Mad Men-ia

I’m rewatching Mad Men, the final season first, then watching season 6, 5, 4 … I like to deconstruct the storylines and this way of watching it allows me to observe how the writers wove tendrils of story, story that visits more than a decade throughout the series. So much to see, visually, how the art director and their team pulled it off, as indeed they have, because I have yet to see anything significantly out of place and I was a little girl in much of the era portrayed on screen. How an art department tells story in pictures, the set dec etc. in Mad Men is brilliant, right down to the swag lamps and toys in the children’s rooms (I certainly remember some of the toys, especially the creepy clown), to Don Draper’s little black book he opens up when he’s detained for DUI and needs someone to bail him out of jail.

This past summer we drove to NYC and back from the west coast in less than three weeks. Every day we drove through massive amounts of infrastructure projects, little had we known that President Biden had put the country back to work big time fixing things, lots of things, over 60,000 projects are ongoing actually. And every single day of that 10,000 km road trip we were rerouted or forced to wait for 20-30 mins. at least for oncoming traffic to clear as we passed through worksite after worksite on highways, over rivers, and through cities. It truly was impressive, albeit super annoying as we stopped yet again … but had no choice but to drive to NYC and back — we were clearing out an NYC father-in-law’s final possessions after the closing down of his upper west side apartment (sigh).

Father-in-law’s apartment was big by NYC standards, tho not Don Draper Meghan-era big. Now Draper’s, that was an apartment. But my father-in-law’s apartment was perfect, and one of its perfect aspects was its real 60s-70s vibe with Danish modern lamps, an Eames chair and footstool (Pa was an architect), his now slightly out-of-date art (he was a collector) and a whole lot of different shades of brown and cream. And I loved it and used to pinch myself when I came to stay with Pa just a block or so off Central Park, a little off Broadway, a little distance to Zabar’s, just as I super love Don Draper’s apartment, and the neighbour Sylvia’s kitchen (I’m sure my mom had most of those cookbooks), and the offices and the clothing, and all that smoking. I mean as a kid it was ghastly sitting in the back seat of my dad’s Pontiac Parisienne with all the windows rolled up and him smoking, smoking, smoking, but somehow I’m envious of those Mad Men folks lighting up, inhaling deeply, not giving a damn about who was inhaling their second-hand smoke in the car, nor even for their own lungs: smoking in elevators, planes, restaurants … (and I never smoked in my entire life and I’m so envious of such selfishness)!

Above all, one of the things I like most in Mad Men is the ambient noise on the series. The Foley artists are surely geniuses to tell so much story via sound. I mean the squeak of Don Draper’s leather shoes can’t help but scream expensive, or the shoes that clunk with heft, gravitas, as when Roger Stirling takes off his shoes and drops them to the carpet at night — well you just know they cost a fortune, cheap shoes simply don’t clunk like that. Ditto the snap and click of those purses, ohhhh those lovely, lovely, and very expensive handbags the wives carry … sorry, Peggy has slouchy cheap purses. (And how I’d have loved to go to a Mad Men set sale once the show ended!!!) Then let’s not forget the sounds of kisses, belt buckles being undone and pants dropped to the ground or clothing rolled or peeled off bodies, then dresses zipped back up, and yes, the bed sheets kinetic and noisy (high thread count for sure)! Most of all, I love the sound of cold, hard cash on the show, especially when someone is counting out a roll of bills for some side deal that’s going on (e.g., Peggy doing Mohawk Airlines for Roger after hours).

In the offices of the ad agency, in all its iterations, we have the sounds of electric typewriters. There’s a certain urgency of a Selectrics, especially the better ones with the light action, the light touch, the sentences RUSH onto the page. And the telephones! Won’t someone PLEASE let me have an old-school rotary phone, one with a handset that has real heft, a handset you can unscrew and dissect and peer at the magic of its diaphragm and receiver, a phone with a proper coiled cord you can play with as you yack, a number plate (and who DID type our number onto that little sticker anyway?), a finger stop, a cradle!!! Please get me a real phone. And then what about the sounds of Mad Men phones as they’re dialled, picked up, hung up, their ringers all so much alike — none of these customized electronic ringtones.

Why even the papers, the binders crackle and tell story. And finally, I’m thinking there’s a Gestetner machine in some of the episodes (or am I willing this to be so?), surely there must be? Season 2 Episode 1 (1960) does intro a brand new state-of-the-art Xerox machine that weighs in at a quarter of a ton and cost $29k (approx. $200k in 2013 dollars) and the ad agency’s clerical staff are intrigued but don’t know where to put it! Oh so much of what I love is on these Mad Men sets, perhaps I love nothing more than those Xmas tree lights, REAL lights, not the pathetic blobs we now have so virtuous and energy saving.

