Showing posts with label Mad Men. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mad Men. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Jon Hamm: I am worried about this boy





(From the Washington Post. I've long wondered if Hamm's ability to inhabit the tortured soul of Don Draper is connected to some torment in his own soul. This, apparently, answers my question.)

Jon Hamm exits rehab for alcoholism before ‘Mad Men’ final season premiere





Jon Hamm as Don Draper in “Mad Men.” (Michael Yarish/AMC via AP)


After a 30-day stay, “Mad Men” star Jon Hamm has been released from a rehabilitation center where he sought treatment for alcohol addiction.

“With the support of his longtime partner Jennifer Westfeldt, Jon Hamm recently completed treatment for his struggle with alcohol addiction,” a spokesman for Hamm said in a statement, as the Associated Press reported. “They have asked for privacy and sensitivity going forward.”

After a long struggle in Hollywood, Hamm, 44, became famous in 2007 for playing alcoholic, womanizing Don Draper on the landmark AMC series. He won a Golden Globe in 2008 for the role, and has been nominated for an acting Emmy seven times.

TMZ reported that Hamm completed a program at Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, Conn., at the end of February. The publication called it a “high-end facility,” and the hospital is affiliated with Yale University.

After an eight-year run, “Mad Men’s” final season will air this spring.





“There’s no version of this ending that is not super painful for me,” Hamm said last year, as The Washington Post’s Hank Stuever reported. “[‘Mad Men’] has been a single constant of my creative life in the last decade, so that’s kind of tough. Yeah, I will be happy when [the final episodes] air and I don’t have to fake like I don’t know how the show ends [but] I will never be able to have this again, and that’s a drag.”

[Jon Hamm and others discuss a ‘super painful’ (but ‘satisfying’) end to ‘Mad Men’ at TV press tour]

In the past, Hamm has tried to draw a bright line between himself and the character he plays on television.

“There is no Don Draper,” he told Esquire last year. “Don Draper was blown up in a ditch in Korea. That whole ‘Be Don Draper’ thing, I feel it’s … sad.”

He added: “This is a fundamentally f—– up human being.”





But some quickly drew a line between the real man and the ad executive who specializes in behaving badly. Deadline Hollywood called Hamm’s trip to rehab “a surreal case of life imitating art.”

“The news does change the narrative in the final promotional push for AMC’s celebrated first original series,” Nellie Andreeva wrote. “It also raises the question about the toll of playing an anti-hero.”

Andreeva pointed out another case of an actor who perhaps got too deep into a role: the late James Gandolfini. After Gandolfini first inhabited New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano on “The Sopranos,” which debuted in 1999, his personal life seemed to get worse. He got divorced. There were problems with drugs. He would disappear from the set. And he reportedly once punched himself in the face.





“Turning Tony — anxiety-prone dad, New Jersey mobster, suburban seeker of meaning — into a millennial pop-culture icon, the character’s frustration, volatility, and anger had often been indistinguishable from those qualities of James Gandolfini, the actor who brought them to life,”GQ wrote after the actor’s death at age 51 in 2013. “It was a punishing role, requiring not only vast amounts of nightly memorization and long days under hot lights, but also a daily descent into Tony’s psyche—at the best of times, a worrisome place to dwell; at the worst, ugly, violent, and
sociopathic.”






I can't help but note a fundamental change in the things Jon Hamm is saying to the press. In the past, he was almost glib about Don Draper, as if he was a vehicle - classy, if a little cracked and broken in places - that would take him far. At one point an interviewer asked him, "Do you think Don Draper can find happiness?" His response was, "Oh, of course! Why not? Anything is possible," or words to that effect.

