Mad Men

Mad Men is the darling of the television world these days--or at least it was in its first season. It's another show, like Sopranos that makes me wonder why I am so taken in by it.

With Sopranos, I couldn't understand why I liked a bunch of mobsters whose every other word started with an "f" and who often blew a few guys away or beat up some woman before going home to eat with the family. Maybe the Italian environment was just a "familiar" for me, since I grew up on the outskirts of North Beach in San Francisco, during the era when the city had much more clearly defined neighborhoods. Now there is spill over and you don't really have "the Italian section" and "the Chinese section" and "the Mexican section." It seems that most neighborhoods in the city are a blend now.

But in the 1940s and 50s, I lived on the outskirts of "the Italian section" and my Irish father felt himself an adopted Italian and loved all things Italian. So Sopranos played to my familiar, though my familiar didn't come with guns. (At least not that I was aware of!)

And it's the same with Mad Men, which is a fairly accurate portrayal of a Madison Avenue advertising agency in the 1950s. The first season I swore you could get lung cancer just from watching the show. They seem to have toned down the smoking a bit, but still all meetings, no matter what time of day, come with generous drinks poured from elaborate decanters always present in business offices and lots and lots of smoking. It was the day when the 3-martini lunch started with breakfast, and nobody ever heard of a "no smoking section."

But that isn't really my "familiar." My familiar is the reserved, restrained relationships between people in the 1950s, the unspoken word, the unshared feeling. All those thoughts and emotions bottled up because it was not considered proper to share what you were thinking, especially in the work place (which is probably why they drank and smoked so much).

Watching how people hold back because of fear of losing their jobs for doing or saying the wrong thing.

And it was the corporate mentality. The sense that every tiny detail was so important that it had to be discussed to death and given so much more importance than it really deserved.

I think I was very fortunate that I never had a real "job." I worked in several places throughout what one might laughingly call my "career," but the closest I ever came to a corporate job was when our medical office was purchased by the big medical foundation and we all had to start tiptoe-ing around and practicing corporate-think.

I never was a "corporate" type person. I find it so difficult to give importance to minutia. I've watched Ned struggle with that feeling his entire work life. He has worked for corporations and when I hear him trying to play the corporate game, I understand his frustration. I worked in places like typing services, where I could come and go as I pleased and had control over what sorts of jobs I wanted to do. I worked in a medical office where I wasn't really "staff," and came and went when I felt like it and was not (until the later years) involved in all the office politics. And I managed a medical office for a renegade who didn't play by the rules, so I never had to deal with "corporate-think."

Then I went to work for a non-profit where corporate-think was all important and I didn't last very long there at all. I always had a good work ethic, but my casual approach to the importance of things that didn't seem very important to me was what did me in.

I ran into problems in several volunteer organizations for which I wrote the newsletter. I remember one where the woman who had held the job for several years before I was asked to take it over, felt that I needed to run everything by her before it was published. She complained that my newsletters were "riddled with errors." I had her go through the 8 page newsletter with me and she found one...count 'em one... typo. But she insisted that from now on she would have to approve everything I published. I quit. This was an organization that had a membership of 100, if that. I could not understand all the fuss and all the steps that had to be gone through to put out a silly little newsletter. We were not the New York Times or even The Davis Enterprise, for Pete's sake.

But that's why I don't work well in corporate settings. Where I see "silly little newsletter," the people involved see their whole identity at stake, no matter how small their membership is or how narrow their outreach.

Mad Men drives me nuts because I know that there are lots of places where that mentality still exists, where you feel you need to watch your words because it's not proper to express what you're feeling about something that is so vitally important to the others in your group. But it's like a train wreck--there is something compelling that keeps me watching.

I'm just glad that I've essentially been self-employed, or some version of self-employment, throughout most of my life. I never would have been able to handle the stuff that Ned goes through on a daily basis.

Things Are Looking Up

Things actually started looking up around 8 p.m. last night when I realized that the temperature outside was cooler than the temperature inside, which meant I could open the back door and cool down the house.

