasagna, baked ziti, etc.), they give you a free extra classic pasta (unheated) to take home with you. This is for those folks who have dinner there and think they might need a second dinner to eat on the way home. But I guess you could put it in your refrigerator and reheat it a day or two later.

With my reduced-sized, gastric-bypassed stomach, I find that one serving of Maggiano's pasta is two meals for me. Ergo, if I order one there, I eat half and take half home along with my bonus entree…and voila! One order becomes four meals!

Now, of course, no one can dine-in at the one near me now but they have a thriving delivery service and it offers some great deals, one being that they'll give you five of their unheated, ready-for-the-microwave classic pastas for $40. So I got the equivalent of ten meals for that price. I also got one order (two breasts) of their fine chicken parmesan for $20 and used another deal they have where you can get a second portion of the same thing for five bucks more.

Each order of the chicken comes with a side of spaghetti marinara…so for $65 plus tax and delivery fees and tip, I got what for me is twelve servings of pasta (twelve!) and four of chicken parm, plus they threw in enough of their wonderful bread that I won't eat a third of it before it goes stale. I froze a lot of the pasta and gave some of it to my cleaning lady.

If you live within delivery range of a Maggiano's, check this out. With the hassle and delays of getting groceries delivered in some areas, you might feel better just to have a refrigerator full of fully-prepared, microwave-ready food and this is a not-exorbitant way to achieve that.

From The Tonight Show for 3/18/1982, my favorite actor — Jack Lemmon — talks to Johnny Carson about acting…

The 'net is loaded today with remembrances and hosannas for Mort Drucker. The must-read is the one from Tom Richmond, who succeeded Mort drawing movie and TV parodies for MAD. And Tom makes a good point that I made to a couple of reporters today…

For years, the most popular thing in MAD was probably those movie and TV parodies…but though they'd done occasional spoofs of films and teevee programs before, they didn't become a regular part of the magazine until Mort blossomed as a caricaturist. Once the MAD editors realized what they had in Mort, they were just about obligated to do satires of hit movies and TV shows. Didn't matter who was in them. Mort could draw them.

And he didn't just draw one caricature of each actor and copy them over and over, which is what you got in some of the lesser MAD imitations. In every panel, he drew stars of the film or show from different angles and he drew them the way they were in that particular project. When he drew John Wayne in MAD's version of True Grit, he didn't just draw John Wayne. He drew John Wayne in True Grit. From every angle. MAD staffer Jerry DeFuccio, who was sometimes in charge of digging up the photos Mort would use for reference once said, "Only I know how good Mort is because only I know how few photos we could sometimes get for him to use for reference." Just an amazing talent.

Mort Drucker, whose awesome skills at caricature were the envy of everyone who ever tried to draw a famous face, died last night at the age of 91. I have no details as to the cause of death but I can tell you a few things about Mort…

Mort began drawing comics in 1947 when Will Eisner, who had seen the young artist's work, recommended him to Bert Whitman who drew the newspaper strip, Debbie Dean. He was an assistant on that strip and several others until he joined the staff of National (now DC) Comics in the early fifties where he was a production artist doing "fixes" and such in the office.

His relationship with the company continued for years, even after he left the staff job and also freelanced drawing stories for other publishers. For DC, he often assisted Owen Fitzgerald, who drew comics like The Adventures of Bob Hope for them and he succeeded Fitzgerald as the artist of that comic. When I met Mort and mentioned I'd worked with Owen, he lit up and told me how much of "learning how to draw" he owed to that man.

He found his way to MAD magazine in 1956 at a precarious moment in that publication's history. Founding editor Harvey Kurtzman had departed and taken most of the art crew with him. Replacement editor Al Feldstein was assembling a new team and with no idea how valuable the new applicant would be to MAD, he took a shot with Drucker.

Mort had never thought of himself as a caricaturist but when called upon to draw the comedy team of Bob & Ray for some pieces, he displayed a flair that surprised even him. Before long, Mort was the illustrator of movie and TV parodies in every issue of MAD…an association that lasted some 55 years. Big stars would say that you didn't feel you'd made it in Hollywood until Mort Drucker had drawn you in MAD.