I've been a Maddict since the show began in 2007, and while last season kind of slid sideways, there was still much to recommend it. Don's chronic desperation was beginning to get old, almost frayed, as was the character himself. Those message boards plumbing hidden symbols in the show (and Don is a good plumber, by the way, fixing the ineffectual Pete Campbell's leaky faucet) seemed a bit too much for me however. EVERY atom of EVERY episode was analyzed - oh, Don could be like Don Corleone! Or Dawn - the dawning of a new day? Draper - obviously, he has draped himself to hide his real identity, and if you take the d away, you have "raper"! We won't get into Dick Whitman, except that Dick is a penis and Whitman is a folksy/literary allusion to Walt Whitman. And so on, and so on, ad nauseam.




But I was still drawn back again and again. I don't know if I have a favorite episode because the show, more so than most,  is all of a piece. I just saw, for maybe the fourth time, the one where Don has to fire Lane Pryce for embezzlement. It's particularly powerful because of Don's reaction: straightforward, not shocked nor apologetic, but with absolutely no room for discussion. You're out of here, Lane, I can't trust you any more - and he's right. It's hard to feel much sympathy for this cloying, blithering Englishman who tries to commit suicide in a "Jag-yew-ar" that won't start, but when the staff find him hanging dead in his office, Don once again shows a kind of low-key integrity by insisting on cutting him down, honoring the body in a way that reflects his wartime experience, no matter how flawed.

Re-watching these still-watchable things, which I really wasn't going to watch, but I recorded them anyway, I once more got lost in the labyrinth. Fortunately the episodes wear well, better than I thought they ever could. Even knowing exactly what came next, I was drawn in. Again.




One of my favorite characters - maybe my absolute favorite - is Sally, whose odyssey has taken her from chubby eight-year-old girl ballet dancing for guests in the living room to fiery, rebellious young woman, someone who conveys a brokenness that she will somehow parlay into an extraordinary life. She has always been a Daddy's girl, but has seen much of Daddy's dark side, which is very dark and murky indeed. She watched Lee Harvey Oswald get shot, screamed when Don scored tickets to the Beatles, got her first period in the Museum of Natural History and ran home to her mother, jumping over years of alienation and emotional abandonment for an understanding and comfort which, against the odds, she did receive.  Sally and I are the same age, which took me a while to realize. She's experiencing all the madness of the 1960s through the eyes of a smart but confused, often emotionally-deprived child. And where else can you find a character like that, one who is allowed to develop in so many directions, with so many dimensions, over a period of eight years?




I do hope the series winds up with a little more dignity than was displayed in the last few episodes, which in many ways sucked. I groaned at some of it - Ken Cosgrove's meaningless tap dance seems to have hit a new low. It was a mistake to take the series into the beginning of the '70s, when all that Rat Pack coolness had worn off and people were into long greasy hair, sideburns and polyester leisure suits. And everyone's wondering what will happen to Don. Will they kill him off? (That would once and for all eliminate the possibility of Mad Men II: The Adventures of Disco Don.) Will he become hap-hap-happy at last? Will he realize all those flashbacks to the old homestead were a complete fiction (as witness the fact that the young Dick Whitman looks more like Alfred E. Neuman than Don)? I would be happy if they killed off the repulsive, non-acting Glen, Matthew Weiner's talentless, creepy son, who has blighted the show and pulled down the quality of it for many seasons now.




Last episodes are a stumbling block for long-running, epic series. Most of them fumble, drop the ball. St. Elsewhere was ludicrous, with the whole series being the dream of an autistic boy. The Sopranos turned all the lights out or something (I didn't watch), stopping in mid-conversation and leaving everyone hanging. Seinfeld just had a ridiculous jailhouse scene that seemed to be punishing the characters for being too entertaining all those years. It was a long time ago, but I think MASH squeezed it a little too hard, so it came out almost as maudlin as the excruciating ending of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. And Sex and the City - dear God - talk about Don Draper! Carrie returned to the wealthy, powerful, smooth sociopath Big after he had mangled her heart a hundred times - and everyone cried and clapped their hands - it was sickening, but no more sickening/completely irrelevant than the two movies that followed.