Last summer we packed up the end of a life, my father-in-law’s. Boxes of the mundane and boxes of the ‘exotic’ — it was once fashionable to collect ‘native’ or African art. One piece, a west coast mask that my father-in-law had on his sideboard, well it terrified me so much that when I visited I used to turn it so it looked away from me where I sat at the kitchen table. It’s off to auction right about now. I think of the transience of the high-end tchotchkes in Don Draper’s apartment, and the boxes and boxes of my father-in-law’s ‘stuff’, and I think of the stories they tell, wondering now if anyone even cares to hear them anymore.

Paper

Paper plays a big role in Mad Men: the sounds of papers, documents, portfolios shuffled, flipped open, signed, crumpled (like Bobby’s whale picture with the love note from Don to Meghan on the back of it being smushed and thrown into the garbage can by Betty) … Images of paper throughout continually remind the viewer that advertising always begins with story, audible (the strategy), written, and then. But paper in the set decoration (set dec) also plays a role. A few images stand out for me. One such scene, in Season 5, after Don Draper exposes the comptroller Lane Pryce’s fraud via his forging a cheque for a bridge loan, and after Draper tells Lane he must resign, we see the comptroller return to his office. It’s snowing outside, and Lane sits at his desk looking morally depleted and filled with despair. The camera shot is of his face, but in the foreground we see old-school red and blue airmail envelopes in a holder on his desk, and in the background a small Statue of Liberty on his window ledge: the transAtlantic dilemma (one I know so well) of living a life in two places at once, two utterly different places — the still war-weary UK and the electric NYC of the 1960s . In the camera shot, the Statue of Liberty is focussed, whereas the airmail envelopes in the foreground are out of focus, clearly New York is where Lane sees his life bold. But the old life across the Atlantic ultimately drags him down: the middle-class expectations of position and decorum, school fees, and finally, a major tax issue back in the UK that might end with his being jailed if he doesn’t pay within two days. The result of all of this is devastating.

But even after Lane’s death we have paper play a part. Don Draper visits Lane’s widow with a cheque for $50,000 (approx. $750k in today’s economy), the amount Lane invested in the ad agency as a senior partner. Paper cheques, the signing of them, the receiving of them, and the forging of them, well they all tell a big part of the story.

Office Equipment

I mentioned the new photocopier in the ad agency elsewhere in these little blabs, and the constant sound of the Selectric typewriters, but I haven’t written about the overhead projectors! Gosh, do kids even know what they are or how they work?

I always enjoyed it when the teacher would roll in the overhead projector on its trolley. Inevitably, it meant dimming those ubiquitous and harsh fluorescent overhead lights that blared all day long in our classrooms and used to give me headaches in class and unnerved me — all that flickering and harsh white light — almost every single day a headache. It didn’t matter what the teacher was going to demo for us using the equipment, it was the blessed relief of a dark room and less distractions. And there was something quite nice seeing equations drawn or erased on the overhead. I remember the squeak of the felt pens as the teacher annotated the acetate sheets they had transferred notes or illustrations onto.

Booze & Cigarettes

If Roger Stirling doesn’t have a Lucky Strike in one hand, and a glass of Stolichnaya in the other, it’s just not a good day at the office. The clink of ice in those round, gold-embossed glasses that Don Draper drinks his Canadian Club out of, and Roger, his ‘Stoli’, well these are the sounds that make up the sonic tapestry of Mad Men, along with the old-school telephone ringers and machine-gun tap of the electric typewriters.

And while Stoli wasn’t imported to the US until 1972 (by PepsiCo), there’s a scene in Season 3 in which Roger comes into Don’s office and he throws a box of Cuban cigars onto Draper’s desk, he then walks over to pour them both a glass of vodka and tells Don, ‘I sent them from Greece’ — clearly he’s shipped Cuban cigars and Soviet vodka to himself in NYC after both embargoed in 1960s US. In 1972, PepsiCo did a deal with the Soviets and became the first importers of Stoli in exchange with the Soviets importing the first ‘western’ drink, Pepsi.

In November 1990, just months before the Russian coup, I had the fantastic experience of visiting Leningrad and Moscow, travelling there from Stockholm via ferry to Turku, Finland, then transferring onto one of those old coal-fired Soviet trains at Helsinki, a train that took us to Leningrad for a few days, then by night train to Moscow. On the night train to Moscow we met Soviets who offered us home-made vodka and sausage. Old farting women in babushka headscarves drank and yacked all night long, and I got outrageously drunk after just a few swigs of that gasoline — so drunk, the filthy toilet at the end of the car didn’t even bother me, nor the dirty sheets on our bunks where we tried to sleep. On the night train to Moscow I met a handsome young Dane who gave me one (well many actually) of the best kisses of my life. Did I say we had all had too much vodka? l remember that man’s kisses still, seared they are, the taste of them, all raw vodka, cigarettes, and the smell of the coal-fired engine of that old Soviet train, and, of course, his tall and appealing youth.

