Today's Page Six leads with what looks like your average "I'm a friend of Richard Johnson's" book plug item, the heartwarming story of one Robert Schimmel, a comic, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2000. Schimmel wrote a book called "Cancer on $5 a Day" and it seems mostly concerned with how to get laid whilst coping with cancer. Whatever, kind of heartwarming right? Not really! The item veers between life-affirming and creepy, like a drunk driver caroming down the moral highway in a blizzard. (The blizzard is cancer, the driver is Schimmel, and on one side of the road is the sweet release of death and on the other is the married Schimmel's banging of his daughter's best friend.)

In today's Post:

Happily, his cancer finally went into remission after a long and difficult period of treatment and things got back to normal - although there was a bizarre footnote to his ordeal. During one of his hospital stays, his daughter, Jessica, brought her boss and best friend, Melissa, to visit Schimmel and the two fell in love. The comic divorced his wife and married Melissa, who is only two years older than his daughter. Schimmel writes: "Feeling horny is life-affirming... Without sex, where does that leave us? Spending the rest of our lives photographing butterflies and picking up seashells?"

Offense to malacologists and lepidopterists aside, that is creepy kind of move to shtup your daughter's boss/friend when she accompanies your daughter to visit you in the hospital.

Plus, you know: one's wife always just hates that.

Former Sixer and current novelist-pugilist Ian Spiegelman, baruch hashem, wrote this exact same item in 2004, back when Schimmel was trying to hawk a sitcom based on the novel concept that even dying dudes can be assholes. Except Spiegelman was a little more critical (barely but still).

Daughter Jessica wasn't always such a happy camper, either. She learned about Schimmel's infidelity with her friend when he discussed it on the [Howard] Stern show. Her reaction? "She didn't talk to me for over a year."