It wasn’t all bad
■■ Chef Valerie Musser needed a quarantine project after her catering business shut down last year. She was working on a cookbook, and one day she involved her bearded dragon, Lenny. “He actually loves wearing hats and posing for photos,” she says, so she found him a tiny chef’s hat and made miniature versions of recipes, posting photos on Instagram. The positive response was overwhelming. One hundred and thirty-four pages later, lizard and human published their book, in which Chef Lenny serves up dishes such as chicken pot pie, biscuits and gravy, and blueberry muffins.
■■ Last week Hong Kong watched breathlessly as Lai Chiwai scaled a skyscraper. The 37-year-old champion rock climber became paralyzed from the waist down after a car accident nine years ago. Since then, he has climbed by attaching his wheelchair to a pulley system and using his upper-body strength to haul himself upward. On his 10-hour ascent, Lai reached a height of 820 feet before dangerous winds forced him to stop. “Some people think that we are always weak, [that] we need people’s pity,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be like that. If a disabled person can shine, they can at the same time bring about opportunity, hope, bring about light.”
■■ After canceling a pizza party at the beginning of the pandemic, Ben Berman had to decide what to do with the ingredients. “I didn’t think it was a good idea to eat 16 pizzas all by myself,” said the University of Pennsylvania grad student. So he put the pies in a box attached to a string and lowered them from his secondstory window to friends on the street below. Soon, Berman began regularly dropping pizzas to strangers, asking only that they donate to a good cause in return. He’s now raised more than $32,000 for charity, and plans to continue for years to come.