Silkstone's Open Salon Blog

A Turkey Tale: Seven in the City

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 01:11:52 -0500

I hate to put anyone off their feed for Thanksgiving, but it seems the right time to share the heartwarming tale of a wild turkey family of seven that lives in our neighborhood. Warning: Baby turkey videos ahead that may melt your heart!

We live in a city best known for its rampant crime, medical marijuana clinics and insanely high housing prices, but it’s also home to glorious regional parks full of redwoods, pines, creeks, ferns, flowers and all kinds of wild critters, including deer, coyotes, foxes, raccoons, skunks, possum, rabbits, owls, hawks, falcons and no doubt some mountain lions (although fortunately none have been spotted in many years). They also harbor the non-native but persistent wild turkey.

We live right on the border of such a park, and so coyotes run down the middle of our street at midnight, deer crash around below our bedroom window at night eating leaves off our trees, hawks and falcons circle and cry as they hunt in daylight, owls hoo-hoo in the dark while hiding from sight, and don’t even get me started on the raccoons, which have been known to shinny up the supports of our deck just to see what we might have up there.

But perhaps most fun of all, every year a turkey couple raises a family of offspring, shepherding them around watchfully for months as they grow from wee fuzzy cheepers to waddling birds as large as their parents. This year’s couple was especially prolific, having five babies -- more than we’ve ever seen before.

With the babies still fairly young, the whole family comes upon some deer in our backyard. After a little apprehension, everyone decides everyone else is harmless.

From early summer until late fall, the turkeys walk through our yard, stirring up bugs in their patented scratch-and-pick fashion, the parents enclosing the kids like parentheses, one at each end to watch for danger in any form, be it a dog or car or simply the baby’s own distracted wanderings away from the flock.

The parents shepherd their cheeping flock up the stairs and then the hill. You'll hear our cat ask me about them. (She's scared of the adults and stays well away from them.)

They keep in constant communication with each other by a whole variety of noises from cheeps, pops, clicks and trills to, yes, gobbles. After months of near-daily exposure, I can hear the turkeys when they’re half a block away and decode their sounds to know whether they’re content and grazing or distressed and under threat or have become separated and are trying to locate each other with sourcing sounds. Which is not to say they don't have family disputes:

Early on, I saw 2 of the babies have a bit of a fight while the parents and their sibs completely ignored them. (I think this video would be even funnier if you dubbed over the soundtrack of an old boxing match, with the bell ringing, announcer calling the fight, etc).

One of the parents is especially fiercely protective – we assume it’s the father. He chases people who get too close to his family, honking and threatening to bite until the offender is well away. One day he followed K. all the way across the street to give him a good talking to just for walking too close to his family on the park trail.

Yes, like the proverbial chicken, the turkeys do cross the road, which is a winding and woodsy but busy street that many people use. When we hear the squeal of brakes and yelling, we know the turkey family is crossing the road and some driver is trying to encourage them to move it along – they never seem to be in any hurry.

The "babies" in teenage mode, hanging out and cruising.

I can also tell you that, WKRP to the contrary, wild turkeys can and do fly. As the babies have grown, they’ve developed the ability to fly not only as high as our roof but hundreds of feet up into the tall pines around our house. When threatened (usually because someone is walking their dog off-leash and the dog does what comes naturally and gives chase), the turkeys scatter, each flying up to a safe perch. From there, they will issue distress calls to each other until it’s safe to re-group on the ground.

And now playing on our local stage: Turkey on the Roof!

That's a turkey up there on that lower, mostly bare branch!

After one such recent incident, I was startled to find one of the “babies” perched on a chair on our deck, making small cries until his parents up on the road got close enough to hear him and answer, at which point he eagerly flapped and waddled away to join them. (Which was a great relief, as I was wondering if we'd have to adopt and finish raising him, and I knew our cat would object to that....)

Lost "baby" turkey perched on deck chair right outside our living room.

I can also tell you that turkeys are great parents. Amazingly, they kept all their babies alive until just recently. Sadly, a month ago, one of the nearly full-grown kids disappeared – we don’t know if it was lost to coyote, dog, car or something else. (We even wondered if some neighbor decided an organic, free range turkey sounded good for Thanksgiving.) The four remaining children are so large now that it’s hard to tell them apart from their parents, but the family remains as close as ever, and the parents still bring up front and rear when they’re on the move.