Later, everywhere we went in the USSR, the only ‘clean’ drink we could find was Pepsi. There’s no way I was going to drink water out of those rusty taps of the firetrap hotels we stayed in, nor drink from the communal glasses chained to water dispensers throughout Moscow. That week or so that I was in the Soviet Union I even brushed my teeth with Pepsi. Seriously.

On the train, as I leaned out the window and watched the Soviets queuing at dusk for their trains, in little villages and bigger cities, in shabby clothes looking as tired as the country did to us from the West, I knew I was travelling somewhere new, somewhere like no other place in the world. And I felt so alive, excited, and so damned young.

Popables and Smokables

In Eps. 01, Season 2, Don Draper goes to the doctor for an insurance checkup requirement. ‘It’s the only way to get you boys here,’ says the doc, adding, ‘You boys live too hard, one day it’s all going to come crashing down.’ He prescribes Draper Phenobarbital, a sedative used to calm folks down back in the day, and suggests ‘buy a boat’. And indeed, we see, or rather hear Don slamming back pills like these, rattling in their glass bottles, throughout the series and as various people swallow a multitude of substances for pleasure and to mitigate pain.

One of the things I seem to remember is the phenomenon of the tranquilized housewife. Variously described as ‘neurotic’, or obsessive (as in ‘she’s always vacuuming’) I would overhear my parents commenting on a friend of the family whose anxiety and depression was being managed pharmaceutically. It wasn’t until years later when I realized the woman was being anesthetized because of her profound anger and boredom at being kept home in her suburban box with just not enough to do. Women like Betty Draper, a graduate of Bryn Maur, a degree in anthropology left far behind.

Sleepovers, Pyjamas

There’s a scene in Season 4 in which the little girl Sally has a sleepover with a friend (it doesn’t end too well but I won’t digress here on it). I remember sleepovers, rare for me because I was such a shy girl. They were at my best friend May-May’s house, usually on Friday nights, and sometimes at our house. One of the best parts of sleepovers was watching late night t.v. on our old Admiral, hunkered down and snuggled in on our fold-down couch in the rec room, eating chips and probably drinking Mountain Dew. And it wasn’t that the movie was so great, quite the opposite actually as we often watched a cheesy and badly dubbed Japanese horror movie, but there was something comforting and companionable to those evenings. I think I was a deeply lonely child and May-May’s presence alleviated this loneliness.

I always slept on the side of the bed facing away from the old t.v. because I didn’t like scary movies. I still don’t. But there was something really comforting in falling asleep to the sound of those film tracks, the flicker of black and white t.v. throwing shadows against the rec room walls and the roar of the patently fake giant monster figures.

It’s a pleasure to look at the sleepwear on Mad Men and remember. Sally and some of the adult women wear Baby Dolls pyjamas made of this really awful synthetic material. I seem to remember owning a pair — were they yellow? How strange they were, I mean, what were Baby Doll pyjamas all about … infantilising girls and women, why … oh let’s not go there.

May Day

In one of the Mad Men episodes in Season 4, I think, we see Sally’s school put on a May Day celebration with the children learning to dance the May pole. Led by a beautiful young teacher, one clearly leaning towards the ethos of the late 60s with her long flowing hair, her simple dress and bare feet, she tells Don Draper and his beautifully coiffed, highly hair-sprayed wife, Betty, that learning the May pole dance is difficult and takes the children a lot of practice. We see Don and Betty sit back in beautifully cut Manhattan clothing alongside other parents similarly dressed and it becomes clear that Don is very attracted to the young and seemingly free-thinking teacher who is directing the students’ dancing.

I clearly remember how we children were taught to dance the May pole for Lynn Valley Days, a community celebration each year. Each of us was given one of those colourful ribbons tied to the central pole and then directed to dancing inward and outward past each and in doing so made woven patterns around the May pole as we did. It was quite lovely to dance and to see the basketweave of the colourful ribbons, and then unwind them again. I seem to recollect that we children wore white clothing which I now understand as virginal, the May Day celebrations having always consorted with fertility. I’m pretty sure we kids didn’t understand the symbolism of all this, but we sure felt special and it was fun to dance outdoors and to that corny English music.

