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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Welcome to Day Five of the Basket of Kisses Fundraiser. We’ve been taking a look back at some of our Best Of’s.

A note about our older posts. When we changed urls, most of the comments transferred over, but not all of the comment counts did. So at the bottom of a lot of these posts, you will see ‘0′ comments. Click on it anyway, and you may find a whole thread of discussion.

Waaay back, right after The Wheel had originally aired, I wrote about Francine and Betty:

It is in this episode that Betty declares to Don that Francine is like a sister to her… when Betty delivers the line to Don, it sounds like a dig. I think she is defending relationships in general. In her therapy session in the same episode, she tells Dr. Wayne that Don doesn’t understand family.

Betty is rather insightful; as she awakens she makes statements like these, and tells some very simple but very big truths. She’s not suddenly getting smart, she’s starting to lift the veil between the place in her brain from where she functions (the good girl, the dutiful wife who knows better than to ask questions, the daughter who never thought a bad thought about her mother), and the woman who in many ways is an equal to Don, does match him in humor, and certainly has more than a clue. She’s been collecting clues for years, and she is starting to lay them all out and figure out what they mean. Regarding who she is, who Don is, and regarding their marriage.

A while later I wrote more specifically about Don and Betty’s marriage.

And here’s a key to her appeal for Don; Betty doesn’t ask questions.
Don, as we see, goes for some pretty amazing women. And I think, because of her subservience, he’s failed to notice that Betty is pretty amazing. What a trick. Why he chose her is how he finds her lacking. She is certainly not living like she’s that kind of amazing, the way that the self-sufficient brunette women who continue to captivate him live.
It will be interesting to see what becomes of Betty on the other side of this depression. Maybe this marriage will end; at least pause. (Maybe it already has.) And then perhaps Don will find her attractive in ways he hadn’t to this point.

And while I was wondering if Don would have eventually put Rachel into the same box, I also brought it back to the Drapers:

I’m not saying that Don ever had with Betty what he had with Rachel. But I stand by that Don and Betty do have a marriage. And that while, yes, Betty was absolutely perfect for Don on paper, he was also genuinely drawn to her. I think that at some point Don opened up to Betty, if simply by loving her, from a deeper place than he’d ever accessed prior.

Okay so maybe it wasn’t that deep a place. But remember, this is a guy who doesn’t believe in love. Love was invented by guys like him to sell nylons. And okay so maybe Betty was an easy mark; certainly she was easy to lie to and to withhold from. And let’s face it, Betty followed Don’s ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ rulebook. She married a man who won’t discuss his past. But now the lies, the withholding, and the anger at Betty if/when any of these things are challenged; these are all the fabric of the Drapers’ marriage.

Thanks again to the Basketcases who have made donations. It is so, so appreciated. Don’g forget also to click around our ads and check out our sponsors. And in the meantime… nifty gifty below the fold! (more…)

So, it’s Day Four of the First Annual Basket of Fundraising, and it’s time to acknowledge our four other Basketwriters. Basket of Kisses started as the Lipp sisters, Deborah (that’s me) and Roberta (that’s not me) but we’ve added four fabulous writers. Check them out:

Hullaballoo wonders what we really know about Don Draper:

Bobby knows a lot more about his father than his mother does. Bobby knows, for example, that his grandfather was a farmer, yet Betty asks if Don had a nanny. How likely is it that a farmer during the Great Depression employed a nanny? That means as late as 1960, possibly later, but at least 7 years into their marriage, Betty didn’t even know about his parents.

MarlyK got an enormous amount of conversation going with this contemplation of love, sacrifice, and Don’s dual identity:

In our culture, we like to believe that the strong just get over these things automatically somehow. “Put it behind you.” “Let it go.” And, my favorite, “Get over it already!” Here’s the problem, though, when we talk about psychological wounds, forgetting is not a cure. You can’t just move past them, anymore than you can expect a broken leg to heal on its own. But when it comes to abuse, our culture expects complete recovery without having to face the pain. In fact, it DEMANDS it–it’s not just manly but the American way. Except that it doesn’t work and, if anything, these expectations make it much much harder for victims of trauma and abuse to heal and get on with their lives.

B.Cooper has kept us entertained with his not-so-live-blogging threads, and insight like this, examining trains and cars as themes of seasons 1 and 2:

Know what we haven’t seen this season? Don on a train. Nor have we seen him near a train, watching a train, accompanying military caskets on a train, escaping the numbness of family life to go sit by the trains. Just … no trains.

What we have seen lots of is cars. Old cars, new cars, buying cars, talking about cars, sex in cars. Cars that dim lights. Cars that crash. Cars that hold the smell of puke. Cars, cars, cars.

Last but not least, Ms. Darkly had her fifteen minutes of fame when her post on Hitchcock Blondes made IMDb’s Hit of the Day list.

Of course, Grace Kelly was one of Hitchcock’s favorite actresses and Hitchcock was a man notoriously fixated on the flaxen-haired, blue-eyes, ice-on-the-surface, but smoldering-fires-underneath flavor of woman. Ice can do two things when heat is applied: melt or crack.

So, now it’s time for your present! We wouldn’t ask you to donate without giving you a present, now would we?
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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.

Deborah and I saw Elisabeth Moss on Broadway in Speed-the-Plow and met with her backstage after the performance. She was just a love, and invited us to come back another time for a proper interview.