Within the next couple months, the turkeys will disappear as they do each year – to where, we don’t know. They must have some wintering spot. Next year, we’ll be happy when turkeys return to the neighborhood – perhaps these same children, as they take their turn at mating and raising young – and be thrilled to watch the cycle of life begin all over again.

My Radio Debut! Talkin’ Mad Men, Women & State of the World

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:11:53 -0500

Blog radio, that is.

I’ve been getting some interesting offers because of my Mad Men commentaries that Kerry and Thomas have so graciously featured on the cover. The latest was from Shelley Ackerman, an astrologer with a blog radio show cleverly called “Karmic Relief” (also the name of her website) asking if she could interview me about Mad Men, which she is a big fan of.

This was a live broadcast, but the archived episode is available either to be streamed directly from that webpage (no special software/program required) or you can download it as an MP3 to listen to at your leisure:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/karmicrelief/2009/11/21/karmicrelief-with-shelley-ackerman-and-friends

(NOTE: Either clicking the last link or pasting in the URL above should take you directly to the show I was featured on and launch it immediately in the embedded player. If it doesn't work or you prefer an MP3 version, check Shelley's main page by simply clicking on her hyperlinked name and you'll be taken to the page listing all her shows.)

Although I did corporate training for years, I’d never done any radio before and so was a bit apprehensive, but Shelley was so wonderfully warm that I relaxed quickly and actually enjoyed myself tremendously. And listening to the show afterward, I didn’t even cringe like I usually do when hearing or seeing myself on tape/video! (I only wish the sound quality on my end was better -- I need to get a headset).

I also was fortunate to be paired on the program with the head of the International Women's Writing Guild, Jan Phillips, and the three of us ended up having a lively conversation after Shelley interviewed each of us separately. Shelley flattered me by asking my opinion on a lot of important issues! I was fortunate to be able to discuss some subjects that are very dear to me, such as how important it is for people to be able to tell their stories – which is why I love OS (and I know many of you feel the same).

And I mentioned all of you at the very end of the show when Shelley asked me what I'm grateful for. I was specifically thinking of everyone at OS when I referred to people I don’t “know” – by that, I meant people I don’t (yet) know face-to-face. I do feel like I know many of you in very important ways. So consider yourself thanked for your friendship and support!

Shut the Door, Have a Seat: Mad Men Season 3 Finale

Mon, 9 Nov 2009 06:11:06 -0500

Do you want to do this, or not? ~ Bert to Don

Nothing ends without something else beginning. In perhaps the most action-packed show of the entire series, the Sterling Cooper agency we’ve known comes to an end in the Season 3 finale of Mad Men, “Shut the Door, Have a Seat,” and so does Betty and Don’s marriage, but in both cases the endings are followed by swift commencements of something new: The Sterling-Cooper-Draper-Pryce agency and the Betty-Henry Trainwreck. When God shuts a door, he opens a window, but these are mere mortals, and so they only manage to find a place to sit: Don and his new business partners on the overstuffed chairs of the Pierre hotel, Betty in a first class plane seat on her way to Reno for a quickie divorce.

The episode begins with Don waking up in the spare room that we’ve seen both Grandpa and baby Gene sleeping in, making Don a cross between a newborn and a dead man, which is exactly right for someone who in the course of a couple days ends one life and starts another. Learning from Connie Hilton that both Sterling-Cooper and its parent company PPL have been bought by McCann-Erickson, which Don sees as “a sausage factory,” he quickly decides he doesn’t want to be the “prize pig” that Connie assures him he’ll be there (after all, pigs get ground up into sausages). Don’s already been courted by McCann and turned them down (in Season 1), and his contract with SC has felt imprisoning enough – he’s not about to get lost in the crowd at a larger agency.

But when Don tries to lay some Oedipal accusations on Hilton, blaming him for the contract he finds himself stuck in and rightly accusing Hilton of being manipulative with all the “you’re like a son to me” talk, Connie returns the serve ferociously, posing a question that will recur throughout the episode, of what kind of man Don Draper is and what he really wants:

I got everything I have on my own. It’s made me immune to those who complain and cry because they can’t. I didn’t take you for one of them, Don. Are you?

