Basket of Kisses

From Maidenform:

Bobbie Barrett: I want the full Don Draper treatment.
Don: You’re spoiling the mood.
Bobbie: I wanted it and I got it and it’s better than they said.
Don: What?
Bobbie: Have no fear. You’re known as a connoisseur. You have lots of fans.
Don: Are you talking about me?
Bobbie: I wasn’t, no.
Don: Well who was?
Bobbie: What?
Don: Who?
Bobbie: Sarah Tierney. Random House.
Don: I don’t know who you’re talking about.

There was more than bit of speculation among the Basketcases about the meaning of this. People assumed it was a red herring. Was Sarah the recipient of Meditations in an Emergency? Will she emerge as a character on the show? Has Don fathered other children or arranged for abortions? Did he block the affair from his mind? And the most popular theory, did Don genuinely have no memory of her because, in fact, the real Don Draper was the one who slept with her?

So, for the record, I never bought any of it. I’m pretty much here today to say what I already said the night it aired: (more…)

In honor of the season, I thought I’d make some quick notes on Mad Men and the gifts they bear. In a way, the entire story really begins on Christmas, with Anna and Don exchanging presents (Episode 12, The Mountain King). Don is grateful for the gift of his new identity and the life it has made possible. Later in the same episode, Betty gives Sally riding boots — interestingly, boots have the symbolic meaning of grounding us. In her father’s absence, Sally’s mother has turned into a wicked witch of a sort, one who locks her in the closet and in turn Sally must learn self-reliance. Later in the same episode, another gift pops up, the book Meditations in an Emergency that Don sent to Anna in For Those Who Think Young, (Ep. 1, Season 2).

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Hey all,

There’s been a lot of activity around here the last few days, so I just wanted to remind you of the interview with Joel Murray we just posted. I don’t want it lost in the shuffle.

Nobody puts Baby in a corner, know what I mean?

It’s Day Nine of the Fundraiser and Blog-in-Review extravaganza. Today I thought we’d focus on children.

Here’s what Matt Weiner said about Bobby Draper:

RL: I’m hoping that now that she’s confronted the real liar in the family, that maybe she can ease up on that kid.
MW: She can ease up on that kid, but you know, here’s the other thing, what is the character of that kid? You can’t just make it all her. He may be a kid who, he already doesn’t need her that much, and that may frustrate her, her whole life. He says no. He does kid stuff like lying and she’s decided he’s a liar.
RL: Right, right. Yeah, and he does lie, We’ve seen it.
MW: Of course, why wouldn’t he? He’s a little boy… I love the fact that he’s not some TV kid, he’s not the perfect kid, and he’s not just a victim. He has a personality, and you can see as he walked into the hotel room and he punches Don.

I was a little disturbed by Sally’s knock-knock joke. Some of you agreed with me and some did not. It was an interesting discussion.

Because childcare is so different today, I researched the whole dry cleaner bag issue, and found an interesting and surprising answer.

Here Roberta takes issue with Betty for wanting to create memories for children. A nice bit of rumination at the holidays.

I am pretty sure that we should be giving them happy childhoods so that they can be happy people, and not just due to the parts they remember. I am pretty sure that doing right by our children involves giving them a happy family (if one is available), not just a portrait of one.

But I know what you’re thinking: Where’s my present? Well I wouldn’t let you down!
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Re-watched ANTR last evening, and have about 97 new observations and comments … but in the interest in being brief and milking a tiny amount of effort for multiple posts and appearing way more thoughtful than I actually am, I’ll spread them out over several posts and see what catches on with everyone …

Okay, so Joan … she has a relatively small but important role in this episode - she’s more of a secondary story.  In terms of her character development, a lot happens in a short period, as well as the foreshadowing of her relationship with Dr. McShortdick.

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Friends, Basketcases, lurkers, Mad Men lovers and affiliates,

Welcome to Day 2 of our first annual BoK fundraiser! We’ve got lots of toys and goodies.

We are taking a look back at some of our BoK Best-of’s.

When we started the Basket, Season One had just ended, and we had lots of time, months and months, to really explore those thirteen episodes. Many of you came around after that, when Season Two began. We feel that all of these essays are worth a revisit, and of course, some of them, like the episodes themselves, take on a whole new meaning in light of the learnings of the second season.

We’re starting with a few pieces on perhaps my all-time favorite episode, Marriage of Figaro.

In 10 Things I Love About Marriage of Figaro, I list, well, ten things I love about Marriage of Figaro:

3. I love that Don and Betty are fine. Through the entire morning of the party, when it is so obvious to us, because we are culturally informed, that every time Betty mentions the cake or any other chore, (and later the movie camera), she is actually freaking out and really wants to lunge, she remains sweet and composed. And with every request from Betty, we know that Don is a pressure cooker. But he never shows it. He remains good-natured (look how he handles the powder room moment). Rachel’s presence leads to what happens later, but this interaction… this is their life together. And they keep it terribly pleasant.

And yet, as much as I already loved the episode, it was months after my initial viewing that I noticed how so much of the events were because Don was in love with Rachel:

Flash back, if you will, to Rachel and Don on the roof of her store. And she is telling Don all about her childhood, and how these big dogs were her closest allies. Don bringing this gift to his own little girl. This tells me that Don went all the way in. This is not just a crush… he is crushed by her. Don is thinking about Rachel as a child, he is with that little girl on the roof. He is thinking about Rachel today, on that roof, laughing at her own childhood. He is with her as she relates back to herself as a child. He is yearning for her as she is now, whole and tragic and somehow not haunted by her losses.

