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Maybe age really is just a number. When The Golden Girls debuted in September 1985, its four stars were, on average, not quite 60 years old, but they were considered “senior citizens.”

Thirty-five years later, the fashions, the technology (or lack of it) and some of the attitudes may seem outdated, but in the most important ways The Golden Girls has hardly aged a day.

Thanks to syndication, cable and now streaming, there has hardly been a day when TV viewers couldn’t visit Dorothy Zbornak, Rose Nylund, Blanche Devereaux and Sophia Petrillo at 6151 Richmond Street in Miami (don’t Google Map it – it’s a made-up address). From 1985 to 1992, The Golden Girls was a Saturday-night fixture on NBC, so much so that it never budged from its 9 p.m. time slot throughout its seven seasons on the air.

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The bawdy, sassy, unabashedly straightforward – and frequently silly – quartet of past-middle-aged women never lacked an audience, but their popularity seems to have only increased in last decade. The series was always a staple of basic cable, first on Lifetime and then on the Hallmark Channel, but became a GIF-tastic, memetic pop-culture phenomenon thanks to streaming; today, you can watch any episode of The Golden Girls anytime you want on Hulu.

The perpetual appeal of The Golden Girls isn’t hard to fathom: The women are aware that they’re societal cast-offs, unwanted in a culture that demands conformity and propriety, and they’ve come to realize that it gives them an advantage – they don’t need to worry about what the rest of the world thinks, either.

Their tropes are equally perfect. Dorothy is intelligent, irritable and world-weary; Rose is open-hearted, optimistic and daft; Blanche is self-centered, sexual but kind; Dorothy’s mother Sophia is wise and wise-cracking. And while they might not matter to the world that turned its back on them, they mean the world to each other – an attitude that has long appealed to middle-aged gay men, who took solace in the silliness during the AIDS crisis and now often see themselves reflected in the “girls,” who found a way to create their own safe community, filled with friendship.

But gay men were just the start – The Golden Girls has fans of every demographic type, and is constantly being discovered. For those looking to binge through the distinctively delightful series during these stay-at-home days, it’s possible to watch it from the start, including the weirdly awkward series pilot. Then again, The Golden Girls was of a different era of television, when each season had nearly two dozen episodes. To help you break through the pastel-hued, wicker-filled clutter, here’s a look at five of the very best episodes of this inimitable, groundbreaking series, all of which are available to watch on Hulu:

• “Big Daddy’s Little Lady” (Season 2, Episode 6) – One of the funniest of all Golden Girls episodes finds Blanche surprised by genteel Southern “Big Daddy,” who announces he’s getting married to a much younger woman. McClanahan’s reactions are priceless, but the episode’s secondary story is what makes the episode. Dorothy and Rose enter a song-writing contest, and find that they aren’t quite Rodgers and Hammerstein – though their lyrics are certainly unforgettable.
• “In a Bed of Rose’s” (Season 1, Episode 15) – Sex is one of The Golden Girls‘ favorite subjects, and here it’s the setup for a story that takes some surprising twists in 23 minutes. Unusually, this episode doesn’t have a “B”-story – Rose’s predicament is the focus, and Betty White received one of her three Emmys (in addition to two she won for “Mary Tyler Moore”) for this episode, which manages to balance perfectly timed comedy with some genuine pathos, courtesy of character actress Patricia Morrill.
• “Isn’t it Romantic” (Season 2, Episode 5) – Never seen The Golden Girls and looking for the best place to start? Here it is: Everything you need to know about each of the characters is perfectly encapsulated in this sweet and wildly funny story about Dorothy’s friend Jean (Lois Nettleton) coming to visit. The catch? Jean is lesbian, and she develops a crush on Rose. When it originally aired in 1986, it may have seemed a little daring. Today, it’s just hilarious.
• “An Illegitimate Concern” (Season 5, Episode 18) – Merely by virtue of having one of the best Dorothy-Rose “newspaper gags” alone (preceded by a perfectly delivered joke about the Seven Dwarfs), this one makes the cut as one of the best episodes. It’s a Blanche-centric story – her mysterious admirer turns out to have a much more unexpected motive – but every one of the actresses gets a chance to shine in this consistently funny episode, the first written by prolific TV writer-producer Marc Cherry.
• “The Case of the Libertine Belle” (Season 7, Episode 2) – This lark of an episode finds the girls taking part in a murder-mystery weekend as part of a scheme of Blanche’s to land a job she covets. The episode is fun on its own, with some great one-liners, but it’s doubly fun to watch such well-honed characters playing roles in a different kind of story. It points to the beauty of The Golden Girls as a whole – by the show’s seventh season, each character was so perfectly defined that they could be put into almost any situation and still keep viewers gloriously entertained … for more than three decades.

