The Year That Was

APR 13

MOLE REVERSAL The New York Post reports that Enrique Iglesias' famous mole appears to be missing.

APR 16

SOUL SURVIVOR Four days before turning 52, Luther Vandross suffers a stroke. Less than two months later, his CD Dance With My Father, which features collaborations with Beyonce and Busta Rhymes, sells 442,000 copies and hits No. 1 on the Billboard album chart.

APR 22

LIP SERVICE Soap viewers witness the first-ever daytime lesbian kiss (between Bianca and Lena) during an episode of All My Children. Soap viewers' husbands all of a sudden start asking about Erica, Greenlee, and Kendall during dinner.

MAY 1

GREAT BALLS OF LIAR Jayson Blair, a reporter at The New York Times, resigns after he's caught lifting details from the San Antonio Express-News. His superiors at the Times eventually discover that Blair mangled, invented, or plagiarized facts in at least 47 of his stories, making him one of the few writers able to make a living at short fiction. The scandal prompts the resignation of the Times' two top editors and--in a sign of just how major a New York event it is--becomes the basis for episodes of Law & Order and Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

MAY 1

TERM LIMITS The West Wing's Thomas Schlamme and Aaron Sorkin exit the show after clashing with Warner Bros. and NBC. Or, as a Sorkin character would say: "You know that whole Nixon thing? The bit where he walked to the plane? Did the whole double-V thing with his fingers? The exiting? They did that."

MAY 12

SWAP O' THE MORNING The Tonight Show's Jay Leno and Today's Katie Couric switch jobs for a day. It's like Freaky Friday, only not funny.

MAY 14

NEO GRANDE The Matrix Reloaded opens at 10 p.m., selling $42.5 million worth of tickets by the end of the following day. This means that, in the space of 26 hours, approximately 5 million people giggled during the big party in Zion, gaped at Morpheus' pot belly, and turned to the person next to them after the Architect's big speech and said, "Did you understand any of that?"

MAY 21

BIG WINNER To the delight of Simon Cowell--six words rarely strung together--Ruben Studdard wins American Idol, and proceeds to fly without wings.

MAY 22

THE MOORE THE MERRIER Media outlets begin reporting that Demi Moore, 40, and Ashton Kutcher, 25, are dating. Elated, America's gossip industry flies into a tizzy, generating reams of press coverage, and sending curious audiences streaming into theaters to see Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and My Boss's Daughter. Okay, the last thing's untrue.