Mad Monday – Season 3, Episode 3: ‘My Old Kentucky Home’

Mad for Mad Men, and not unwilling to embrace a brief respite from the weighty issues of economic hardship and national security that we regularly cover here, we're going to try to post a recap of the show each Monday — and bring in some guests to blog with us as well.

More importantly, we hope fellow fans will comment below about what they think is going on.

These recaps will contain spoilers.

And we hope to update this blog, at this same address, throughout the week. So come back!

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"My Old Kentucky Home" had three stories revolving around class and trying to fit in — Don and a very pregnant Betty Draper attend Roger Sterling's party at his country club; Joan Holloway and her fiancé Dr. Greg Harris throw a dinner party for Dr. Ronald Ettinger, the Chief of Surgery; while back at Sterling Cooper, Peggy Olson, Paul Kinsey, and Smitty work the weekend on the Bacardi account.

A fourth story, back at Chez Draper in Ossining, involved Sally Draper stealing five dollars from her maternal grandfather, Gene Hofstadt, who makes her read to him from volume one of British historian Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, first published in 1776.

(Bonuses — check out this q and a with the actress who plays Sally, and this Sally Draper Cocktail Cheat Sheet.)

Some initial thoughts:

At first I found the Sally-"Grandpa Gene" dynamic (why the "Grandpa Gene" specificity? There's no other Grandpa in that family) the least interesting, saving for the mild inappropriateness of Sally struggling through Gibbon's line about the 'intemperate enjoyment of tranquility and opulence; and the lively licentiousness of the Greeks." But on retrospect, the fact that Sally Draper is learning dishonesty and manipulation is fairly telling.

Sterling's country club is where the most cringe-inducing moment of the episode transpires — Sterling in blackface, serenading Draper's former secretary Jane Siegel, now his fiancée, in blackface.

Draper recoils, but I don’t think he was doing so out of racial sensitivity. As he later makes clear to Sterling, who finally confronts him about his chilliness, Draper thinks he's become an embarrassing ass.

"My mother was right," Sterling says. "It's a mistake to be conspicuously happy."

"No one thinks you're happy," Draper says. "They think you're foolish."

"That's the great thing about a place like this," Sterling responds. "You can come here and be happy, and you get to choose your guests."

As the Newark Star-Ledger’s Alan Sepinwall points out, both Jane and Draper aren't used to the posh setting, unlike Sterling and Pete Campbell. "Jane retreats by drinking heavily and not eating at all, while Don finds temporary refuge in the club bar, where he bonds with a fellow climber of the social ladder, Connie," Sepinwall notes.

Draper and Connie chat about their humble beginnings while Draper makes them Old Fashioneds, (here's the recipe) continuing his practice of sharing personal information almost entirely only with strangers.

When Jane drunkenly stumbled around at the end of the party, Sterling stumbles upon Draper innocently trying to help her, though with Jane's hand on Draper's belt, pathetically pleading "You don’t like me; I’m a nice person," it must have looked to Sterling as if they were pawing at one another — an echo of when Sterling hit on Betty in the first season's "Red in the Face." (And, in a way, an echo of Draper's alcohol-soaked revenge on Sterling.)

The other two memorable events from the party: Pete and Trudy Campbell's well-practiced hoofing on the dance floor (Dance, Pete Campbell, Dance!) which earned some derisive looks from the likes of Draper (and me, for that matter), though it caused Campbell rival Ken Cosgrove to note, "I've got to bring a date next time." Would Ken say that because it looked like the Campbells were having fun, or because having a wife is an essential component of rising at Sterling Cooper? Maybe both.

The other moment at the party of some note: Betty, waiting for Trudy Campbell in the restroom, is approached by Henry Francis, whom we later learn works for New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. Francis asks if he can touch her pregnant belly, and he asks her what it feels like — two impulses it's not clear Betty's husband has ever experienced. She complies, hinting, perhaps, that her licentiousness is not only in the past.

At the less fancy dinner party, at Joan Holloway's, we learn that beyond his being, well, a rapist, Dr. Greg Harris seems less and less of a catch. Joan hears some vague references to a Harris screw-up — a bad result after a pneumonectomy (a lung removal, yet another reference to the hazards of that era's smoking insanity) — and Mrs. Ettinger seems to suggest that he wont become chief surgical resident.

To rescue himself from the conversation about his screw-up at work, Harris begs his fiancée to perform with her accordion — and she does, a French version of the 1953 Cole Porter song "C'est Magnifique" from the musical Can-Can, later popularized by Dean Martin. Holloway manages to convey both her seductive qualities as well as her rage at Harris. The cable news channels should put up a countdown clock to when she dumps his sorry tush.

At Sterling Cooper, Smitty, Kinsey, and Kinsey's Princeton pal Paul — hiding inside Paul's office, smoking pot — hear this from our heroine: "I'm Peggy Olson. And I want to smoke some marijuana."

Peggy's burgeoning feminism is at full force, along with Kinsey's insecurity. Kinsey frets that he wasn't invited to Sterling's party, and wonders why so many of his contemporaries have advanced more than he has. His liberal politics have always been clear — his commitment to civil rights, his snide remarks to the fat cats who want to destroy Penn Station — but Kinsey's desire to be accepted in the club for which he often professes disdain also drives him. We learn from Paul that Kinsey's seemingly upper-crust accent is an affect that the copywriter created. Baked out of his mind and lying on the floor, Kinsey's pretense was on full display as he quoted T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men":

"This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper."

Of course, it's Grandpa Gene's premonition to Sally about what's to come in The History of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire that's the other choice for this drama, even if the Drapers end the evening in an embrace.

"You just wait," he tells her. "All hell's gonna break loose."

Here's AMC's video recap:
 

You can check out some other recaps here — Dave Itzkoff at the NYT and James Poniewozik at TIME.

So what did you guys think?

– jpt

BLOG UPDATE: Some interesting gleanings from other blogs:

Tom & Lorenzo  say that when Grandpa Gene sneers at Don “You people. You think money's the answer to every problem,” he’s hit on the theme of the episode: “you can change your social class with the acquisition of money, but you'll never fit in as well as the people who are born into their class.”

Maureen Ryan at the Chicago Tribune offers Mad Men Subtext Theater about the Joan-Jane encounter:

Jane: "Well, look at me, swanning around in my fancy designer hat while you working gals go to have your pathetic lunches at the cheap diner."

Joan: "Hello, man-stealing wench."

Jane: "It's great to see you too, Joan. Have you noticed I'm even thinner? Also, I'm rich now. Jealous much?"

Joan: "As if, child. I have a doctor husband. He may be a creep and a half, but he'll earn. Translation: I'll be as rich as you someday."

Jane: "Whatever you say, dear. By the way, you're my servant and I can boss you around now. Have one of your girls run down and flag down my driver, there's a good secretary!"

Joan: "Now I will shoot lasers out of my eyes and kill you where you stand."

Also, Mad Men offers a special deal for iPhone users:  “An inside look at the singing and dancing in last night's episode, "My Old Kentucky Home." Besides hearing more about Joanie on the squeezebox, you'll learn how Pete Campbell perfected his Charleston as series creator Matthew Weiner, actress Christina Hendricks and actor Vincent Kartheiser discuss how both of those scenes came to be.”

–jpt