No one would choose to be synonymous with a pandemic. Such a label makes them a pin in history representative of an acceleration point, a shorthand of when things got serious. Rudy Gobert, running his hands all over the phones and recorders on the table in front of him, not seeing in that final press conference that the window for levity had shut, became such a shorthand. And because Gobert, seated on a podium in his uniform at work, is a representative of a much larger entity, in the blink of an eye under the collectively furrowed brow of those watching, the NBA grew just as instantly intertwined with a global pandemic.

In the slow-motion minutes and fever dream cadence after Gobert’s failed prank, there was a rare glimpse into the real-time response of a company weighing its options. Snippets of information were coming out of the sports media in Chesapeake Energy Arena: OKC players being waved away from the emptied visitors bench by panicky referees, both teams sequestered in locker rooms, and with every backward shot Rumble the Bison attempted from half court to a crowd teetering between confusion and alarm, there was a growing impatience from those watching from outside, piecing it all together, to call the game.

That same night in Sacramento, with the Thunder-Jazz game yet to be officially postponed, Kings players took the floor. Within a few minutes, it became clear that New Orleans players would not be joining them. News leaked out of Oklahoma City that a Jazz player had tested positive for COVID-19 earlier that day. Courtney Kirkland, set to officiate in Sacramento, had worked the Utah-Toronto game two nights prior. Pelicans coach Alvin Gentry told officials his team would not play, and players and staff quickly returned to their hotel.

With both games postponed, there was growing concern over what was actually happening and how initially widespread things were within the league. All 30 NBA teams could be linked together in the week preceding March 11, well within the incubation period of the virus, not to mention the staff and media — like those who were stuck inside OKC’s arena as reports began to suggest that the infected player in question was Gobert, whose fresh fingerprints were all over the recorders and phones in their hands and pockets — surrounding each team.

While hindsight softens the impact of some, the league’s missteps in those first few hours came fast. The league didn’t postpone the March 11 games or the season despite the World Health Organization declaring COVID-19 a pandemic earlier that same day and its China office having already been closed, its colleagues there under the same lockdowns that would soon hit the United States, both stick out. The league knew Gobert had been tested and still assumed the game could continue as they awaited results. Sixty percent of Oklahoma’s available tests for the virus were rushed to test players and staffers despite the fact that it was not yet clear how many tests were available within each state and when they could be replenished. People like media, arena staffers, and other team personnel were left exposed and scared, and the onus was placed on them to figure things out for themselves in the lurch.

But as rapid in succession as those mistakes were, the league righted itself quickly by realizing that, like it or not, it had arrived in the eye of the pandemic making landfall in the U.S. The NBA suspending its season outright in the days that followed forced both other pro-leagues to follow suit and individuals who still viewed COVID-19 as a distant threat to sit up and pay attention. It is strange, but it is not a stretch to say that Gobert and the NBA were arbiters of the pandemic, mitigating its impacts and proactively responding before the government did.

“We’ve certainly never been through anything like this,” the NBA’s President of Social Responsibility and Player Programs, Kathy Behrens, says over the phone from her home in New York, “but we have been through other situations, unfortunately, that have required us to figure out the right ways to connect with our fans, connect and support our communities, and make sure that our employees and players and teams were all safe and doing all they could to stay together, whatever the crisis might be.”

In her twenty-year tenure with the league, those crises have ranged from natural disasters to terrorist attacks, but never a pandemic on the scale of COVID-19, which Behrens says “requires a different way of thinking and a different way of responding.”

As unprecedented of a situation as it was for the league to be involved in, the NBA’s organized response came together within eight days — sooner if you count its first public health PSAs and the independent efforts of its players to subsidize lost wages of arena workers — due to the launch of NBA Together. The program took some of its framework from ongoing league initiatives, like NBA Cares and Jr. NBA, but its focus was far more targeted on public health messaging.

These were commercials with players and alumni, urging hand washing and social distancing long before similar missives were coming from municipal or federal government. They soon evolved to include encouragement to stop the spread of false information as much as the coronavirus. But as statewide stay at home mandates caught up, Behrens recalls, “I think when we all went into the shelter at home protocol, we realized that there was going to be more to our work.”

It is rare for an emergency to affect so many at once worldwide, but this unwanted, alarming commonality was the unifier for the league’s immediate response.

“As you look around the world, we have so many communities impacted by this virus, and so what could we do to deliver those public safety messages?” Behrens asks. “What could we do to supply support to the front line healthcare workers and other essential personnel, first responders? What could we do to stay connected to people, and communicate and use whatever means were at our disposal? Usually we have our games to do that, but we don’t have those right now.”