Every year, I dreamed of being chosen to be one of the Lynn Valley Day May Day Princesses. There was a May Queen, some cute teenage girl, and she always had a handful of princesses from the elementary school. Every year, I dreamed and hoped I’d be chosen to be one of the ones who were were given a beautiful puffy dress and a shiny tiara. The princesses got to sit on stage with the May Queen, a glamorous teenage girl, and they would look down at us dancing the May pole. And every year I was really disappointed, because I was never chosen to be a princess. It took me years to understand why I would NEVER be chosen. When I think about it now, how could I ever have fantasized such a dream? The truth is that I looked nothing like the May Queens and their princesses, nor could I ever: I was a little brownish-skinned girl with dark brown eyes, jet black hair, and black GLASSES. I was shy. What made me think I could ever be chosen to be a May Day princess, it just wouldn’t have done would it? So every year I was heartbroken when it was announced who the May Day princesses were to be. My name was never on the list.

I was especially pained the year the girls who were our class bullies were chosen to be princesses. These were the original mean girls who spent hours and hours in class and on the playground, when teachers weren’t looking, making life miserable for so many of our fellow students. This little gang of girls hogged the four square, shoved other kids out of the way in lineups, took kids’ belongings, and said terrible, mean things to their fellow schoolmates — especially the girls. They played up to the male teachers (and we had a genuine pedophile at our school btw), and were nasty little human beings. But I was fortunate that they didn’t bully me, just as in later years profs. didn’t pester me (an ‘A’ for a lay as they saying went back then). I often wonder why the bullies didn’t fix on me and have come to the conclusion that I wasn’t high value enough for them to do so. I was so shy and little (youngest in my class), and I don’t think I even registered on these nasty girls’ radars. Girls with names like Marlene, Laura, and Cindy, I often wonder how life turned out for them.

Girls who were chosen to be May princesses back then were petite. Most had long blonde or light brunette hair, big blue eyes, and white, white skin. I clearly remember looking up from dancing the May pole and seeing the nasty girls from my school year on stage as I think this is one of the first great disillusionments of my life. I realized that it didn’t matter how kind or good a person is, it was how you look that got you to one of those coveted spots, and in the 60s – 70s a little, dark girl, well she just didn’t make the cut.

In then end, though, I got to be a queen of another kind for Lynn Valley Day. There was always a parade leading up to the formalities and we kids were encouraged to make our own costumes and floats and enter the parade. One year, I think we must have been in Grade 6 or 7, I convinced my best friends to all dress up as Egyptians and I somehow convinced them to carry ME dressed up as Cleopatra — Liz Taylor version — in a litter we’d scraped together with scavenged 2 by 4s and bamboo curtains. I still can’t believe I talked my buddies into carrying me along the long route the parade took. All I remember is me arguing that I had black hair and LOOKED the most Egyptian of all of us and them agreeing, and suddenly there we were with me waving regally from my perch while these pals of mine were sweating under the weight of the litter and me! Halfway through the route the litter started falling apart and so my pals set it down, I climbed out and we all walked the rest of the way. In any case, I think we were far more interesting and attractive than any of those boring old May queens and princesses that just looked the same year after year after year.

Clothing

Crinolines. When I was a teenager we shopped at the Sally Ann on Lonsdale where a friend’s mom worked. Back then you could buy vintage clothing cheaply because ‘vintage’ wasn’t really invented until maybe the 80s or even the 90s. No, back then, a 50s prom dress was just an old dress, and a hand-embroidered tea jacket from the 1920s was just an old silk jacket, both probably cleared out of some dead woman’s closet after her family closed down her estate.

One of the finds that I still own is a gorgeous cream-coloured prom dress from the late 1950s I’m guessing. It is strapless and has layers and layers of crinolines that fall from sharp waist and a lovely sweetheart bodice. Over 65 years old, it is still a beautiful garment. I wore it once, maybe, and it has been stored in a big Mennonite blanket box that I bought in southern Ontario decades ago. What I remember about the dress is how it swished, made a fabulous sound with every movement — crisp, an announcement of beauty. During the Pandemic, isolated with my family on a farm on the northern Gulf Islands, I dug out the dress for my daughter, home for the duration, to try on. It fit her perfectly.

In the earlier seasons of Mad Men we see the women wearing crinolines and puffy skirts. They are hideous, actually. Hideous, they made the women untouchable.

Toys

In Season 4, a scene opens with the creative team gathered around a toy I remember well, a ‘Lucky Bird’. This bird seemed to dip and drink from a glass of water endlessly. My grandmother had a dipping bird and it absolutely captured my attention as a little girl, just as it captures the attention of the ad agency’s creative team in Mad Men. A quick scan of the info out there tells me that the thermometer-looking toy is actually a ‘heat engine […] that works through a thermodynamic cycle’. What appears to be a pretty simple toy is in fact quite sophisticated. Do a search and you’ll see just how complex and wondrous this toy actually is. I loved my grandmother’s and I’m wondering if they still exist? Or did they, perhaps, have all kinds of noxious ingredients that would no longer be deemed safe?!