From that Father Dearest moment with Hilton, Don flashes back to the Depression of his childhood, when Archie pulled out of a farmers' cooperative because the agreed-upon prices for crops fell too low, stubbornly refusing to sell until the bank’s about to take the farm – precipitating not just the loss of it, but (we presume) his own death in a drunken barn accident. Determined not to die a dog’s death like his father, and fired up by Hilton’s challenge, Don wakes up Bert and proposes that they buy the agency back only to become infuriated by Bert’s initial resignation and unwillingness to gamble his fortune:

Bert: Young men love risk because they can’t imagine consequences.

Don: And you old men love building golden tombs and sealing us in with you.

I think that exchange might be a paraphrase of a line from the movie Troy, “Old men talk and young men die," but in any case Don’s entreaty “I want to work. I want to build something. How can you not understand that?” seems to exert a powerful pseudo-parental guilt on Bert. The sleepy old lion bestirs himself and goes back on the hunt, helping Don convince Roger to join them, lest he end up one of those men who retire only to die a few years later because they’ve “lost their appetite.” (Translation: Be a man or lose your dick. Or is that your Don?)

Proving that mens’ relationships are far more simple or sensible or something of that sort, Don quickly makes peace with Roger by acknowledging that he can’t do what Roger does with clients:

Don: I was wrong. I can sell ideas but I’m not an account man.

Roger: You’re not good at relationships because you don’t value them.

Don: I value my relationship with you.

With the Three Musketeers back together, it’s on to figuring out how to save the agency. Lane Pryce at first throws cold water on their idea to outbid McCann, saying it’s only SC that’s being sold and it’s a done deal, only to have his own ice facial when he finds out that PPL is indeed being sold and he’ll be just another brick in the wall at the new firm. Having been liberated from merry old England by this news, he’s free to join the colonist revolutionaries in their plans to overthrow the king. (Thus far proving right my prediction last week of how this plot would go….)

But as usual the person who makes it all work is Don, having one of his trademark flashes of creative genius on how to dream the impossible dream and undertake the illegal mutiny without getting sued. He suggests that Lane fire the three partners, thus freeing them from their contracts and enabling them to start a new agency right away. Lane puts up about as much resistance to this idea as a drunk co-ed at a frat party before devising a way to make it work: He’ll Telex the jolly old home office that afternoon and given the time difference, they won’t get the news till Monday morning, by which time the pirates of Sterling Cooper will have made off with the booty of as many accounts as they can. And people think modern technology makes their lives better. Just try pulling this coup off in the age of email, faxes and texts!

As the principals go about assembling their Impossible Mission Force, it’s gratifying to see that they pick our favorite characters to take along with them: Peggy, Pete, Harry and, in Roger’s one moment of inspiration, Joan. For of course Joan is the one person who actually knows where the files (and probably the bodies) are buried, as well as being absolutely crackerjack at organizing their new venture from top to bottom. Pete’s in for a slice of partnership and possibly a title with no adjectives in it, Harry’s in to become Head of Media, and Peggy’s in it just for the chance to say “No” when Roger asks her to get him some coffee. They soon set about liberating as much material from the office over the weekend as they can, while purloining the clients needed to get up and running. (Sadly, the keystone account status of Lucky Strikes means Sal’s not going to be invited back any time soon, but perhaps next season Lee Junior will run off to Hollywood and abandon the tebacky business so we can get our Sal back.)

I want to be a partner and I want my name in the lobby. ~ Pete

There’s not going to be a lobby. ~ Don

Nothing good ever came from seeking revenge. ~ Lane Pryce

As one new partnership comes together, another comes apart. With his marriage to Roger back on, Don comes home only to find out his other one is off, when Betty tells him she’s lawyered up and he should, too. His reaction illustrates one big reason Betty wants out:

Don: You haven’t been yourself. Maybe you need to see a doctor -- a good one this time.

Betty: Because I’d have to be sick to want out of this?

It’s hard to reconcile the Don who is so intuitive about what consumers and clients want with the man who’s so utterly hopeless at his personal relationships. He knows how to lie and manipulate, and even how to be honest when he really really has to be, but he doesn’t know how to hear honesty about himself. He has to deflect it and make it entirely about the other person. And yet in this episode he makes progress, helped along by the other main woman in his life, Peggy. Throughout this episode, Don’s relationships with her and Betty are juxtaposed and played off each other, as the two main women in his life stand up to him in ways they never have, in one case to dissolve a partnership, and in the other, to form one, of equals.

