Now our man on Madison Avenue already has a pretty happy sex life - with his wife, blond Betty, and his woman on the side, brunette Midge. Both are fine.
But Don has also been attracted from the beginning to Rachel Menken - also brunette and fine (and Jewish - of note, because the firm is rife with anti-semitism) (but, interestingly, Betty doesn't like it - she's discourages one of her neighbors from making cracks about people with "long noses"). Rachel is owner of a Bloomimgdales-type NYC department store which has hired Don's firm to bring it more dramatically into the second half of the 20th century.
Rachel - played just right by Maggie Siff - doesn't know Don is married. They kiss, he tells her he's married, and she walks away.
But Don seems all shook up about this. He can't concentrate on his daughter's birthday. Disappears when he's sent out to get her birthday cake. And even Betty's beginning to notice...
What strikes me as especially interesting about this is the sheer affect on Don of that kiss. Were things different in 1960, and a kiss then more powerful an act than now? I doubt it. Not in reality. But in our fiction, we have become accustomed to more than just a kiss needed to have such impact.
Meanwhile, the 1960s ambiance continues to be excellent. My favorite business scene in the office has the guys both admiring and ridiculing that new Volkswagen "bug"...
My Toyota Prius was still decades from being born...
20-minute interview with Rich Sommer (Harry Crane) at Light On Light Through
great interview with Peggy (Elisabeth Moss)...
See also reviews of other episodes: Mad Men Debuts on AMC: Cigarettes and Nixon Coming ... Mad Men 2: Smoke and Television ... Mad Men 4 and 5: Double Mad Men Mad Men 6: The Medium is the Message! ... Mad Men 7: Revenge of the Mollusk ... Mad Men 8: Weed, Twist, Hobo ... ... Mad Man 9: Betty Grace Kelly ... Mad men 10: Life, Death, and Politics ... Mad Men 11: Heat! ... Mad Men 12: Admirable Don ... Mad Men 13: Double-Endings, Lascaux, and Holes
6-minute podcast review of Mad Men
The Plot to Save Socrates
"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News
"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book
2 comments:
Re. the whole Don Draper is not actually "Don Draper" deal, as his war-buddy on the train told us, I've read somewhere (and I think it makes a lot of sense) that we'll see it revealed in the near future that Don is actually concealing a poor Jewish background. I find this particularly interesting, since I made a sidelong crack about Don being the kind of ad man that Brian Kinney of Queer as Folk (who was fully aware of the irony of a gay man selling housewives and other "breeders" the material baggage of hetero-normativity - and seeing them more clearly, and more sharply, than they do themselves) would satirise; and now it turns out the characters might be much more alike than I ever suspected.
I didn't make it clear in the original comment, but the above is all speculation (on my part, and on the part of the blog I was reading).
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