Overnight Briefing & General Reality Check - Sep 15, 2020

No surprise: NYC Mayor BILL de BLASIO said yesterday this year's Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade will be a virtual one. There will be five helium balloons and the usual floats and street performers... but not live. The high school and college marching bands from around the country will not be featured either --they'll have to wait until 2021. Instead, local New York bands and performers will provide music.

Good news over in London --the West End musicals will be reopening but will be socially-distanced. "Six" (about Henry VIII's wives) and "Everybody's Talking About Jamie" will start admitting audiences in mid-November, three weeks after a bunch of plays also reopen in the theatre district. "The Play That Goes Wrong," Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap" and Adam Kay's "This Is Going To Hurt" will begin admitting audiences in October. But audience members will have to take temperature tests and deep cleans, as well as hand sanitation, face coverings and track and trace.

HBO has renewed its show, "Last Week Tonight With John Oliver," for another three seasons. The show will be back with new episodes on September 27th, but will still be filmed remotely because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Need a job to get some cash for holiday gifts? Good news --FedEx is hiring 70-thousand workers to meet their holiday season demand. Don't expect a full-time job, though --FedEx says the majority of the new hires will simply be seasonal employees.

It was RYAN REYNOLDS who persuaded "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" star RICK MORANIS to head back to Hollywood after 20 years. Moranis left the show biz life back in the 90's to focus on his children after his wife passed away. "I'm a single parent, and I just found that it was too difficult to manage raising my kids and doing the travelling involved in making movies," he told USA Today back in 2005. Now, he'll be in a new Disney film called "Shrunk" --a "Honey, I Shrunk The Kids" sequel-- and Ryan persuaded him to also appear in a Mint Mobile commercial with him as well. Ryan, if you didn't know, is the owner of Mint Mobile.

Fast food: For you folks who like Beyond Meat items like their veggie burgers, the company is now putting Beyond Meatballs in stores starting this week: $6.99 for 12 meatballs.