NYC

So let’s talk about NYC. Because, really, NYC is the actual star of Mad Men isn’t it? She is the star of the series, yet for the most part we really don’t see much of her do we? Sure we hear her, lots of her: sirens, traffic, the dull background roar. And we do read (newspaper and magazine articles in Don Draper’s hands) a lot about her: riots, garbage, strikes, muggings, protests, traffic jams, elections.

In Mad Men, NYC is a city about to go down, waaay down in the late 60s and 70s. We see her before she rises again sometimes in the late 80s and becomes the shiny city it now is. As Don Draper says sometime in Season 3, ‘New York City is in decay’ …

But there is a caveat to this all .. with the shine NYC now has, it has got a whole lot duller — gone are the New York taverns, the delis where the guy behind the counter tells you to ‘shut up you’re going to eat the pickle’, the little bars … gone are the great publishing houses, gone are the city dwellers, ordinary people, people who actually worked for a living … and in their stead, billionaires buying the same dull baubles, all those deadly dull Lulu Lemon and well-being shops, and all those other boring flagships of shops you see on every street of every city in the world. Only a few holdouts such as Zabars and Katz’s deli … but the latter is a nightmare. Last summer we hiked down to Soho to get a Reuben. Twenty-eight bucks for a Reuben. Repeat, $28!!! A lineup around the block to even get in, it was hot and crowded and nothing as enjoyable as it used to be in the old days when it was just a New York deli.

Still, I love the city. More later …

Death of a Grandparent/Birth

In Season 3, Betty’s father, Gene, Sally’s grandfather dies. Gene is perhaps the only person who Sally has a deep friendship with within the family, though her father and she have a relationship that is perhaps secondarily important. Gene has latterly come to live with the Drapers, his two children believing him incapable of living independently, and it is during this time the girl and her grandfather become close. It is worth noting that the Drapers put Gene in the nursery on a cot, the nursery waiting for the baby that will soon be born to them, child number three.

In the entire stretch of seasons of Mad Men, this relationship between grandfather and granddaughter is perhaps the only on Sally has that is meaningful and loving, so fraught are the relationships within her biological family — later, much later, Don’s next wife, Megan, befriends Sally somewhat as the latter becomes a teenager. Betty’s second husband, Henry, does display some sympathy for the girl. But overall, relationships are bleak within the Draper nuclear family, especially between the mother, Betty, and little girl, Sally. There’s been a lot of writing on Betty’s cold and rather heartless parenting — the actress playing Betty is on record citing anxiety and fear rather than frigidity. After all, we see the golden cage of Betty’s life: a fabulous university degree and then the barrenness of pre-feminist suburban motherhood. I actually remember some of those women, schoolmates’ mothers — well kept, bored beyond belief, and ultimately dosed with valium for much of the early 60s. And so it is not surprising that after the grandfather dies, nobody attends to the emotional needs of the little girl who has just lost her best friend. Betty, ever competitive in her neediness, cannot see the suffering of the child.

Sally was not allowed to go to the funeral. Her mother, when called into Sally’s school for Sally’s misbehaviour, is asked by Sally’s teacher if Sally had gone to the funeral. Betty responds: ‘Now why would we put her through that?’ And Don, the father states, ‘I don’t think children belong in graveyards.’ I lost my beloved grandmother, my only grandparent whom I knew well, when just Sally’s age. It was a nightmare for me because I felt she was one of the few people in the world with whom I could be myself, and feel absolutely loved in a way only a grandparent can love. The worst of this time was that I was not allowed to go to my grandmother’s funeral. I was sent to school as if it was just another day, despite the obvious anguish in the house. I came home to see the table laden with the leftovers from the funeral reception held at our house after the mass at our church and the graveyard, and a little dish of petit fours was set aside especially for me. It was horrible. A nightmare, because I felt my grandmother’s absence terribly and it was impossible for me to believe she was actually dead.

Soon after Gene’s death the new baby is born to the Drapers. Don delivers Betty to the maternity ward and is told by one of the nurses, ‘Your job is done now go sit in the men’s lounge, we’ll let you know what happens.’ A far cry from the birthing business of my generation when the men practically switched places with their wives, undressed, and pushed. Of course I’m exaggerating, but in my very limited experience I think I wanted to be alone as I gave birth, or would have loved to have my sister with me.

Women’s Work

The creative, Peggy Olsen, in Season 3, goes into Draper’s office to ask for a raise. The office is full of baby gifts for Don’s third child. Peggy fingers some home-knit baby booties attached to a gift, inevitably thinking of the child she had to give up, and turns to Don and says, ‘I look at you and I think, “I want what he has” … you have everything and so much of it’. As indeed he seemingly does: the beautiful wife, the big job, three healthy children, a suburban house, a great car, beautiful suits, you name it.

