I suppose what made Mad Men work was that it brought 21st Century eyes to the sixties. And many details are so dead on. The smoking, the drinking—now in season 6 the ridiculous whorish makeup and stiff hair and crotch-skimming miniskirts. The women look insane. Mutant. Impossibly girlish. The womanly styles of the earlier years were so much more attractive, I think.
And that wonderful episode where Roger and his trophy wife take acid….. I remember an occasion in the later sixties, picture us, a dozen fourteen year olds at a sleepover, though I believe that we used to call them pajama parties. We have turned the lights down in the rumpus room and are playing a game. The game is called Bad LSD Trip. Some of us of lying on the ground, faking seizures. Pat Brown cries out Red! Red all over! We get too far into this game – some of the girls begin to cry and Fran’s Mom comes downstairs and turns on the lights. She does not understand what has happened but pours on the Maternal Comfort anyway. “Poor lambs”, she says, stroking the hair of weeping girls. We knew about LSD because we had read about it in Time magazine. We were too young to try it, but some of us could hardly wait, me included.
