It wasn’t all bad
■■ When the University of Minnesota Medical School moved its classes online, students Sruthi Shankar and Sara Lederman suddenly had a lot more time on their hands. Desperate to help those on the front lines of the pandemic, the pair began recruiting med students to assist doctors, nurses, and pharmacists—not at the hospital, but in their homes. Within days, 280 people had volunteered with the MN CovidSitters program, and were providing child and pet care and doing grocery runs for health-care workers. “Not only does it take a village,” said Lederman, “it takes a brilliant, humble, determined village.”
■■ A Milwaukee neighborhood went Jurassic in a bid to beat the lockdown blues. Hoping to lift local families’ spirits and break “the monotony of being socially isolated,” Stacy Meyer said, she and a couple of friends decided to organize a truly unique parade for Bay View. Participants put on inflatable T-rex costumes and dinosaur onesies and marched through the streets—while always maintaining a CDC-recommended distance from one another—as onlookers whooped from their yards and held up signs reading, “Go dinos!” “Here we can be together,” said parade grand marshal Patty Thompson,
“and 6 to 10 feet apart at all times.”
■■ One New York City couple had a wedding to remember last week, in spite of coronavirus-related restrictions. Reilly Jennings and Amanda Wheeler got their marriage license just before the city’s Marriage Bureau closed indefinitely, and then held their ceremony on an empty sidewalk to honor social-distancing guidelines.
The lovebirds’ nuptials were officiated by their friend Matt Wilson, who leaned out of a fourth-floor window and opened with a passage from the novel Love in the Time of Cholera.
After saying “I do” to the cheers of neighbors and friends watching from a responsible distance, the brides set off for a honeymoon in their living room.