Unfortunately, the league had firsthand resources when it came to the real-time education it could offer its audience on the coronavirus. Gobert and Donovan Mitchel were two of the first high-profile cases confirmed in the U.S., with Marcus Smart, Kevin Durant, Christian Wood, and unnamed individuals within other franchises following. The entire Raptors roster and staff went into Canada’s federally-mandated 14-day self-quarantine given their contact with Gobert and the Jazz. Almost all of the players who were publicly confirmed as testing positive offered PSAs and Q+A sessions on their social media for fans, sharing reports on their health and science-based information on COVID-19, all while urging viewers to stay in and stay safe.

There were also lessons that the league was taking from its China offices.

“We have close to 200 people who work in the NBA China offices,” Behrens says, “and so we understood what they were going through as soon as things really started to get out of control. As we started to see the spread of the virus, we really focused in those early days on the public health messaging, and those have evolved certainly.”

In many ways, the pandemic has put us on a collective course. Those with jobs that supported remote work quickly fell into a new routine. Kids stayed home from school and most of the world’s population followed some form of lockdown measure, as frontline workers remained some the only people to maintain “normal” routines, but faced challenges that were anything but. When developing its offerings, the NBA took all this into account.

Its 2K Tournament gave fans the chance to engage with players real-time, for prolonged stretches, while extended initiatives like Jr. NBA at Home promoted physical and mental health through exercises that could be done in small, enclosed spaces with little to no equipment, led by NBA and WNBA players, coaches, and alumni. First designed for kids who couldn’t play in leagues or at school, these drills expanded to include anyone, with varying degrees of skill and difficulty. A HORSE tournament followed, offering a form of gameplay, albeit adjusted for remote and technical constraints, in the broadcast slot where games once sat. The league was able to take these varied offerings and schedule full days of programming. While keeping its audience entertained and informed, it was also keeping them home and safe, because in some states where fans were watching, COVID-19 had arrived but was not yet rampant.

Behrens is intuitively cognizant of this balance, trying to offer entertainment that also could use their platform to push best practices and raise money for relief efforts. And it’s all coming through platforms that the league and its fans have utilized to a degree, but not to this extent. Behrens acknowledges that they are “learning every day” when it comes to what works and what is less successful in reaching a captive, but remote audience.

“TikTok is not necessarily the best place to do public services messages,” Behrens says with a learned, knowing laugh, “but it’s a great place to let people have some fun and release some of that nervousness.” Instagram and Twitter have proven to be good avenues for engagement, especially in giving their audience accessibility to medical professionals, like former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, to answer questions related to COVID-19 where misinformation has been rampant. “We’re just constantly trying to evolve,” Behrens says.

This evolution has most recently shifted to highlight disproportionate infection and fatality rates amongst those most vulnerable, like black and hispanic communities, where the NBA has significant reach. Utilizing its longstanding partnerships with organizations like the National Urban League and the NAACP, as well as local, community-based organizations, the league is keen on ramping up its health and economic messaging, spotlighting issues of social awareness through its most prolific voices. Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were two of the first who featured as advocates.

“And that affects both the criminal justice system as well as those who are historically marginalized, and how do we both raise awareness but also take action to support those communities? That’s something we’re very focused on.” Behrens says. “This virus has hit the black community in really significant and profound ways. We can’t ignore that.”

Aside from its ongoing financial contributions (the league has raised over $78 million internally so far to support in relief efforts and frontline response to COVID-19), some of the most profound and affecting resources the NBA has are its players. With huge, organic platforms and reach most are already familiar in using, players were also the first to be touched by COVID-19, if not directly, then in the small circle that they make up. It was natural for player-led initiatives to accompany those the league was rolling out. Kevin Love brought his concerns around isolation and mental health forward and helped to shape the mandate of NBA Together. Steph Curry’s interviewed with Dr. Anthony Fauci, a few days after Donald Trump sidelined him during his daily press briefing, and brought the first plain language conversation around coronavirus concerns to many.

Behrens stresses that “it takes a village” in terms of the logistical organization of the league’s efforts thus far, but that “players bring it to life.”

“Their voices, the power of the platform they have, the commitment they have to want to engage in this way, and the support from them has just been incredible,” Behrens says. “I think that’s one big benefit we’ve had. NBA players have historically, and by historically I mean the last number of years that social media has been so prevalent, they have always embraced that way to connect with their fans and now they see it as even more important.”

There’s a snowball effect to this as well, with 58 million video views across the league’s social platforms, 40 unique PSAs, individual teams starting up their own together programs focused on the unique needs of their markets, and players coming forward everyday with new ideas.

“There are some guys who keep saying, ‘Oh, I have another idea!’ And so we’re taking as many of those ideas and trying to turn them into program elements as we can,” Behrens says. “I think they realize both individually and collectively that they can have a tremendous impact and that they can help people. That’s something that they are committed to. I love that it’s NBA players, it’s WNBA players, it’s coaches, it’s legends, it’s team executives. This is everybody.”