We’re not surprised that the first person Don wants in his new agency is Peggy, but he’s initially as clueless and insensitive with her as he is with Betty, expecting her to simply follow him, prompting a long overdue speech from Peggy:

Peggy: You just assume I’ll do whatever you say, just follow you like some nervous poodle.

Don: I’m not going to beg you.

Peggy: Beg me? You didn’t even ask me. […] I’ve had other offers, you know. They came with a sales pitch about opportunity. Everyone thinks you do all my work, even you. I don’t want to make a career out of being there so you can kick me when you fail.

It’s only after he learns from Roger (in a drunken slip of the lip) that Betty is involved with Henry that Don comes to appreciate Peggy, enacting a seeming split of good girl/bad woman (reminiscent of the Jackie vs. Marilyn bra campaign) with Betty’s demotion resulting in Peggy’s literal promotion. Shocked to learn that his sanctimonious wife has been stepping out on him, Don confronts Betty with an inversion of his usual admonition that she go to sleep – demanding that she “wake up” and tell him who Henry Francis is. Betty too switches roles, answering with the Don Draperesque lie, “No one.” But having taught her that game, Don isn’t fooled, and wants her to recognize that she’s as flawed and venal as he is, keeping her own secrets while hiding behind a self-righteous façade:

Because you’re good and everyone else in the world is bad. You’re so hurt, you’re so brave with your little white nose in the air. All along you’ve been building a life raft.

Don of course has had his own life raft built, stocked and pointed towards Tahiti more than once on this series, but beyond simply being hypocritical, it’s his ego that can’t bear the blow. What is really infuriating is that Betty has found him wanting as a man, causing him to snarl, “You got everything you ever wanted and now I’m not good enough for some spoiled Mainline brat” -- an accusation Betty lets soak in like poison by retorting, “That’s right.” And when he threatens to cut her off financially and take the kids because they’d be better off with him, Betty has her own weapon ready and loaded: “Don’t threaten me. I know all about you.” Don’s only response to this is to call Betty a whore, which come to think of it…is what his mother was. So I guess Betty has that Madonna/Whore thing covered from both ends.

After the late night drama, it seems for a moment that Don has come to terms with the divorce when he and Betty sit down to have that agonizing ritual of modern life, Telling the Children About the Divorce. But even as Betty shakes her head in contradiction and frustration, he fudges and says it’s only temporary, and it’s up to another little woman, Sally Draper, to set him straight:

Don: I’m not going. I’m just living elsewhere.

Sally: That’s going. You say things and you don’t mean them and you can’t just do that. You said you’d always come home.

Don: I will. It’s just a different home.

Is it just me, or is Sally showing both her father’s gift with words and her mother’s gimlet-eyed observation of Don’s behavior? In any case, while he comforts Bobby lovingly, Don seems chastened by Sally’s words, although the woman who benefits from that change of heart is Peggy, on whose doorstep he appears both to apologize and to lure to his new company, acknowledging that he’s seen her an extension of himself when she’s not. But after this budding attempt at seeing women as autonomous creatures, Don slips back into merging himself with Peggy, casting them as twin souls who see the world differently because of their secrets and pain:

There are people out there who buy things. People like you and me and something happened. Something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves is gone. And nobody understands that. But you do and that’s very valuable.

In a strange shadow of a proposal, far more romantic and satisfying than the overtures she’s been getting from that hickey-biter Duck, Don all but goes down on one knee to woo her, allaying her fears that he’ll never speak to her again if she says No by assuring her that he’ll never stop trying to win her over. We don’t need to hear Peggy’s answer to know that this is one offer she can’t refuse.

We got nothing and we’re about to have less. ~ Don’s stepmother

Throughout the episode, we’re faced with the idea of family: What is it? The one you are born with? The one you grow up with? Or the ones you make, both in your home and at work?