We'll keep our expectations low, or maybe we'll have no expectations at all. But we'll watch. I don't think we'll find it as hard to say goodbye to it all as Jon Hamm, who seems to be at a fragile point right now. He speaks in another article about Don Draper building his house on a crumbling foundation. It alarmed me, because I wondered if the brokenness in him was being laid bare by playing a deeply broken character for so long. I was even more alarmed reading about James Gandolfini - I confess I never watched The Sopranos, but I hated to see what happened to him when the show got hold of him.

Actors become. Don't they? Do the best of them stay separate from their work? Can they? And how do you do that, exactly? Why would anyone need to anaesthetize and numb themselves with booze to the point of needing rehab? Doesn't this point to a pain and a pressure approaching the unbearable load Don Draper has carried for eight years?

For if Don's fundamental nature is one of integrity, as that one episode seems to indicate, how and why has he trespassed against himself that many times, and survived?















"You had me at hello"

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!





Friday, January 3, 2014

The most astounding video I've ever seen (no, really!)



I'd like to call this Mad Men on acid, or the '50s via Hieronymus Bosch, but mostly I call it incredible. I've never seen anything like it, and for once I'm too humble to exploit it for gifs (though I'm sure someone else will).


Thursday, May 9, 2013

Jon Hamm, the Kent-Smoking Man





I think we may have walked this way before. But it's time to walk it again. This is the Kent Man, with the gleaming skyscrapers of Madison Avenue towering above him. Though the ad copy refers to "scientists and educators", my first thought was, "Like fuck!  He's an ad man."

The ad is circa sometime in the early '60s, when medical experts were beginning to grumble about the negative health effects of smoking. Imagine the panicked discussions in boardrooms across the nation! "How are we going to put a positive spin on this so people think it's GOOD for them to smoke?" One astonishing television ad from the era had a bellicose man with a cigarette in his mouth proclaiming, "I want a treat, not a treatment."

Unfortunately, his "treat" all too often DID lead to a "treatment", usually received too late.






The ad guy puffing away on his Kent ("For the best combina-tion of fil-ter and good taste/Kent satisfies best!" went the cheery little jingle) looks so startlingly like Don Draper of Mad Men, it's downright eerie. I wondered if I could get Don's head into the Kent ad, and was almost successful.






Of course it's never perfect. Head shape and angle, skin color, all that stuff, will never match up exactly.
Besides, in the ad the guy is looking up, squinting actually, in a cool Madison Avenue sort of way.







Kind of like this? Looks a bit like Rod Serling on a bad day. One eye looks more or less OK (these are the Kent Man's eyes, by the way) but the other one, well. . . It would have been best to have that eye in shadow, but I don't have those kind of skills.






Here Don stares into nothingness in his typical God-how-misunderstood-I-am-because-I-was-poorly-mothered-if-in-fact-I-was-ever-mothered-at-all expression. I guess he stares at the sidewalk when he lights up.





DEFINITELY not mothered. At all. Ever.

Plus it looks like he's going to throw up.






This is my personal favorite. His hands have suddenly turned into brown oven mitts, but never mind.
At least he looks happy.







Wednesday, January 30, 2013

EXTREMELY RARE: world's most idiotic cat food commercial!



I have noticed that if you put EXTREMELY RARE in a title, everyone reads the post. Or something.

This ad is, I will admit, extremely bizarre, with the "p-p-p-p-protein" and the dog chasing the three cats into a barrel (with an obvious break to get the freaking cats out of there). 

Cat food ads have always been way stupider than dog food ads. We had Morris, who used to complain endlessly in that smarmy voice. (In spite of his addiction to Nine Lives, he died.) We had "chow-chow-chow" and that weird running-the-film-backwards dance that no cat would do if they were starving to death. And we had the incomparable telephone-proficient Baxter ("Don't answer it, Frank"), whom I thought was lost forever until I dug up a couple of the commercials on an advertising site. 