And then Deborah comes along with this brilliant backwards and forwards thing about the episode:

Act 1, Harry tells a nasty joke about marriage, the upshot of which is that the husband wishes his wife dead.
Act 2, One of the party guests tells a nasty joke about marriage, the upshot of which is that the husband wishes his wife dead.

Act 1, Pete makes an anti-Semitic remark about Rachel.
Act 2, Francine makes an anti-Semitic remark about Boca.

Act 1, Don tilts Rachel’s chin, kisses her.
Act 2, Don watches a husband tilt his brunette wife’s chin, kiss her.

Yeah and there’s a whole bunch more of those.

So, enjoy your look back. Then re-watch the episode, and enjoy that too.

Oh, fine, so those are the goodies, but where are the toys? You’ll have to look below the fold… (more…)

At the opening of A Night to Remember, Betty rides a horse.

In the previous episode she had been confronted by Jimmy Barrett and Don’s affair with Bobbie. We can imagine that as she is walking through the steps of her life, the facade is harder and harder to maintain. We find out in the next scene that she is in the process of organizing a dinner party for Don; a party for Don’s business and social positioning. The perfect wife.

She rides the horse hard. She is trying to literally ride it out, shake it off; all the horrid feelings.

She dismounts and, exhausted, she rests her head huggingly against the horse. She is giving it love for helping her, and for being willing to connect with her the way no one else is willing. She turns to the horse the way she turned to Glen in Season One.

Joel and I had an awesome talk yesterday. Hopefully I will have the whole thing up in a week or so.

Anyway, here are some wonderful descriptions:

And I also had been semi-pigeonholed for years as being a sitcom guy, and my agent sent me on a dramatic role, and I thought, this is weird because they never do that. And it turns out that Matt Weiner had requested me, he’d seen my previous work and said, There’s something sad about this guy that I want. So I went in and I read, and Matt was there, and he gave me a couple of notes and I did it again. And then he stood up and he was, Fantastic, fantastic, brilliant, great, great, great, so I walked out of there feeling pretty good. And then I got a call that I had gotten the part. And unbeknownst to me, Matt Weiner then walked around to his offices, and he said he asked four people, because he wanted sort of unknowns for the show, unrecognizable people, and he said he went to four people and said Do you think Joel Murray’s too big for Freddy Rumsen, too big for the part? and all four people said Who? So I got the part thanks to the extensive PR I’ve done throughout my career.

And:

It’s funny, I had different ways to play some of the things, and Matt had notes on it and he was like, No, that’s just kind of the way you are. Don’t play him drunk. You’re a functional alcoholic. You’re not drunk. You’re just full of liquor. And he was right, you know?

Okay one more:

I mean the first scene that I ever had was with Elisabeth Moss, and you know I was a fan of the show, and I’m in this scene and I’m just staring at her and a big part of acting is listening and reacting, but all I could do was watch her. And I knew my lines and they came; the ‘basket of kisses’ scene, but I’m doing a scene with her I’m like, She’s fantastic! Wow is she great! So I was just kind of tuned in and entranced with her in the first scene I did.

In Season Two, Peggy figured out that climbing the corporate ladder entailed more than working hard. When it finally dawned on her that she was losing deals because she wasn’t socializing, she unexpectedly joined the guys and a client at a strip club (interestingly enough, the episode in which this happens is Maidenform). One of the things that lingers in my memory is the look on Peggy’s face when she ends up sitting on the client’s lap. In my naivete, I thought, “Well, things have changed. Women don’t have to join the boys’ club in order to get ahead in business.” And then by chance I caught a commercial in late-night TV which was advertising, of all things, a gentleman’s club. The intro to the commercial begins along the lines of: “For milllenia men have paid homage to the female form” intercut with images of famous paintings portraying naked ladies (say what you will, some of those masterpieces are a form of cheesecake, even if they’re by the likes of Michelangelo and Rubens.)* Then the narrator adds that this tradition continues on the West Side of New York and it cuts to some bikini-clad ladies strutting around in three inch high heels. Asides from being surprised, I immediately thought of Peggy at the stripper joint. Because it’s obvious that a lot of business is actually getting done at these “gentlemen’s clubs” to this day. Or at least, it’s obvious to me.

Then recently there was an article in New York Magazine about how young women are drinking more—sometimes even outmatching men. One of the reasons reminded me of Peggy:

As she drank more, her career advanced. “It was like a one-of-the-guys kind of thing. In terms of success, people wanted to work with me. They’d be like, ‘Ugh, I have to work with X,’ you know, another girl. But with me, it’d be like, ‘Oh, this will be so fun.’ ” Rather than trying to hide how much she drank, she realized that her party-girl image would make her more relatable. “You have to be a bitch to survive—and then they’ll call you a bitch. I think maybe for me the drinking let me balance out the kind of stern, bitchy attitude at work with, like, Yeah, obviously, when I’m not working, I’m really fun. It made me look a little more human.”

*Mind you, I’m not against anyone paying homage to the female form, even if the only person likely to be inspired by my current female form is a personal trainer.

Joel and I will be speaking this week. We are very excited about this interview!

“The Faux Pas” by Dyna Moe