I was re-watching Mad Men
recently, when I saw something that made me sit up and hit Pause: a
piece of kitsch art on the wall of Joan Holloway's apartment. It was
a fake Chinese scroll painting of a red bridge over a deep gorge, and
I had grown up, during the Mad Men era, with its
identical twin.
It's from a paint-by-number kit. My
father had painted it, with his usual care and patience -- if it's
worth doing, it's worth doing right -- and it hung on the wall of our
kitchen for a number of years. I dredged the Internet for a picture
of that scene, so I could email it to my siblings; the best I could
find was the one you see above.
I liked Mad Men when
it first aired, and still do. When I found out that Matthew Weiner,
the show's honcho, had been a writer/producer for The
Sopranos, I figured: well, OK, it'll have one or two good
seasons, then it'll get all Hollywoodish and up its own butt. But,
no. It was very good from start to finish.
And, as a bonus for us Boomers, it did
a very nice job picturing the world of the 60s. Some of the cultural
stuff was contorted by modern wokeness (no, the average American
didn't smoke three packs a day, and no, women's lives were not a
relentless hell of misery and oppression), but the details were right
on the money.
Kudos to the anonymous set-dresser or
prop-buyer who found that paint-by-number scroll and put it on the
apartment wall.