Probably the best- known was the Meow Mix jingle, with the original subtitles reading, "I want chicken, I want liver, Meow Mix, Meow Mix, please deliver." There were infinite varieties on this, with the words gradually making less and less sense ("I want lightly-grilled sea bass, I want roast turkey with razzleberry dressing," etc.).  My all-time fave, which I think I already posted at some point, was the "Close Encounters" Meow Mix commercial of the mid-'80s: a cat is pictured gazing heavenwards and meows four times in the familiar Meow Mix "frequency". A huge spaceship appears and echoes the meows with "BOM BOM BOM BOM". All that's missing is Richard Dreyfuss digging up shrubs and having a nervous breakdown from sheer intensity.

I'm glad to find these things again, because they're fun, and my grandkids whoop and scream over them. They don't make ads like that any more, with those stupid cats, or rather, those stupid advertising copywriters. Paging Freddy Rumsen!


Saturday, December 8, 2012

A Song for Found Elephants




This piece has become cornball over the years, kind of like Flight of the Bumblebee (which I hate: the only version I have ever liked is the one in The Big Bang Theory where Sheldon was dressed up as - who WAS he dressed up as? - anyway, he ran real fast to it and it was funny).

I remember hearing it on Mad Men when Betty Draper, in all her 1960s splendour, came down the staircase in a restaurant called (I think) Lutece. Don looked at her in admiration and even awe. But like most of the music in Mad Men, it was really effective.






GOD, when will Mad Men be back? I die inside, I can't wait any longer.

Speaking of things Indian, ever since Slumdog Millionaire, every comedy has to have a funny Indian guy with an accent. The Big Bang Theory is only one example (a GAY Indian guy with an accent). I can't figure out why this is considered OK. They wouldn't have a black guy named Rastus shuffling his feet, would they? Yet these characters talk incessantly about elephants and cobras and arranged marriages, like something out of a Kipling story.




(This is sung by Bjoerling - I won't try to spell his first name - and his silvery voice, vibrating with layer upon layer of overtones, seems to catch slant rays of sunlight. Indian sunlight.)


 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
    It took me years to write, will you take a look


Thursday, September 13, 2012

Hype and hard rubber




Since I like to do things bass-ackwards, I'll spoil the
surprise right off the top. This is what you got.
When you sent away for them.




They came in one of these-here things.
A brown cardboard box with a suspicious rattle.




Close-up, they appeared larval, like this thing.
Looks a bit like the Elephant Man with a hat on.




It was this thing, see, this ad, this - didn't you used to read comic books, or what? How old are you? All right. I DO remember this ad, though since I didn't like dolls to begin with, I never sent away for them. Plus I could never scrape together a whole dollar anyway. My allowance always went on things like Lik-M-Ade, wax lips with red syrup in them and those sherbet fountains, the powdered stuff you sucked up with a liquorice straw. Once I bought a Hercules ring modelled after the Trans-Lux cartoons, but it broke the first day.

But to get back to these things, these 100 Dolls for a Dollar. I was suspicious. Just what were they talking about? What the hell was "Lilliputian cuteness"? (Jonathan Swift might have had a problem with that.) Was this just another Sea Monkey caper, another X-Ray Specs con? Another Grog Grows Own Tail? How many little girls were they disappointing, anyway - sending in their damp crumpled dollar bills in eager anticipation - only to get something that wouldn't caper, spec or grow?




As with the mind-boggling sex manual I just translated, I will attempt to make the grainy type from 50 years ago more decipherable:

100 Little Dolls all for $1.00

100 Dolls made of genuine styrene plastic and hard synthetic rubber only $1 for entire set. You get BABY DOLLS, NURSE DOLLS, DANCING DOLLS, FOREIGN DOLLS, CLOWN DOLLS, COWBOY DOLLS, BRIDE DOLLS, and many more in Lilliputian cuteness. And made not of paper or rags but of STYRENE plastic and hard synthetic rubber. If you don't go wild over them your money will be promptly refunded. Send $1.00 plus 25 cents for postage and handling for each set of 100 Dolls you order to: 100 Doll Co., Dept. 315, 285 Market St., P. O. Box 90, Newark, N. J.