As widespread as the pandemic has grown, saturating every media outlet, there are many who, either inundated with conflicting news or simply overwhelmed by its steady proliferation, would rather hear from voices associated with something separate from its psychic weight. Figures of respite, like players, are able to translate the closeness and gravity of the virus without the associative anxiety of the news. The NBA understands acutely this direct line to its audience because it has relied on it, albeit as a marketing tool, for years.

This collective, unified voice has stood out where other communication has been fractured. While coming from many different people and their inherent personalities, it has still managed to hit on the notes the national political response is missing. When asked whether that collective tone has helped to deliver a strong, science-based, and compassionate message, Behrens said simply, “That gives us a chance to think about who we are, what we believe, what we care about, [and] to try and communicate that in a way that it shows the compassion and empathy that’s needed as people are unfortunately losing loved ones, are scared, are fearful for their friends and family, are fearful for their livelihood. So making sure that we lead with our heart is important.”

Part of the reason why the NBA’s initial messaging was so ahead of what was being shared by a lagging U.S. government was readily utilizing what had been captured by their colleagues abroad. “We were able to understand from them how some of the cadence of communication would go, what some of those public safety messages were going to be, the social distancing terms that are now a part of our daily lives. It was more trying to get a sense of what was happening there and what the impact was,” Behrens says, but admits there was more they could have taken to heart. “I think even though we were having those conversations, it’s safe to say I don’t think anybody thought it was going to be to the extent we are now living and operating under. So it helped us, but I don’t want to overstate it. There’s still a lot more we could have learned, and are still learning every day.”

That spirit of cooperation has been largely absent from the American federal administration, with information and resource sharing either scarce, rationed along partisan lines, or devolving into infighting when the president’s accountability is questioned. Ego is sabotaging relief efforts and unrelated policies, like attacking immigration, are being used as smoke screens to deflect blame. The NBA is a large, for-profit corporation primarily concerned with entertainment, which can make it seem even more bleak that it is one of the strongest leaders with ostensibly unselfish motives that has emerged in this crisis. Moreover, that it learned from its early lapses and instead of retreating to shed any associations with the virus, appears to have genuinely stepped up to reframe its efforts toward public service.

“This isn’t a program that we developed and put on the shelf,” Behrens says, “I think you asked the question before, did we launch it and keep adding to it, and that’s certainly true. And unfortunately I think it’s something that we’re going to be dealing with for a while. Even though we may move on from this phase, there are going to be additional phases of this pandemic that are going to require more support, more philanthropic support, more community engagement. So we know there’s going to be work to do.”

It should not be up to any private corporation to provide basic, reliable, unified information on public health and safety in a pandemic, nor should people need to rely upon the philanthropic efforts of corporations in lieu of social programs and meaningful financial support in crisis from their elected government. But when the president is making bizarre, dangerous inferences in daily press conferences, justifying his ignorance as a joke while confirmed positive cases in the U.S. surpass one million, this is the reality.

Learning from this seems something that is still far-off, as its tragic fallout is ticking away in present time, but the blueprints that are being established now will be useful to countries not yet as afflicted or in the inevitable future waves of COVID-19 to come. This is as true for healthcare and government infrastructure as it is for entertainment bodies like the NBA.

“In terms of other lessons that we’ve learned, I know we’re all taking notes about things we would like to have done differently, things we could’ve thought about differently but were probably just not ready to tackle that area yet because there’s still so much in front of us that we’ve gotta resolve,” Behrens says. “There’ll be a ton of learnings from here. For everybody. For every country, for every local government, state government, business, you know, what did we learn here so that we can prevent it from happening again.”

The forward motion from here will be in fits and starts. Perhaps the only comforting part of such a global, uncertain future is that it’s shared. No country will proceed smoothly, without regression, disruption, and occasional full-stops. In the U.S., cities, states, and municipalities are still providing different guidelines on lockdown orders, public safety and the future of their economies. “There’s no switch to flip to get everything back at the same time,” Behrens says.

Given there’s no unified plan for states to come out of lockdown and no guidance from the federal government on how or when, the league has another opportunity in front of it. With its announcement that teams may soon start opening facilities in markets where lockdowns are loosening, it will once again be an early COVID-19 model for other businesses, even governments, in what a return to work will look like. If things ease too quickly, then the care the NBA has taken since early March would be made insincere by negligent optics or worse, a resurgence in cases among players or team staff. Teams will need full autonomy to decide whether it is worth the risk or the complicated logistics, and when, at any point, to pull back.

When asked what the next steps are for the league, Behrens gets sidetracked by the difficulties so many communities are facing.

