Mad Men Note: Only Don Knows How To Behave
My inclination this week is to stand back and let everyone else do the talking — for talking there will be! The overarching theme will be that this was the episode that ought to have opened the season. In contrast to what we had two weeks ago, tonight’s episode was crammed with excitement. What made it exciting, though, was the preparation. As an opener, tonight’s episode would have been something of a dud.
Consider how much of it took place in one day. “The Unities Observed” would have been the episode’s  Bryn Mawr title. While Don, Peter, and Ken attended a party that Roger and Jane held at a country club somewhere, Peggy and Paul got stoned in order to service the Bacardi account. Joan hosted a medical dinner party. All sorts of things flew right by us — does Joan’s husband have cancer already? — and there was a creative type who looked a lot like Peter Cameron but wasn’t. Peggy decided to get high — and it really did make her more creative! Betty’s Dad had Sally, his granddaughter, read Gibbon aloud to him! I never thought that I’d ever think that Gibbon could be age-inappropriate for anybody, but that changed this evening. I was dying of laughter.
Don’s hopping over the country-club bar was pretty cool, but then I’ve long since decided that Don Draper is the only man in the show who knows how to do anything. Kathleen asked, at one point, “what’s he doing?” Don was grinding herbs and spices in a mortar, making a cocktail. One imagines that this was an expertise that went back to pre-Don times.
The Charleston, though. Peter and his wife did a Charleston. They did it very well, but they were only doing it at all because the band started to play it. As someone who danced the Charleston at the drop of a hat in the Sixties, I must complain that the famous song was never played at any dance that I ever attended; but Kathleen confirmed my suspicions that things might have been different where Yale and Princeton alums were thick on the ground. Lots of Bronxville people — that’s where I come from — came from Charleston, but they didn’t dance it.
I will conclude with a word about Sally the thief. (As distinct from Sally the reader of Gibbon.) When Sally stole an unguarded five dollar bill from her grandfather’s stuff, I was paralysed by the memory of small fortunes stolen from unguarded wallets by me. I never got away with any of my larcenies; people really did miss five dollar bills in those days. I don’t know how much a kid would have to steal today for me to notice. At least hundred dollars, certainly. The episode turned out to be wonderfully meta. When it was all resolved, we were glad that Carla, the black maid, had not been implicated in the theft, even though she certainly thought that she would be. Mad Men, deliciously, is never predictably melodramatic.
We did have one heartstoppingly exciting moment. When Kinsey’s drug-dealing friend turned on him and remarked that he’d been thrown out of the TigerTones, a gasp issued from Kathleen that could have been heard all the way from New Haven to Penn. Hey, she was a Smithereen!Â