People still have them, obviously, as these photos illustrate (and don't they just look like boxes full of dead insects?), and I would imagine that  a complete set of 100 might fetch a handsome price on eBay or Craigslist, but what the hell would you DO with them? For that matter, what did little girls do back then when they received these rattling toothpicks, looking something like those plastic things you stick birthday candles into?

The fact that they seemed to come in two colors is confusing. The pink is no more fleshlike than the sickly Chee-toh orange.




But wait! Though it looks almost the same, THIS ad has completely different copy. It's effusive, it's gushing, it's pure Madison Avenue in the '60s: Peggy Olsen might have written it during her coffee break with her feet up on her desk, chewing Wrigley's spearmint gum:


Don’t shake your head in disbelief! This is TRUE! For only 1 PENNY EACH you can give that little girl the most thrilling present of her life. This set of ONE HUNDRED DOLLS for only $1 – 1 penny A PIECE!
 Baby Dolls – Nurse Dolls – Dancing Dolls
Costume Dolls – Ballerina Dolls – Mexican Dolls
Indian Dolls – Clown Dolls – Cowboy Dolls
Bride Dolls – Groom Dolls – and many more.
 The wonder of this unprecedented offer is that every doll is made from beautiful high-quality Styrene plastic and hard synthetic rubber. You get BABY DOLLS, NURSE DOLLS, DANCING DOLLS, FOREIGN DOLLS, CLOWN DOLLS, COWBOY DOLLS, BRIDE DOLLS and many more in Lilliputian cuteness. Your daughter or your niece or the cute child next door will love you for this gift. She will play with them for months and not grow weary of them. What a family for a little girl! Just think of it – 100 exquisite little dolls – in beautiful high-impact styrene plastic and hard synthetic rubber at this unbelievable price!



So fill out the coupon below. Order as many sets as you have little girls to give them to. Enclose $1 for each 100 doll set you order. And even at this amazing bargain you take no risk. If you don’t go absolutely wild over this bargain, just send the Dolls back and we will promptly refund your money.
(But don't go away, there’s more – to the ad, I mean! This freakin’ thing goes on forever.)

Our Guarantee     HERE IS WHAT THESE DOLLS ARE MADE OF
People seeing our ad, and not believing we can give such value, write us to ask what our 100 Dolls are made of. “Are they paper dolls, or rag dolls?” they ask. NEITHER! Each and every one of our 100 dolls is made of GENUINE STYRENE and SYNTHETIC RUBBER, expensively molded in true dimension – Height – Width – Depth! Every doll has come out of an individual mold, manufactured out of high-impact styrene to resist breakage, and is life-like in its proportions. They are truly delightful dolls!




How many times can you read the word "styrene" without puking? These people were obsessed with it. And all that hard rubber makes me worry. If these dolls had been a little less Lilliputian, if they had been, say, life-sized, think of the sin they might have spawned. But then they wouldn't have fit into that little brown box, would they?

And just what happened to the 100 Doll Company in Newark, New Jersey? Is it still there? Why did they only manufacture one thing? What sort of dolls would they be turning out in 2012: the kind that appear on TLC shows like My Strange Obsession?




Life slides me into tender melancholy, virtually daily, because I always think it was Better Back Then, more magical. It probably wasn't - I couldn't wait to grow up and get the hell away from school and my parents - but such is the power of nostalgia, a word that literally means "Don Draper pitching bullshit to a bunch of Kodak executives".

To be fair to the 100 Dolls Company, and to clarify any residual confusion, we should define Lilliputian once and for all.