“Healthcare workers, ensuring they have the PPE that they need,” Behrens says. “There’s still such a major issue around food insecurity, especially for kids who are not in school who rely on school meals. For communities that are hard-hit by this pandemic, food insecurity is a big issue. I think the next phase is really going be about the economic issues, and what that means for small businesses and what that means for people whose,” here she stops, pauses for a long beat to catch up and recalibrate, like someone who hasn’t — and really hasn’t — had a break, “livelihoods, have been so impacted.”

Unprecedented has been a word closely associated with the COVID-19 pandemic since its onset, sometimes in the human toll it has taken or its impact on the economy, and one that came up several times in my conversation with Behrens. But there is something striking, immediately arresting, in the way she uses it. “That’s what I meant before too about unprecedented, I think every day we’re learning something new, and in some ways every day we learn less, or know less, about what’s going to happen next.”

It is excruciating to consider that we could be moving backwards, even more to think we are regressing where we’ve already lost so much to learn. But perhaps the most progressive thing, a silver lining we can take even if it has emerged from as unanticipated a source as basketball and its corporate body, is to be honest and compassionate about our failings, and use them as a framework to move forward.

In response to Netflix’s Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness, which some have claimed glorifies animal abuse (and ignores its true protagonists, the tigers themselves), dozens of celebrities have come together in support of the Big Cat Public Safety Act.

If passed, the federal bill, which was introduced last year but only recently gained attention, would prohibit “the private ownership of big cats, direct public contact, and dangerous public interactions with big cats such as cub petting,” according to a letter from the Animal Legal Defense Fund. Those who have signed include Joaquin Phoenix (who rescued slaughterhouse cows hours after winning an Oscar), Rooney Mara, Iggy Pop, Justin Theroux, Jenny Slate, and Christopher Walken.

“Documentaries can be powerful forces for change, sometimes through a call to action and other times simply by telling a story that entertains, creating a window into a world viewers weren’t previously aware of,” filmmaker Gabriela Cowperthwaite, who directed the 2013 SeaWorld expose, said in a statement. “But at some point, there is a pivot and the passion of their millions of viewers lands somewhere useful.” She continued:

“Tiger King and its audience can do that now. The world of big cat captivity requires a call to action, and I’m encouraged that through this partnership with the Animal Legal Defense Fund and support for our petition by the entertainment industry, we may see enough pressure lead to the passage of the Big Cat Public Safety Act.”

You can find out more about the Big Cat Public Safety Act here.

(Via Variety)

Though the current pandemic has caused a reduction in the number of new Jeopardy episodes aired, there is still enough content to stay entertained. The show is mainly about testing one’s own trivia knowledge against savvy contestants, but it’s always a great pleasure when a question is widely far from being correct. That’s exactly what happened in last night’s episode when a contestant came close yet immensely far from having the correct question about a Zulu warrior.

Posed by host Alex Trebek, an answer tested contestants knowledge about the Zulu. “Here, as on each September 24, Zulus celebrate a holiday that was named in honor of this warrior leader of the early 1800s,” Trebek said. The contestant Sarah accidentally referred to the legendary ten-time Grammy-winning singer when she responded with, “Who is Chaka Khan?” The contestant Matt then answered correctly (“Who is Shaka Zulu?”) and Sarah looked immediately remorseful as she realized how wrong her response was. While she was wrong about that particular question, Sarah actually went on to win the entire round.

This isn’t the first time a Jeopardy answer about a musician went viral. Recently, a clue about Lizzo had Trebek reciting a tone-deaf version of her hit song “Truth Hurts.” Before that, Trebek took a shot at doing an impression of Lil Jon’s signature catchphrase.

Watch a clip of the botched Jeopardy question above.

Some of the artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Thanks to the ongoing pandemic shutting down film productions and basically the entire movie theater business as we know it, Marvel has been forced to push back the release dates for virtually all of its upcoming films including Thor: Love and Thunder, the highly anticipated sequel to Thor: Ragnarok.

But on the bright side, director Taika Waititi is actually a huge fan of the delay, particularly the rare, yet much needed opportunity that a lot of movies could use. In an interview with Total Film (via Heroic Hollywood), Waititi practically relishes the chance to make Love and Thunder even better while opining on how far too many films are rushed into production before scripts are even finished.

There are a few positive things I can take away [from the Covid-19 crisis]. One of them is that a lot of these films, and films in general, are rushed, or you don’t have as much time as you’d want to have on the script and things like that. We’re still writing Love And Thunder, and I think it’s good to just keep writing, and then you know, we’ll have a really, really good script. And with writing, especially, you should use as much of that time as possible to get your story right, because you never really get it later on. Film is an industry where you’re always complaining about not having enough time. I think, right now, we’ve given ourselves a huge amount of time to work on all sort of things, so we may as well use it.