In the photo above, you see Mort receiving one of his many awards from his fellow cartoonists. He got a lot of them and most of his peers considered him the Gold Standard at celebrity likenesses. We will write more about him here in the days to come.

The gorgeous face resting on my shoulder in the above photo belonged to a gorgeous person named Carolyn Kelly who was my lady friend/companion/love for around twenty years with occasional time-outs. In that time, I believe there were three moments when we broke up permanently and forever and then, after missing each other for a few weeks, reunited. There were no more sabbaticals later because we became firmly unified in our fight against a common enemy: The cancer that was threatening — and ultimately took — her life. I lost her on 4/9/17.

Since then, I've thought of her often, often marveling at how sometimes it feels like my last moments with her were days ago and sometimes, decades ago.

For obvious reasons, she's on my mind when I'm working on the Pogo books, as I am this week. She loved that comic strip and not just because she loved its creator and not just because he was her father. I never met Walt Kelly so I can't hear him when I read it but I sometimes hear Carolyn. It's her sense of humor and often, her way of looking at life. Don't ask me to explain this because I can't. It's just there.

For the last 11 or so months of her life, she was in a nursing home and when she went in, I knew she would not be coming out. At the time, she didn't know that…or maybe didn't accept that…or maybe couldn't accept that. But slowly, she realized how it was going to end and I don't know if she realized it because the deterioration of her condition was escalating or if it escalated because she realized it. Probably a little of each.

In messages I wrote here after she died, I tried to explain some of the things I'd learned or decided upon with regard to losing a loved one. I believe some people overmourn (to coin a word) because they think a vast amount of visible anguish is expected of them. It seems to me that many people are too reticent to rethink their lives without the dearly departed so they just leave that huge hole. You can miss someone dearly without wearing your grief as a badge. This might be a good time to remember that and in the coming weeks especially.

Carolyn left me many things, some even tangible. For instance, I don't want to brag but I now own the world's largest collection of Walt Kelly's old phone bills. And she left me a project…finishing up the Pogo reprint series that she started. Most of all, she left me memories of her wonderful face and spirit and smile and laugh and so many things I learned from her. When someone close to you dies, you can keep all those things and still get on with your life. I am absolutely certain that she would be glad that I have. If you think for a second that she wouldn't have, you really didn't know this wonderful person.

Hey, how about some stand-up from John Oliver?

One of my favorite musicals of recent vintage is Something Rotten, which is probably not now playing anywhere you can see it, at least not in a polished professional production. But it's too good not to come back…somewhere…sometime. Below is a musical video that was made to promote it when it was on Broadway in 2015.

Christian Borle, who has become a star on the Great White Way, was playing William Shakespeare, who in this show was an egomaniacal, drunken plagiarist. I'm not saying this is what the real Will Shakespeare was and I'm not saying it's not. But in Something Rotten and in this video of one of the show's best songs, he is…

Yesterday, I had a brief appointment — nothing serious — with a doctor in Beverly Hills. I could have postponed it but I kinda liked the idea of getting out of the house for a bit…and unless I want to go to a market, which I don't, I really have nowhere else to go and doctor visits are a legit reason to be out. So I got dressed, went out and got in my car…and the battery was dead.

I'll deal with that in a few days when the rains are over. Instead, I called an Uber and during the ride, I was somewhat amazed at two things. One was how empty the streets were. The other was that only about half of the folks I saw on the sidewalks were masked. Most of 'em weren't really near anyone else but at some point, they might have been.

Everyone at the doctor's office had nose and mouth properly shielded — nurses, receptionists, other patients, the doctor himself and me. I was in and out in about ten minutes. If I'd driven, I was going to come home by way of the drive-thru at Pollo Loco but since I had to Uber home, I came straight back here, got back into my jammies and spent the day working on material for Volume 7 of Pogo: The Complete Daily & Sunday Comic Strips. Boy, there's some good stuff in this volume.

Otherwise, the isolation goes on. It's getting to feel like the norm and that's not necessarily a good thing.