Family is what Don has always been running from: the sordid circumstances of his birth, the poverty and abuse in his upbringing, the stealing of another man’s family name. Family is what he’s avoided, having formed the façade of one with Betty but failing to commit himself fully to it, and signing a contract at work but only under duress and due to the lure of a man who called him“Son” and then betrayed him, as his own father did.

The loss of fathers weighs heavily on Don in this episode, and yet we know from what he’s told Betty that his life actually got better after Archie died, because his stepmother remarried a man who was good to Don. But we feel that Don’s children would be worse off without him, and not just because they sadly plead for him not to leave (as all children do when told their parents are divorcing) but because we’re suspicious of the man who wants to be their stepfather – a man who doesn’t want Betty to take any money from Don but instead to rely entirely on him for both her own and her children’s welfare.

Apparently unversed in Freud despite her time on the shrink’s couch, and relying instead on her fantasy time on the fainting couch, Betty fails to see that she’s about to marry her father, and is trading a man who won’t be controlled by her for a man who wants to control her. But that’s what you get when you divorce a man who's a mystery for one who’s an enigma. In her haste to leave Don, Betty seems unconcerned about the fact that she knows even less about Henry than she did about Don before marrying him. As she jets towards Reno, we can only reflect that married she still may be, but divorced from reality she has always been.

Don ends the episode heading alone towards a hotel with suitcases in hand – a lonely image that would seem worthy of Edward Hopper, except for what came before it, which is the formation of a new family. Having phoned Betty and given her his promise that he’ll give her no problem with the divorce, and telling her he hopes that she gets what she’s always wanted (ah, if only she knew what that was!), Don returns to see everyone working cheerfully together, excited by the adventure of starting a new company.

The proud paterfamilias stands in the corner, looking a bit stunned at the family he’s created out of seeming disaster, and happy to be in their midst. We’ve seen him in hotel rooms many times before – in solitude, in meetings and in flagrante delicto – but this is the first time we’ve seen him look at home, even if it's the "different home" that he told Sally he was going to. While the episode started with his father breaking up a cooperative, Don has instead formed one, in both senses of that word, and in doing so, may have finally found a group that he can actually see himself in. Earlier, as they’d left the pillaged SC offices, Roger and Don had paused for one last look:

Roger: How long do you think it will take us to be in a place like this again?

Don: I never saw myself working in a place like this.

We know (even if Roger doesn’t) that Don’s remark has two meanings – both that he ‘s succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, but also that the stuffy corporate life isn’t what he’d wanted – or wants. All along, he’s felt trapped in the gleaming modern offices of SC, just he’s felt trapped in his comfortable suburban married life. He ends the season liberated, facing an unknown future in which anything can happen – and we viewers also have no idea where these characters may end up. In telling the kids about the divorce, Don hedges with “It’ll just be temporary,” while Betty sounds decisive, “It’ll be different.” And yet it seems that they are both wrong. Betty’s headed for a temporary change of man and marriage that will end up much the same, and it’s Don who seems headed for something truly different, even if it's with the same familiar people.

Isn’t this exciting? ~ Trudy

Internet Not Socially Isolating, Study Finds

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 14:11:36 -0500

We can all stop worrying about our OS addiction as well as our Facebook obsession and LinkedIn updating compulsion. A study by the Pew Center, a prestigious nonprofit think tank in Wahington D.C., has concluded that users of the internet and mobile media are not losers, um, socially isolated.

"Social isolation" is defined as whether someone has a confidant they can talk to about “important matters.” A different study conducted in 2006 by three sociologists (Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin and Matthew Brashears) resulted in 25% of respondents saying they didn’t have such a person in their lives compared with only 10% who felt that way in 1985 – and the researchers suggested that the Internet might be to blame for the change.

The Pew study confirmed that “discussion networks” of core trusted friends and family have indeed shrunk by one-third (from an average of 3 to just 2 for each of us) since 1985. But by adding in questions on Internet and mobile phone use, the Pew study came up with a cheerier conclusion: It’s not the internet’s fault! In fact, the internet might be good for you.