Peggy reminds Don that she does the same job as Paul Kinsey, and that his work is not as good as hers, and yet she is paid a fraction of what he receives. And she reminds Don that a law has been passed that women will get paid equally for equal work. Don tells Peggy that it can’t happen at present. And I’m reminded of my brilliant, creative mother. My mother, woman who worked for a fraction of what her male colleagues made. At one point in her work life, she trained young male workers for management positions, positions she was never allowed to even apply for. This went on for so long and she was so discouraged so she went back to school and learned some clerical and administrative skills and moved out of the retail sector and into education, eventually being a divisional assistant for a college department.

At the college department my mother flourished. She found the teachers to be fascinating and their subject matter to be engrossing. But in the end she found it frustrating. My brilliant mother could have taught circles around many of these folks and yet she was their de facto secretary. Academically, they were fairly mediocre, many with only master degrees and they often published each other. More than a few were predatory men who worked their way through the students. Once in awhile these men would marry a student. Never once would they look at my brilliant, beautiful mother because she was the same age as those old dogs and they preferred the freshness of youth. In retrospect, they disgust me.

My mother never finished high school. She left at age 17 to work as a telegraph operator during the war, a job she enjoyed tremendously, and which was needed — her mother was a single mother raising four children through the Depression and war. After raising a family, a lot of it on her own, my mother worked for years and took university courses part-time after hours. She graduated at age 69 with a degree from Simon Fraser. Too late for a career.

WWII/Japan

In Season 3 (or was it 4), the ad agency has a chance to bid on a major campaign for Honda, a relatively new entry into the American market. In this case, it is a motorcycle. The Japanese have set very strict stipulations as to what the bid will look like and a strict budget of $3000, an amount I would venture might translate to around $30k in 2010 terms (when the series was shot). Spoiler alert, Cooper, Stirling, Price (or whatever iteration it is at this point in the series) wins the bid not the least because Don Draper has devised a plan to make their competitors think his agency is going all out and far surpassing the $3000 budget, providing film and a well-articulated ad campaign. The competitors, thinking this is the case, go all out and show up to the ‘auditions’ with film in the can, story boards etc., and on leaving the meeting, see Don waiting for his turn to present. ‘It’s going to take a whole lot more than what you’ve got after what we just showed them’, they tell him cockily. Draper enters the boardroom, and after formalities addresses the Japanese, ‘We are withdrawing as obviously you didn’t stick to the rules as outlined and others didn’t adhere to your strict expectations of keeping to a budget and what to present’. Draper’s agency wins the bid after the client has dishonoured them.

But not all is well at Cooper, Stirling, Price. Roger Stirling is bitter and has insulted the Japanese earlier in the episode and all have been ordered to keep him away from the clients. Roger, it seems, served in WWII in the Pacific (though it appears he also fought in Europe, something very few soldiers did). He lost many comrades and housed an enduring hatred of the Japanese almost two decades later. Meanwhile, the younger generation, in Pete Campbell, a striving opportunist par excellence (and who reminds me of JDV, currently running for VP of the United States) reminds his boss that it should all be left in the past. But for some how was that possible?

It must have been in the mid-to-late 1980s when I was asked by an editor to interview a pair of gardeners living in Metchosin, British Columbia for a gardening magazine I regularly contributed to. The details are elusive to me now, but if I think hard I picture a couple perhaps in their late 60s, a lovely Canadian woman and her taciturn British husband. They showed me their fantastic acreage of market garden and perennial beds (the climate in Metchosin is an enviable northern Mediterranean in nature) and afterwards we settled for some tea and cake for the interview. I remember very little of the substance of the interview, well none, actually, with the exception of the man’s absolute hatred of the Japanese, a legacy of three or four years spent as a prisoner-of-war in a Japanese camp.

To give some context, in the 80s the Japanese economy was roaring and the Japanese seemed to be everywhere with their powerful yen. In my own life, I had a job teaching English to Japanese students who came over for a six-week intensive program, a fascinating but often frustrating experience; our students, all girls, were most interested in shopping rather than any of the number of ‘Canadian’ experiences we tried to give them. Further, they were, for some of our teachers at least, incredibly difficult to teach. I remember one of our teachers, a grown man with maybe 20 years college teaching under his belt, actually bursting into tears in the staffroom at a meeting one day. He said, ‘They won’t answer questions, they sit silently, nobody has an opinion, I just don’t know what to do …’

And indeed, these Japanese girls were so demure, and for the most part so conformist. And not always kind. Amongst our students were a few Indigenous Japanese students, Ainu peoples from Hokkaido, Now most of our students were from the big cities while these Ainu girls were from smaller towns in the north, and not only did they look slightly different from most of the girls, they dressed differently, very modestly. If I close my eyes I see the Ainu girls in long pleated skirts and simple white blouses. In contrast, our hyper-shopper urban girls wore bright colours, short skirts, and expensive jewelry. And while the girls had not yet adopted ‘western’ assertiveness, at least in the classroom, they were certainly sure of themselves as belonging to an economic powerhouse.