Noun 1. lilliputian - a very small person (resembling a Lilliputian)
small person - a person of below average size

2. Lilliputian - a 6-inch tall inhabitant of Lilliput in a novel by Jonathan Swift Adj. 3. Lilliputian - tiny; relating to or characteristic of the imaginary country of Lilliput; "the Lilliputian population"
3. lilliputian - very small; "diminutive in stature"; "a lilliputian chest of drawers"; "her petite figure"; "tiny feet"; "the flyspeck nation of Bahrain moved toward democracy"

bantam, diminutive, flyspeck, midget, petite, tiny

little, small - limited or below average in number or quantity or magnitude or extent; "a little dining room"; "a little house"; "a small car"; "a little (or small) group"

3. lilliputian - (informal) small and of little importance; "a fiddling sum of money"; "a footling gesture"; "our worries are lilliputian compared with those of countries that are at war"; "a little (or small) matter"; "a dispute over niggling details"; "limited to petty enterprises"; "piffling efforts"; "giving a police officer a free meal may be against the law, but it seems to be a picayune infraction"

fiddling, footling, niggling, picayune, piddling, piffling, trivial, petty, little

colloquialism - a colloquial expression; characteristic of spoken or written communication that seeks to imitate informal speech

unimportant - not important; "a relatively unimportant feature of the system"; "the question seems unimportant"








  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Friday, July 20, 2012

Don Draper and the shifty scientist



There's nothing I love more than old ads (except maybe old cartoons), and this one just reached out and grabbed me. Pure sixties nostalgia, sleek and sophisticated, which of course reminds me of my all-time-favorite TV series. . .


Et voila. This took very little photoshopping, was the exact size and head angle, and had a similar attitude of kibuki-like enigma. Don's in a little more contemplative mood than our "scientist and educator", who has the shiftyiness of someone who's about to blow up Cleveland. But they are oh-so-the-same: the skyscraper background, the clean boxes full of statistics giving the whole thing an air of - what? Of not-rotting-your-body-out-with-horrendous-cancerous-tumors-that-kill-you-before-you're-40?

Don's particular about his Luckys, but for the sake of the ad he must have been persuaded to switch. Now, wouldn't that be something - Don actually DOING ads? Posing for ads, I mean? Isn't he perfect? Isn't he the most amazing - I mean, he's the kind of guy who just smells good. Nothing more to say about it.

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Is Don Draper really a vampire? and other depressing questions



It's not every day, well, it's almost every day but never mind, that we find, that I find I mean, uh. Let me start over again.

I don't even know how I YouTubed my way into this one. Every once in a while I profess my rabid, tree-scratching, hide-tearing, rubbing-salt-into-my-private-areas LUST for AMC's Mad Men. It's the smartest show I've ever seen, even though, at the base of it all, it's nothing more than a sexy and well-acted soap opera.



Angst rules supreme. Nobody is ever really happy. This makes us all feel better about ourselves, because, you see, WE'RE never really happy either. Or at least, I'm not.

Privately, I believe that happiness is for idiots, or at least for people who don't think or don't notice the intractible mess all around them. I have moments of it, of course. Even serious upgusts. But angst remains my prevailing mood, and that's when I am not downright depressed.



So Mad Men cheers me up. The way the characters hurl themselves at their fate, impaling themselves on ill fortune, screwing around madly just to forget. They beat their fists on reality. They don (!) mask after mask, phony disguise after phony disguise, hoping THIS one will be the charm, and it never is.

And saaaaaaaay, isn't that some coincidence that we have a character named Don (as in Don Quixote; as in Don Juan; as in The Godfather; as in "don we now our gay apparel") Draper, as in let's throw a tarp over all this mess before anyone sees it (too late!). And that's not even his real name: he has "donned" it like a "drape" over his somewhat vampirish personality. His real name, Dick (!) Whitman, does not need to be examined (though Walt Whitman may sneak in there somewhere: but hey, wasn't he queer or something?).