Some highlights from the report (as summarized by the SF Chronicle article linked above) with my added commentary in italics:

45 percent of Americans discuss important matters with someone who is not a family member, but Internet users are 55 percent more likely to have a non-family discussion partner. Who they tell things that their family and friends have no idea about.
Internet users are 38 percent less likely to rely exclusively on their spouses or partners as discussion confidants. Because they have “special friends”…that they have “special times” with online.
Internet users who upload photos to share online are 61 percent more likely to have discussion partners that cross political lines. Who they argue with while posting doctored photos of Sarah Palin and Obama.
Those who maintain a blog are 95 percent more likely to discuss important issues with a person of another race, while heavy home Internet users are 53 percent more likely to have a confidant of a different race. Whether they know it or not. Online is color-blind.
Users of social networks are 30% less likely to know their neighbors. At least by their real names.

Whew! Now that we’ve settled that, we can all go back to ignoring our friends and family in order to spend more time online. As long as you find someone of a different race or political party and tell them your deepest darkest secrets, you're perfectly healthy.

The Grown-Ups: Mad Men, Season 3, Episode 12

Mon, 2 Nov 2009 06:11:41 -0500

What the hell’s going on? ~ Don

I just want to see what’s going on. ~ Duck
What’s going on? ~ Peggy

My god, what happened? ~ Peggy

What is going on? – Betty

Well, now we know where Marvin Gaye got the idea.

It’s a cliché that the 1950’s ended – and that the 1960’s truly began -- with JFK’s assassination on November 22, 1963, but like many clichés, it has some truth to it. Mad Men runs with this theory in “The Grown-Ups,” an episode which does what creator Matthew Weiner swore not to do, covering an event that (pardon the pun) has been done to death, and showing how it affected America, including by starting an irrevocable splintering process between the kids and the adults, and calling into question who "the grown-ups" really were. Are they the ones who have the power and the money, the titles and positions, or are they the ones who decide that those formerly precious things are now worthless, and that life is about other values, like peace and love and personal satisfaction, thus upending the entire culture?

As Roger says at his daughter’s wedding, “The adults, we all want to be strong for you but your spirit, your love, your hope, is giving us strength.” In the next several years, these grown-up children will end a war, start a sexual revolution and change the culture for women, minorities, gays and, well, yes, even the white guys. If for one brief shining moment there was Camelot, so too will there be Woodstock, and other moments that bring hope for societal change, before America slides back into self-absorption and economic decline in the 70’s.

Obviously we’re all in a different mood. ~ Roger

The fateful news comes down as tragedy always does, while people are going about their ordinary, self-centered lives: Roger’s daughter Margaret is throwing a childish tantrum, threatening to cancel her wedding in a pique about her stepmother Jane, who keeps putting her high-heeled foot in things, and violating the Sterling rules of etiquette. Pete is brainstorming with Harry about how to save his career now that he’s lost the tug of war with Cosgrove to be Head of Accounts (although Lane Pryce has issued a Solomonic pair of titles to save Pete’s pride -- and not coincidentally, his loyal clients). And Duck’s so eager to fuck that he unplugs the breaking news before Peggy can see it and he loses the chance to nail her during a nooner (ick!). Oh, what fools these mortals be!

Can you turn that off? ~ Pete about the TV, just before the announcement

Not really. ~ Harry

But this news is too big to fail…breaking through even these epic layers of self-absorption to mesmerize everyone for days on end. And while some of the adults fall apart, the kids turn out to be alright.

Always a strange mix of childishness and forward thinking, Pete takes the assassination quite personally, perhaps because it comes on the heels of his demotion, which severed his investment in the status quo. The very structure he’s based his life on is coming apart, and he has no idea where he stands, explaining his demotion to Trudy as a stream of jabberwocky (a preview of how formal titles will soon be seen by much of his generation):

Kenny is senior something of something accounts and I’m not…I’m accounts something… I couldn’t even hear. All I saw was his frog like mouth flapping.

His initial shock at the assassination turning to anger, Pete seizes the chance for personal growth, which is a rather surprising development for a man who starts out the episode in a fetal position, childishly demanding hot cocoa. By its end, he and Trudy have suddenly stopped being conformist social climbers playing by the same rules their parents did and scheming how to save Pete’s career and become turtle-necked young rebels refusing to leave their apartment, where they watch TV endlessly and ponder conspiracy theories. Pete even writes more future Who lyrics by arguing that the new boss is the same as the old boss, and that LBJ will merely maintain the status quo that the youthful JFK would have overturned.

