Basket of Kisses

Well, just pictures for the moment. Have a gander at some of the Mad Men on the town at last night’s Musical Revue fundraiser for the educational and professional development programs of The Recording Academy. More on the event later. But pictures, people. There are pictures. And maybe a sampling of the evening’s fare…if you’re good. Click on the image to view a larger photo.

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• Canadians will now get to see Mad Men at the same time as Americans. Yay Canada!
• America: The National Catholic Weekly, comments not-all-that-favorably on the role of Father Gil:
  

  Father has…broken the seal of the confessional. Which, by the way, is grounds for automatic excommunication. For the record, the seal means that you cannot divulge anything about a confession, and are forbidden from discussing confessional material outside the confessional–even with the one who confesses. Nor, after confession, can the priest act on anything he has heard inside the confessional. Father Gill, who presumably has just been studying in Rome, would have known that even mentioning something like that to Peggy is strictly verboten.

  After Mass the camera zooms in on the parish bulletin, which lists the priest’s name: Father Gill, S.J. Ugh–he’s a Jesuit! With a wandering eye and a big mouth. (And note to the costume designer: if he’s a Jesuit, he’s wearing the wrong style cassock.)

• Steve Penner sees Mad Men as an object lesson for young women, who don’t realize the strides that were made so recently on behalf of women’s rights.

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for I have sinned. It’s been two weeks since my last confession.

This is how Peggy’s sister, Anita, begins her confession. She then admits to taking money at the laundromat and also taking the Lord’s name in vain. Anita then pauses, seems to ponder what she wants to say next, and then speaks again, hesitantly at first:

And I’m … I’m so angry, father … I’m so angry at my little sister. She’s causing my mother so much pain … She had a child out of wedlock. She seduced a married man. It’s a terrible sin, and she acts like it didn’t even happen. And I hate her for it. I feel so guilty about it … but everybody keeps falling all over themselves, trying to help her, and she goes on like nothing happened. Nothing at all.

So much there. In very few words a volume of subtext, pain, accusation, revenge, jealousy, and denial.

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