True Happiness: Mad Men

I just spent way more time learning to put a picture on my blog than I will spend writing about it.

I love Mad Men! It has totally transformed my life. I look forward to watching it, to closely observing the office politics, family lies and incredible fashions. Now that Season 1 is On Demand, I've been catching up on episodes I somehow missed--before I caught the bug.

A brief list of what makes me happy about Mad Men:

1. The clothing. The clothing. The clothing. From the stiff, starched white handkerchiefs peeking out of Don Draper's front pocket to Joan's incredible clingy sweaters and handbags and Betty's beautiful dresses and filmy peignoirs.

2. The hairdos. How hilarious or how glamorous, depending. The flips and updos and bouffants. The slicked-back hair for the men. The barber coming to Roger Sterling's office.

3. The workplace. The plastic covers for the typewriters, the couches in the offices, the make-do bars behind every man's desk, the ice cubes clinking and the liquor flowing. Come on. Though I did once know an editor who went out for two-hour liquid lunches and then came back tipsy.

4. The city. The restaurants, all big stately banquettes that you can really settle into and Brandy Alexanders for the ladies. The true hunger for work, for unparalleled success that is so tangent still in New Yorkers and in those of us who thrive on the city and its pathways and staircases.

5. The blatant infidelity. They make it so frothy and easy for the men that it's completely absorbing to watch. No strings attached. All this dallying at hotels, on office couches and in single women's apartments...but it's all cotton-candy fiction. No one you know is really getting hurt when very married Don Draper or Roger Sterling is cheating on his devoted wife. Pure fun as a spectator sport.

6. The food. Oh my God, the food. The casseroles. The "delicatessen," used as a noun as in "I know how you love your delicatessen" when a client is sinking into a pastrami on rye and sour pickles.

7. The brilliance. The hard work these writers, directors and set designers have done to so carefully recapture this early 1960s lifestyle, from the Kennedy-Nixon debate to the Post cereal commercials to the lipstick ads--every little detail, even the sound of the trains rumbling by when Peggy turns out the light in her bedroom in her first Manhattan apartment, the one she shares with a roommate who gripes about the Velveeta being eaten before she got to it. Oh, take me back to the sixties.