One of the things Waititi won’t be working on, however, is whether to keep Thor’s more rotund “Lebowski Thor” look from Avengers: Endgame. The director recently revealed in an Instagram Live video that he feels like that gag is “done,” so Marvel fans can presumably look forward to a more ripped and shredded Chris Hemsworth when he returns as Thor in February 2022.

(Via Heroic Hollywood)

Before he became a young star in the NBA, or a No. 1 draft pick, or a standout in the world of college basketball, Zion Williamson played his high school hoops at Spartanburg Day School in South Carolina. He dominated at that level, putting out mixtapes that quickly became the stuff of legends.

At one point, Williamson was on the receiving end of a pretty unique honor. Drake posted a picture on his Instagram account back in 2017 of himself in a Zion high school jersey, which blew up and brought a ton of attention his way.

Fast forward to Monday night and in an interview with Ernie Johnson on NBA Together, Williamson recalled that moment, which he believed was a launching pad to where he is now.

“I think he posted it, like, late at night, and I woke up in the morning to, like, just crazy notifications on my phone,” Williamson said. For a second I was like, ‘Oh my, something happen?”

Williamson explained that he was starstruck as a 16 year old who just got love from Drake on Instagram, which made going to school that day a little more fun than usual.

“I think that was kind of a start to everything,” Williamson said. “Because after that, I went from No. 12 at Spartanburg Day School to Zion, and everybody knew me. It all happened so fast, from my junior year, the start of it, No. 12, to end of junior year, well, that’s Zion.”

Williamson might be the NBA’s brightest young star, but of course, everyone has to start somewhere. For Williamson, that somewhere was two places: Spartanburg and Drake’s Instagram account.

Working at a grocery store during the COVID-19 pandemic is a stressful situation, but for Matthew Simmons, it made it nearly impossible to do his job.

Simmons is deaf and relies on lip-reading to help most customers at the Vancouver store. So when they started wearing masks to prevent the spread of the virus, Simmons couldn’t be of much help to those who asked him where to find Gorilla Munch or Trader Joe’s frozen lasagna.

“When customers (wearing masks) come up to me to ask a question on the floor, I always said, ‘I am Deaf and need to read your lips so I can help you,'” Simmons told Today.

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“Some of the times, customers didn’t want to lower down their masks and shook their heads ‘no’ and walked away from me. It made me upset because I couldn’t help and left me feeling defeated,” he continued.

It was also difficult for him to communicate with his coworkers.

The store’s first attempt to help Simmons communicate during the crisis was to put another team member with him at the register. Although it was a big help, it made him feel “truly different or disabled having to depend on someone to do my job that I am completely capable of doing and was hired to do.”

Simmons works at Trader Joe’s part-time on the weekends and during summer. During the week, he’s a teacher’s assistant at a school for the deaf.

COVID-19 hasn’t just made life difficult for deaf people to communicate with the hearing world, it’s also caused problems among those who communicate through American Sign Language.

“When wearing a mask it cuts off 55% of facial communication and even if using ASL it is heavily based on facial expressions in order to make sure the communication is understood clearly,” Simmons said.

To keep his on-the-job independence, Simmons found some new solutions to help him so his job. He purchased a shirt online that says “I’m deaf” on the front, and “tap on the shoulder” on the back. He also got three wipe boards to carry around with him so customers can ask him questions.

He also had Plexiglas put in front of his register to protect him from the virus and wrote “Hi My name is Matthew. I am deaf and read lips'” on the protective barrier.

“When I opened the register, the first customer read it and wrote down on the small white board stating, ‘It must be hard with everyone wearing masks! Thank you for your help. :),'” he said. “This made me feel better and I was able to start smiling again!”

Simmons’s story is a great example of someone with a disability and their employer coming together to make the best out of a difficult situation for the worker, the store, and its customers.

WWE’s Chief Brand Officer gained a new title today: Ad Council Board of Directors member.

While WWE‘s wrestlers get ready to have a ladder match in/on top of an office building, the company has experienced more drama behind the scenes. As the coronavirus pandemic spread throughout the United States, WWE drew media attention by continuing to produce television, being designated an “essential business” in Florida, and by the intersection of the McMahon family’s business and political interests becoming more obvious through the actions of a Linda McMahon-run SuperPAC and Vince McMahon being appointed to the government task force to reopen the economy.

Meanwhile, WWE has attempted damage control, emphasizing the safety measures at their tapings to both the wrestling-focused and mainstream entertainment press. The company also released a Community Impact Report about their charity work and company policies and worked with the Ad Council to release a coronavirus awareness PSA, which notably did not mention social distancing.