We could sit here and analyze every character's name - Jesus, Roger Sterling?? - Lane Pryce?? - but I'm getting very tired. I am so addicted now that even when whatsisname, that Weinerhead guy, spews out a substandard episode, I still watch it at least three times. Then I go on the message boards and see what arcane, cabalistic meanings the fans have squeaked out, adding a few of my own ("hey, Cool Whip isn't real whipped cream!"). When I found this video I thought, great, I get to see Don's new sexpot wife Megan make a total fool of herself (again) and be the only person in the room who doesn't know. But then. . .

Then I realized that my two greatest loves, Mad Men and Mr. Trololo, had somehow met and blended, had fused together and become one, and it was magical!



There is a certain affinity between the two songs, after all, a certain bouncy optimism. Surely Don needs this sort of frisson of joy, this gasping souffle, this seething birthday pie that he can stick his thumb in any time he wants to. Megan may have big scared eyes and teeth that are completely over the top, but she's HAPPY damn it, and is going to make DON happy ("yes, master!") too, even if she won't eat the orange sherbet at Howard Johnson's.

Ye-ye-ye-ye-ye, ye-ye-ye, ye-ye-ye, o-ho-ho-ho-ho!


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

Fifty Shades of Grey: yearbook photos



I was going to title this post Daydream Believer, because this-here lovely young lady is a Homecoming Queen from that succulent year, 1966.

It's a strange coincidence that my fall-down-and-worship slavish addiction, Mad Men, is right now in the midst of that august (actually it's October) year. A year when the whole world seemed to be balanced on the point of a pin.





And here are the runners-up, complete with poofy hairdos and hopeful expressions. The Marlo Thomas look vies with the '60s beehive and side-flip that will all-too-soon give way to two curtains hanging sullenly on either side of the face.





OK, here's the backstory: it all had to do with painting. When you paint, every century or so, you generally repaint the closets, which means a major purge. Which yielded what seemed like dozens of yearbooks from junior/high school. Most of these belonged to my kids, and we spent a hilarious evening reading the scrawled comments out loud to each other. My son's wife Crystal kept bursting into whoops of laughter so loud it raised the roof (that is, until she saw a spider, jumped straight up in the air and disappeared upstairs for the rest of the evening).

But the choicest cut was this one. Turns out my husband Bill, now 65, kept one yearbook from all his university-hopping days: the Brown and Gold from the University of Manitoba, circa 1966. That year when things were still just barely teetering on the side of innocence.




That skateboarding fiend above is mysteriously captioned ATHLETIC PROGRAM. The skateboard looks to be a handmade job cobbled together using rollerskates and  a piece of plywood.

Here we have an even more enigmatic mystery: the Rifle Club, consisting of two pistol-packin' mamas. No boys in sight (so to speak), but is it any wonder?

Some clubs, we noticed, had only one member, but we could find no pictures. Too excruciating, I guess. But the elections would be fast.




Ah, 1966, when accountancy was still Not Boring!




Hey look, everybody. . . it's Robert Vaughn!




The Rhodes Scholar. No one smiles in these things. Where is he now, I wonder? He might be dead. Dear God! Most of my high school teachers must be dead by now, and all of my grade school teachers. How did that happen?





One of the racier, lovelier photos in the collection, found in "candid shots" which look anything but candid. "C'mon, Peggy Sue. . . lie on your stomach." Come to think of it, that IS pretty racy.




And here he is, MY Rhodes scholar, looking deadly earnest, complete with Big Bang Theory glasses. (When I met him in 1972, they were held together with tape.) I had a thing about science nerds even then, though I have to admit that in 1966 I was only 12 years old.

In 1967, I heard the word "hippie" for the first time, but wasn't sure what it meant. In 1968, I first heard the sound track to the musical Hair and began to get stoned to Donovan records ("First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. . . ").

By 1969, Woodstock exploded, the unwitting pinnacle of that magical, idealistic time which all too quickly plummeted into the dirty rotten shame of Altamont.




But the kid from Manitoba grew up, and lived through all the rich and rough and bumpy times since then. As did we all.