That meant that I could actually sleep under a puppy and not feel like I was having a night-long hot flash. I almost didn't mind being awakened by Lizzie's barking at 5:30, because I'd had an almost full, comfortable night of sleep.

While I was up locking the dog door, I decided to check e-mail and that's when I discovered that the computer was off. I did not turn the computer off. What's more, it wouldn't come on. Great. Now the computer's broken, I thought. I checked everything. No puppy had gnawed on the power cord, all the cords were plugged in. All the surge protectors were plugged in and did not appear to have been peed on. The computer just. wouldn't. come. on.

I sighed, fully awake now. It was time to call my guru again and to set up the laptop so I could use that instead. This required cleaning off the desk (of course). About the time I got the desk all cleaned off and was headed out to get the laptop from its new wheeled carrier, I had this sudden thought -- was the switch on the wall in the "on" position? I checked. It was not.

I don't know how that switch gets turned off. Walt swears he doesn't do it and I swear I don't do it, but very clearly I had done it last night. The switch powers only one thing: the electrical outlet that the computer is plugged into. How I managed to turn it off is beyond me. But it was lovely to turn it on and see the computer fire up right away.

What's even better, the lovely local TV weather person was predicting temperatures "in the 90s" in Sacramento today, which is about a 10 degree drop in temperature from the past two days. The house had a fighting chance to stay "reasonable" until the air conditioner repair guy got here.

The a/c guy arrived 3 hours ahead of schedule and determined that the problem was a blown circuit breaker. It took all of 10 seconds to fix and cost $58. Now I feel like a real dummy for not checking that to begin with. But at least I'm a cooler dummy, so I won't waste valuable energy getting angry with myself. And he said that they had about 90 calls in the last few days which turned out to be exactly the same problem, so if I'm a dummy, at least I'm in good company, I guess.

Nothing is all bad, however, I happened to catch a promo saying that the new season of Mad Men was starting July 27th on AMC and that in preparation, there would be a marathon the previous week, or you could catch all the episodes on Comcast On Demand.

Since it was such an effort to move, causing much sweat, I kind of took the better part of two days off and watched the entire first season of MadMen, all 13 episodes.

This was a show I never heard much about when it was in its regular season. Now that AMC has become a regular commercial station and you can catch good old movies on TMC without comercial interruptions, I've stoped watching it...I used to be glued to it when we first got cable.

So anyway, I had never seen Mad Men, though I think I remember Steve telling me that it was excellent. And, in fact, it won a couple of awards during award season (Golden Globes for best new series and best actor for John Hamm as Don Draper.

Lemme tell you, if you're looking for a new good drama that doesn't involve car chases, murders, or gory autopsies, this is the show for you. It recreates the 1960s world of the Madison Avenue advertising agencies and you'll find yourself laughing at the old fashioned view of women, the office romances, the constant drinking, and especially the smoking. My god...I think one of the requirements for this show must be to sign a waiver holding the production company not responsible for any adverse health effects. Everybody smokes. All the time. They smoke during meals. They smoke at work. They smoke in restaurants. They smoke in cars. They smoke during sex (yes, during), they smoke at doctor's appointments. The women smoke while cooking. Pregnant women smoke. They smoke while taking care of the baby. You could get lung cancer just watching the show.

But if you can get past that, this is a well-written, well-crafted, crisp-looking series that I highly recommend. I will be watching when the new season starts, because I'm already hooked.

If you decide to try it out and it bugs you, as it did me, where you've seen the new secretary, Peggy Olson, before--she is actress Elisabeth Moss, who played President Jed Bartlett's daughter in the much-missed West Wing. And the white haired boss, Roger Stirling, was Gabi's short-lived politician husband, actor John Slattery, on Desperate Housewives. Also, if you old timers want to feel old, the old guy who runs the agency is actor Robert Morse, the young guy in the original (1961) How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (apparently, he did...succeed!)