That PSA was good enough for the Ad Council though, apparently, because the organization announced today that Stephanie McMahon has been elected to its board of directors. The board’s most recent project, according to the Ad Council’s website, was leading “the media, marketing, advertising and entertainment industry’s response to the COVID-19 crisis with unprecedented communications efforts.” The list of new members also includes executives from other companies whose response to COVID-19 has been criticized, including Walmart and Amazon, whose workers will be part of a strike on May 1 about working conditions during the pandemic.

With Vince working with the President, Linda running a SuperPAC, and now Stephanie on the Ad Council, that’s a significant amount of McMahon influence on the U.S. response to COVID-19.

BadBadNotGood is a versatile group, as they’ve collaborated with everybody from Ghostface Killah to Future Islands frontperson Samuel T. Herring. As far as producing their own output, though, it’s been a while. Their latest full-length release, IV, came out in 2016. Today, though, the group returns with a pair of new songs, “Goodbye Blue” and “Glide (Goodbye Blue Pt. 2).”

As the titles suggest, the tracks are connected to each other. While “Goodbye Blue” features singer Jonah Yano and has shades of R&B and classic vocal jazz, “Glide” takes things in a more instrumental jazz direction, more closely aligned with the work the band has become known for.

The band’s Chester Hansen says of the new tracks:

“The end of 2018 was the beginning of the first long break from touring that we’ve had basically since we started as a band. It was a time of reflection and the opportunity for us to explore all sorts of things. ‘Goodbye Blue’ was one of the songs that came out of this. Eventually, we worked some of the melodies and feeling into a second instrumental which felt like it stood on its own, but was definitely a companion piece. We hope that everyone enjoys these two songs and they offer some peace in these troubled times.”

Listen to “Goodbye Blue” and “Glide (Goodbye Blue Pt. 2)” above.

Michelle Wie’s been a mainstay in the world of golf for more than a decade. Once the most highly-regarded young golfer in the world following her decision to turn pro when she was 16, Wie’s carved out a steady career on the LPGA Tour, registering more than 60 top-10 finishes and five wins in her career.

Physical fitness plays an important role in Wie’s career, with a wrist injury she suffered as a 17 year old teaching her the importance of adding some type of non-golf exercise early on. Of course, that has been magnified in recent years as her career has progressed and the miles have racked up. Now, Wie is one of the many athletes who agreed to appear on Iron Sharpens Iron, Cam Newton’s Quibi show that features athletes from different sports discussing the methods in which they train — Wie paired up with Olympic gold medalist and beach volleyball great Kerri Walsh Jennings.

Uproxx Sports caught up with Wie to talk her cameo on the show, the role fitness plays in her golf career, the surprisingly similarities between the golf and beach volleyball, and much more.

How did your involvement in Iron Sharpens Iron come about? Did Cam reach out to you directly, or did it happen through some different channels?

My agent actually represents Cam, so I had heard of the opportunity through my agent, which I initially was like, “Wow, this sounds like a really cool idea,” and then especially after I heard about who they paired me up with, I was so excited.

Kerri is a legend. Why were you so excited to work with her?

I mean, like you said, Kerri’s an absolute legend, and just growing up watching her play beach volleyball — I think growing up in Hawaii, we have such a big beach volleyball culture, and as you’ll probably see in the episode, I am not very good. So watching someone on TV, growing up idolizing her, and then just being able to spend one-on-one time with her and her husband on the court was just incredible.

A question or two about golf and just your history with the game as a form of fitness. I think when we think about golf and athletes, it’s something that gets thought of as something that people do on days off, during the summer, those sorts of things. How do you believe golf is beneficial as a form of exercise and cross training for other athletes?

Oh, it’s great. I mean, you hear of golf — like you said, all the football players and a lot of basketball players, they love playing golf, even hockey players, and I mean, tennis too. All other sports, you hear of athletes getting obsessed with the game, actually. I think it’s so great, because I think it allows you to use different muscles. I think being so specialized in one sport, no matter what sport it is, you’re doing the same motion over and over again, and you kind of get stuck in your own ways and stuck mechanically with your body moving in one direction or one way, and that’s definitely how I feel in golf, for sure. So it’s always good to really just change it up. I think it’s really good for your body to do that, and mentally as well too.

I think golf is such a mental sport, and I think people that play a lot of team sports and whatnot, they find this extra challenge in playing golf because it’s such a solo sport, and a lot of the game happens in between your two ears. So I think it’s a great mental challenge. I think it’s a great mental exercise. For walking, I love walking and playing. I mean, a round of golf is about five to six miles. You walk 18 holes, you’re walking six miles a day, which is pretty great. So I think it’s good, I like it, and I think it’s really useful too.

You’ve been playing the game for however many years now, and you turned pro around when you were 16. Plenty of folks think that they’re invincible when they’re 16 years old.

Oh, yeah.

