Was it just yesterday that I learned Mad Men was following the Errant Aesthete?
Imagine that. Had devilishly handsome or, depending on the degree of your obsession, fatally attractive, Don Draper, sauntered up to me at one of Manhattan’s poshest watering holes, wearing a smile, savoring a smoke, and offering to buy me a drink, I couldn’t have been more over the moon. Well, maybe a dinner … with breakfast to follow might have had me skipping in rose-colored streamers across the galaxy. The giddiness of it all is fully weighted, of course, with the realization that some guileless young intern stumbled upon my Mad Men post of a few days ago and as a media savvy sort, sent the dutifully smart gesture of appreciation:
Mad Men (@Mad_Men) is now following your tweets (@ErrantAesthete) on Twitter.
What can I say? Yowza comes to mind. Okay I admit it. I’m hopelessly beholden, helplessly smitten and shackled forevermore to my twitter tryst, chaste though it may be, knowing full well, I am, alas, but one of many. Nevertheless, I fervently join the legions of the faithful in proclaiming my undying love and devotion to the terribly tarnished and magnificently flawed hero of girlish, gayish and matronly dreams — Don (Dreamboat) Draper.
One might say I’m not all that unlike the dewy-eyed girl with a similar fixation, Judy Garland, singing You Made Me Love You, a tribute to her crushingly gorgeous fantasy, matinee idol, Clark Gable.
I didn’t want to do it …
I didn’t want to do it.
I am a bit long in the tooth for such girly ardor, but nothing sets the heart soaring, or pumping, like a robust flutter. And lest you think me, hopelessly, mawkish, do consider those prehistoric times (BC – before computers) of innocence, when unapologetic yearnings of love were welcomed, embraced and emulated, not scorned and ridiculed as in the current climate of snark, sneers and disillusionment.
For the uninitiated who have never heard of Mad Men, and who might you be?, the season premiere last Sunday was bookended by reporters’ interviews with the mysterious and charming main “Mad Man” himself. After a horrendous profile of Draper in Advertising Age makes the fledgling firm look bad, ad honcho Bert Cooper orders Don to try again with “my man at The Wall Street Journal.”
In a series about personal and professional facades, Sunday’s show wraps in how the press influences perception, and how so much of that narrative can be manipulated. According to the review:
“Sunday night closed with Draper
charming the cheap suit right off the Journal reporter,
thanks to a brash tale of how Don and his cohorts
orchestrated their exit from their former firm. That’s
how we know the old Don – confident, womanizing,
creative as hell – is back after some low moments
of self-doubt. And therein also lies a lesson that
applies equally for ad men pitching Glo-Coat floor
cleaner, and for interview subjects:
give us a good yarn,
and we’re putty
in your hands.”
The legendary Wall Street Journal included the above hedcut (in newspaper lingo, that’s short for “headline cut”) of Draper with a story it ran on July 26, 2010. The Journal was careful to point out that its signature dot-ink portraits weren’t launched until 1979, well after the period of this season’s “Mad Men” series of 1964.
Nevertheless, they are the first to admit that Draper’s hedcut looks pretty cool. And you, dear readers? What do you think?
Filed under: Entertainment, New & Notable Tagged: dondraper, hedcut, madmen, theErrantAesthete, twitter, WSJ 