So this was the economic environment of the 80s during which I interviewed the former POW of a Japanese internment camp. What I observed with this man was a level of hatred and bitterness that had shadowed him his entire adult life. He had been 21 years of age when captured, and he endured three or four years of malnutrition, physical and mental abuse, ‘Years I can never get back’, he said to me. So if this is in the 1980s, what must Roger have felt with those experiences barely 20 years afterwards.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

As I’m rewatching Mad Men from the final season first to the first last, I am only in Season 3 and am just beginning to hear hints/echoes of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In a scene with Peggy, Paul, and I don’t know the third character’s name (because I’m watching Mad Men backwards and thus encountering characters in reverse order), the three from Creative have smoked a joint and are in a max-relax state in the office trying to come up with new ideas for Bacardi Rum. Paul is lying flat on the office floor and morbidly states, ‘I keep thinking about rum, and I keep thinking about Cuba, and about how we are all going to die’. ‘We almost died,’ he adds. The other guy says, ‘But we didn’t’. And indeed we didn’t. Fast forward three decades and we saw the end of the Cold War. Still, it cast a long shadow on the imaginations of us kids growing up with it.

I remember being a little girl living in North Vancouver, a small Canadian city on the north shore of Burrard Inlet, a city of hills and valleys at the foot of the coastal mountains, a city of workers, church goers, boy scout troops, and simple lives. Surely North Vancouver was no epicentre to anything, no Soviet target — I mean it had been decades since Burrard Dry Dock had been a major ship builder in WWII and thus had no military significance in the bigger scheme of things in the Cold War. I remember an air raid siren about a block away from our house in Victoria Park (it’s still there). Though a very young girl somehow we knew the siren was there to give us an early warning in the case of a Soviet attack. Thinking about this now, I’m appalled that little children would be frightened so. But my spouse, who grew up in Detroit, talks about duck and cover exercises little kids had to do in case of the same.

Brent Richter / North Shore News 2019

• Television ‘Clickers’

I had an uncle who served as a captain in the Air Force, a brilliant Red River Métis boy who never knew he was Métis, so buried deep was his mother’s identity way back in the bad old days. My uncle and mother knew they were French, and possibly had some ‘Indian’ in them, but nothing more — so efficient was the Canada’s attempted erasure of an entire nation, a nation rich in kinscapes that tell the history of a continent.

A somewhat fatherless boy, my uncle’s dad, his white dad, was feckless — a rich American son of a rich American representative in the Iowa Legislature who was a wealthy landowner. Grandfather left Iowa and landed in Alberta as a land developer after having to cut his political career short after falling in love with a married woman, after his own wife wouldn’t free the grandfather. Intending on running nationally for the Democratic party (which was back then the conservative party), maybe even taking a run at the vice-presidential job, the grandfather abandoned all political hopes and moved north. And with him brought my grandfather, a boy who became a man so feckless he abandoned not one but five families of children over the course of his 89 years. And in his wake, the boy became a feckless man and left so many brilliant children that I just shake my head at all of them and their mothers, especially my beloved and so beautiful Métis grandmother; how hard life was for them all — separated from their kinscapes, their homelands, and back in the day, no social safety nets. My uncle, his brothers, my mother, and their mother ended up living in Vancouver and never looked back once they crossed the Rockies and headed west to the coast.

Well my uncle found a father, a family in the Canadian Forces. He was a Cold Warrior for decades, and his brilliance led him higher and higher to the point he was consulting as an engineer to NASA by the time he wound down his work life. My God he looked good in his RCAF blues. And the women loved him too in his uniform. But that’s not an uncommon story for its time, and those Métis men were so handsome, such sharp dressers. I’ve in recent years met close Métis cousins whom I never knew existed before, and they have shared photographs of their fathers, some in uniform, always so good looking, the proverbial tall, dark, and handsome and so beautifully dressed. It’s a thing.