When did your routine start to incorporated more physical stuff so that it wasn’t just, “I’m heading to the range and working on my short game because I’m 16 years old now and don’t have to worry about these fitness-related things”?

I think it happened quickly for me, because I had a pretty big injury when I was 17, 18. So rehab after that, and trying to take my fitness really carefully and cognitively after that was definitely very important to me. But I think taking fitness in general, because even though I had injuries, I was still super limber. My body was doing things without me even thinking about it. I could just go up onto the range and start hitting balls, full shots, and nothing was hurting. Everything was working well, and then all of a sudden you hit later on in your career and you try to do that, and things start cracking that shouldn’t be cracking.

I definitely, within the last couple of years, have really taken fitness seriously. I think I was doing fitness long before, where … we touched base on this in the episode. I was doing really heavy weights and all that, but I think Kerri and I actually, surprisingly, even though how different our sports are, how we train and how we recover and focus on taking care of our bodies are very similar. That’s something that was a definite eye opener for me, and reassured me that I was doing the right thing. If Kerri Walsh Jennings is doing it, then I have to be doing something right.

Could you map out some of those similarities? Any that were, I don’t want to say surprising to you, but like you mentioned, when you found out that Kerri is also doing these sorts of things, you go, “Oh, wow, yeah, I am doing something right”?

I think a big thing in golf is thoracic motion, keeping everything limber, taking care of your shoulders. The shoulder thing wasn’t as surprising, but the thoracic motion, how much she focused on that, was shocking to me, because what you think of volleyball, it’s not a lot of horizontal turning like golf. But you don’t realize how much horizontal turning that they actually do when they serve or when they spike, and they wind up to do a big spike. So that was definitely an eye opener for me, and just how we do stuff, how we train. I really, really enjoyed what she taught me, and yeah, it was a really great day.

Just specifically, what things did you share, or did you want to go in making sure you shared with Kerri, because you thought they could be relevant to her experience as a beach volleyball player?

Well, I mean, I think she was really excited to get golf-specific lessons, because I think her husband plays a lot. So I think she was really excited to learn that aspect of it, which I was really surprised at how quickly she picked it up, as someone that has never played before. She was getting the ball airborne within five minutes, which just shows how great of an athlete she is. But for me, when I actually was filming it, I was going through an injury, so the way we did the episode, I was really focused on recovery and the mental aspect of the game. We did a couple of eye exercises, which I felt were really unique to the game, which you have to have strong eyes to play golf. I think in other sports as well too. You don’t realize that your eyes are muscles, and you have to train them like you would any place else.

You mentioned that you learned about some of the similarities between your two sports while Kerri was going through the things that she was talking about. Was there any new things that you learned about beach volleyball that you went, “Oh, you know what? I can maybe start to incorporate this into my daily routine.”

I think just, some of the workup that she showed me, it was the same thing, but she was doing them differently and approaching them differently and seeing them differently. So a lot of TRX movements that we were doing, a lot of stuff on the physio ball. I want to definitely incorporate more stuff in the sand. I think that the explosiveness of jumping from the sand can really help in golf, and I really feel like if you can do that in the sand, almost using your legs as power on stable grass, I think that would be very beneficial.

Let’s say you get a call and says, “We want to do this again and we want to have you involved again,” who are some athletes whose brains you would love to pick for something like this. Have you ever gotten any particularly interesting tips from someone in another sport that you’ve adopted in the past?

I don’t know. I mean, I would love to pick the brain … I saw Carli Lloyd’s name was on there. Even though we’ve crossed paths a couple of times, but I’d definitely love to pick her brain on what she was thinking when they won the championship, and press situations and stuff like that. I always find it really interesting to talk to athletes about how they handle pressure situation. But yeah, I think if the opportunity came again, I would love to be involved again.

Just a few quick ones here to wrap it up. First things first, something I’m sure that people say to you all the time, I personally am horrific at golf. What is a very simple piece of advice when it comes to hitting a golf ball that you think people can sometimes take for granted?

I think, do less. I think it can get very complicated. So I think just keeping it really simple and still thinking athletic. It’s a really awkward motion for people who don’t play, but like Kerri Walsh Jennings and I were talking about, the setup to the golf swing is the same athletic cluster you would find in almost any other sport. So just bringing it back to athleticism and bringing it back to simple motions and good tempo, I think helps a lot.

I saw that you announced earlier this year, you’re expecting a daughter, and that a goal is wanting her to see you play. What do you need to do to achieve that goal, both in the short and long terms?

I definitely have to get back into playing shape. The injuries that I had that stopped me from playing last year, it was a blessing in disguise. It gave me another year to get better. But I think just really focusing on mental game, being really sharp and focused. I think having a daughter and having that new goal in mind, it definitely puts different perspective on things, and I think it’s going to help me to focus, because it’s a new goal of mine, for sure.