MASKING FOR A FRIEND: A PRIMA FACIAL RANT

Reflections on covering up

By Ed Goldman

Since receiving my anti-COVID-19 booster shot—meaning I’ve now given Pfizer three chances to implant mind-control sera in my left arm—I’ve been a reluctant masker.

It’s not that I plan to join survivalists, morally opposed anti-vaxxers and the remaining members of the Duck Dynasty clan in a kumbaya rally any time in the likely future. 

It’s just that every time I tear off my mask after leaving a restaurant that required it to be worn to walk to the table, but not once I arrived and sat down at the table, I feel like I’m in an old episode of “Mission Impossible.”

I’m referencing  the TV show, not the series of films celebrating Tom Cruise’s dental work and do-your-own-stunt death wishes (Question: Did it ever bother you knowing that Paul Newman and Robert Redford didn’t really jump from a cliff into a river 50 feet below in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”? Me, neither. Someone should tell Cruise that hanging from a mountain ledge or off the wing of an airplane doesn’t make him a better actor—but it does deprive trained stuntmen of a payday).

Remember how a Mission Impossible team member used to triumphantly rip off his face mask to reveal he’d been impersonating a dictator in an unnamed Central American country? And remember how we always knew no such masks would have been that convincing, and that another actor had played the faux-dictator while the cast member dubbed in his own voice in post-production?

But we willingly suspended our disbelief, didn’t we?

That’s been a more difficult challenge with the mask mandate, which I fully support but whose inconsistencies are laughable. Take the parenthetical example I offered in Paragraph 3 about our needing to wear our masks to walk into an eatery and to our tables but not once we sit down at said tables. Does the threat of our being pandemic spreaders immediately vanish once we’re seated? Is it an altitude issue? If so, why don’t we all walk around in a permanent crouch—a la Groucho Marx, Bugs Bunny (who stole the walk from Groucho) and that lovesick bell-ringer Quasimodo (whose long-embargoed literary tell-all is about to be published: “I Always Had a Hunch About Victor Hugo”). 

The nonsense doesn’t end there. 

If you use the bathroom at a restaurant, you’ll often see a sign posted warning that employees MUST wash their hands before they return to work. One would like to believe they’d do that even without a sign demanding they do. But why aren’t customers told the same thing? Just putting our hands on the bathroom’s door knob is probably far more potentially lethal, germ-wise, than walking (at our full heights) to our tables.

The first time we were lulled into thinking the pandemic was over, I remember getting an occasional knot in my stomach when I’d walk into a store and someone wasn’t wearing a mask. Like most of you—and to paraphrase Henry Higgins—I’d grown accustomed to no face.