Lately I’ve been watching Mad Men, streaming it actually. And I love it. I love it because it brings back so much of my parents to me, my long-dead parents. The 60s’ polyester clothing, the cigarettes, the amber-coloured drinking glasses, the helmets of hair, the wedge shoes, the silver brocade (I still have my mom’s 1968 silver and hot pink brocade jacket), the straw basket bottles of Chianti … all of it. I have happy memories of my parents as young. And alive. Happy, until they were no longer happy, and one summer I was put on an airplane to spend a month at my uncle’s home in married quarters at Camp Borden because they wanted to get me out of the way of their difficulties. It was 1968, the year of the moon landing, I know this because my cousin Andy gave me a souvenir photographic sheet of the momentous event.

My uncle was strict. He wanted beds made properly, meals eaten properly, manners exact, even how we should drink milk at the dinner table (after eating not during). He ran his house with military precision. His wife less strict was kind, but I never felt at home that summer. Still, I found it interesting in that they lived a really different way from my family. Unlike my parents who struggled financially (all those teeth to be fixed), my uncle’s home seemed to be a place of plenty, not the least with a colour television set with a clicker!! A channel changer. Now that was a great thing. Back home we still had a monster black-and-white television set, one that we had to hit from time-to-time when it acted up, one we had to get up off the couch stroll over to and turn the stiff dial to change channels. It was one of those old things with huge vacuum tubes and wires and rabbit ears in a blonde wooden box. Am I imagining that my uncle had cable? We surely didn’t. Not for almost another decade. In any case he had Ontario t.v., and that was superior to what we had at home, almost as good as American, or so I imagined.

I love Mad Men. All that smoking and real silverware and glass glasses and china on airplanes. I sure remember all of those. And on Mad Men I love the scenes with newcomers from eastern Europe in their undershirts and work pants, and their first-generation offspring all neurotic, nervous, even though it was the parent that lived through the war and not the American-born kid. I recall some newcomers. Fondly. We had a Belgian housekeeper the year my mother had tuberculosis and had to go away to the ‘San’. Our housekeeper, a refugee from post-war Europe, had her wages paid for by the church — those were the days when church was as much a social service and a recreation club, as a religious gathering place. Mrs. Cousins (I don’t think that’s how to spell her name) baked beautiful bread and cared for all five of us children while our father worked and our mother convalesced.

I grew up with many friends whose parents left Europe after the war. This includes my best friend’s dad, a man who was a former Hitler youth and who had escaped from East Berlin when the wall was first there. For some reason he hated me. He never welcomed me into my best friend’s home. He looked at me with a cold scorn I only twice experienced thereafter — once from another good friend’s new Dutch boyfriend who was jealous of how close my friend and I were, and the other time from someone whom I was once very close to but who shut their heart off to me. I never understood why my friend’s dad looked at me with cold hatred, I was a good kid. Only years later, when I realized quite a few people have seen me visually as ‘Indian’, did I understand the hate my friend’s dad had for me was blatant racism.

I had more than a few schoolmates whose newcomer fathers were so strict that they weren’t allowed to do anything except go to school or work in the family businesses. One boy, he was a grade younger than I, well his father made him wear lederhosen to school until he was in Grade 8 or 9. And we all knew his father beat him with a thick leather belt. In those days a parent could basically do what they wanted. I always wonder what happened to that boy. Another friend had a Dutch father with a really terrible temper. He made life miserable for his entire family.

A refugee that I met and remember well was my friend Miriam’s mother. Miriam and her mother lived alone in an apartment building my mother and I moved to when my parents went separate ways. Back then a solo parent was unusual. And as Catholics, divorce wasn’t on our radar either, so this was a new world my mother and I entered. And it was an uncomfortable world.

Well, Miriam was a really nice girl from Montreal, a shy girl. I don’t know how it was that she and her mom came to British Columbia, but we struck up a friendship, used to go swimming together in our apartment’s pool, used to sit around and chat, listen to music maybe, usually at Miriam’s house where I had the chance to get to know her mom because her mom didn’t work, unlike mine. Miriam’s mom was very quiet but very kind. One day I saw the sleeve of her cardigan roll up her arm, and on her forearm I saw blue numbers tattoo’ed across her skin. I didn’t understand what I was looking at and Miriam’s mom explained to me how when she was just a few years older than Miriam and I were, she’d been taken to the camps where she had been tattoo’ed. She didn’t say much more than that, and to be honest, while I don’t really remember what happened next I suspect she offered me some strudel or something equally delicious, because Miriam’s mother cooked old-school food and I loved it. I remember Miriam’s mom as being soft and kind and now I have lived life, I cannot imagine how Miriam’s mother survived life, nor Miriam, really. Miriam and I didn’t go to the same school. I rode a bus and travelled to the school I began in long before my parents split. But we two girls, lonely girls really, well we found a lovely friendship in that modest apartment so long ago, an apartment in which two brave mothers and two brave teenage girls built a new life.

And though it’s only a television show, Mad Men somehow provokes these memories of so very long ago.