What is hard to capture in these interviews is the enthusiasm. Everything out of Elisabeth’s mouth has an excitement and a sense of wonder and a lot of love.

RKL: So how was performing on Saturday Night Live?

EM: It was pretty awesome. I got the text [message] just before my matinee, around 1:45, from my friend Casey who’s a cast member. I knew Amy [Poehler] was gonna play Peggy…

RKL: Which is brilliant!

EM: … which is awesome enough. And I still am a little disappointed that I didn’t actually get to see her rendition of Peggy; that would have been fun.

RKL: Right. Rich [Sommer] just wrote about how that was just the greatest thing he’s ever experienced.

EM: Oh, I’m sure. So I got a text from her saying Amy just went into labor, can you come tonight, and I called her and I said absolutely. I went over in between my performances, and rehearsed a couple of times. They wrote a new joke for me because now it was like a guest appearing. So Seth Meyers wrote me a great joke. It was crazy. I wasn’t even nervous because I was like in shock. And then the great thing was that, during rehearsal, the SNL cast members kept looking around and being like, This is so cool, it’s like stepping into your favorite tv show. Because they’ve got the set and there are both of the Johns [Hamm and Slattery] and I was there. And I would just look back and be like, Are you kidding me? I’m on SNL! What are you talking about?!

RKL: That’s great; that’s amazing. That’s so amazing.

EM: Yeah, and it was weird because I’m kind of in a Peggy costume and I’ve got the bangs and a ponytail and there’s Jon and then John. And yet there are SNL cast members. It was very surreal.

RKL: And there’s the house [live audience].

EM: Yeah, so it was kind of like shooting Mad Men but not. It was very strange.

RKL: Like a dream. Like you’re in a Mad Men dream.

EM: It was like one of those weird dreams that you have where you’re like, It was so weird I dreamt that we were shooting Mad Men but we were shooting it with SNL cast members.

RKL: Well congratulations, that’s very cool, and fun.

EM: Thank you.

RKL: So. Mad Men. Because, omigod, the finale was as satisfying as everyone had indicated and certainly your story was stunning.

EM: Oh good! I’m so glad.

RKL: What do you want to say about it before I poke?
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Something I loved across the second season was how from time to time each character’s language would echo something from the first. There were certain expressions or phrases that I’d hear a character say, that I remembered from specific S1 episodes.

Now I don’t see this as thematic. I don’t think there is some underlying hidden meaning in whichever particular moment from last season was being reflected. I am certain, in fact, that this is simply Weiner’s commitment to details that create realism; not dissimilar to his insistence that characters have wardrobes, i.e., outfits and accessories that we see repeatedly. (thirtysomething is the first show where I ever saw that. Hope often wore the same dangling earrings. Melissa had a particular winter coat.)

People have their pet phrases. Goodness knows I have a gajillion of them. Plus I do that thing where I make up words. On a TV series, the show itself has a music to its language; the cops on Law & Order have a very different rhythm than those on NYPD Blue. Mad Men has a music, but Weiner has taken this extra step to strengthen the music, the voice, of each character.

Anyway, I rounded up a few of them. This is not a comprehensive report; I’m sure there are a bunch I’ve missed.

For Those Who Think Young

Lois: And there was your 12 o’clock in the conference room.
Don: Of course.

We’ve heard Don say Of course more than once, it’s fairly subtle, hardly in the catch-phrase category. And still…

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

Don: And you are…
Roger Sterling: Why Don, you remember David Cohen from the art department.
Don: Of course! David. One of the rising stars here at Sterling Cooper

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I must’ve been around five or so and sleeping at a friend’s house when we snuck out of our beds and turned on the TV and there it was — the scene in Hitchcock’s The Birds in which the farmer lies on the floor with his eyes pecked out. It remains one of the most quietly terrifying moments I’ve seen on film.

Of course, like everything old Hitch did, there was humor in the exploration of fear. Bird is British slang for “chick” or a young woman. The Birds, in short, was Hitchcock’s exploration of female rage.

Now, given the strong Hitchcockian influence on Mad Men, in this blog’s previous incarnation we hashed out the significance of Don calling Betty Birdie in Season 1, the same season in which she shoots her neighbor’s pigeons when the latter scares the wits out of Sally. Significantly, Don stopped calling Betty Birdie in Season 2. This was the season in which Betty stopped being just a pretty young thing and began to grow into a real woman, one who is willing to take control over her life. And the transformative vehicle for it all was her rage.

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This morning in the There is no word for it thread RedHeadedWonder wrote:

About Don and Bobbie–didn’t she assault him first in the car? In a way they were playing the same game, which makes it a bit different from Joan and Greg. While Greg was threatened by Joan wanting to be on top earlier and saw his rape as a retaliation, Joan probably didn’t see it that way. She didn’t climb on top with the purpose of belittling him, but as an act of love. Bobbie’s initial act was one of aggresion. All throughout dinner, Bobbie was deliberately undercutting Don’s efforts, and his “act” was part of the power-play. Granted, Don’s assault on Bobbie made me really uncomfortable when I saw it, but I understand a difference. I wouldn’t want to say she was “asking for it” but she was being violent with him long before that moment.

Excellent point.  Earlier this week I had begun to write something in this thread, but stopped because I felt it was treading too close to a defense of Greg.

Let me see if I can try to do this again while walking the appropriate side of that line …

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