I feel like I’ve done a lot with what I’ve been given in this arbitrary scheme. ~ Pete

How would you know that’s what a monster looks like? ~ Jane

Even the always-shallow Jane seems to suddenly know what time it is, swinging abruptly from telling her step-daughter to cater to her husband in every way to railing at Roger for trying to tell her what to do and observing that he’s singing the same old song men always have, jeering “I’ve heard your toast a million times,” but “The President’s dead” and everything has changed, so she's going to do whatever she wants, Roger be damned.

I don’t know what kind of world you live in, but I’m the good person here. ~ Jane

Like a drowning man treading water, Roger spends much of the episode trying to save his daughter’s ill-fated wedding on day after the assassination, “consolidating” the sparsely attended tables at the reception like a man rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, and using his ever-reliable speechmaking skills to offer an amusing toast to his ex-wife, who he calls a lioness (and who we see he has come to value more since the divorce). Afterwards, spent and as serious as we’ve ever seen him, he seeks solace in a phone call to Joan, who dishes out her usual wisdom by observing that at Greg’s hospital, babies are still being born and people are still getting sick, and life goes on. But when she senses that Roger is truly sad, she comforts him, and here the generation gap doesn’t matter, as we see once again that these two speak the same language in a way they don’t with anyone else.

I needed to talk to you. Nobody else is saying the right thing about this. ~ Roger to Joan

I don’t know where to begin. ~ Betty

Never the deepest dish on the buffet, Betty only gets part of the message of change. She starts the episode absurdly grateful just to find that Don’s left the bed at night not to desert her yet again but to tend their crying baby, and ends it by saying there’s no point to her marriage. In-between, feelings she’s held in for a lifetime seem to pour out in a torrent of tears triggered by JFK’s death. While it’s gratifying that she stands up to Don and a stunning relief to see her finally feel something as intensely as the grief, shock and anger she displays, Betty takes two steps forward only to take one giant step back.

Don: Why are the kids watching this?
Betty: What am I supposed to do, Don? Am I supposed to keep it from them?
Don: Why don’t you take a pill and lie down?

In letting the kids watch the TV coverage, a fact that Don is horrified by, Betty shows how far she’s come from the days of not wanting Sally to grieve Grandpa Gene. Having recently ripped the truth out of Don (acting a bit like a lioness herself), she wants no more deception or avoidance, and sits openly weeping on the couch with Carla as a bewildered Sally puts her arm around her in comfort, a gesture Betty accepts, giving us hope that her love for her children may have merely been hibernating, not absent. While Don continues to act as if life can go on as before, Betty is having none of that:

Don: Hey, everything’s going to be fine.
Betty: How do you know that?

In repeatedly rejecting Don’s formulaic and empty reassurances, Betty symbolizes another huge societal shift: The turning of women from reliance on men to make things feel (and be) all right to thinking and acting for themselves. Throughout the episode, we see women question men and refuse the old orders or platitudes. Not just a societal but a personal trust has been ripped in half, and it can’t be put back together as easily as men like Don seem to think, which leaves a man who has made a living (and a false life) out of how he talks to people truly bewildered at the sudden collapse of his livelihood.

What happened? ~ Sally
Nothing, go upstairs. ~ Don

But realistically enough, Betty hasn’t changed as radically as we might wish -- rejecting Don and embracing her feelings is as far as she can go. Having seen Henry Farrell at Margaret Sterling’s wedding, she slips out to meet him on the day of JFK’s funeral, seeking comfort in yet another authoritative man who wants to take care of her. Betty, Betty, Betty – can’t you see that Door #2 holds the same booby prize as Door #1 did?

True, Henry does look like classic “second husband” material – the faithful, boring man you settle down with after the sexy dangerous one who broke your heart, taking comfort in the knowledge that he will continue to look at you worshipfully even as his prostate fails and your breasts sag. After soberly declaring that he’s “not in love with the tragedy of this thing” and wants no secret Romeo and Juliet affair, Henry stuns Betty by saying that he wants to marry her (after they’ve shared one coffee date, a furtive kiss and some puerile letters!) and inanely wishes he could cheer her up by taking her to her favorite movie (Singin’ in the Rain, she confesses – a classic romantic musical, but tellingly, also about the end of an era -- of silent movies).

We expect or at least hope that the newly awakened Betty will laugh him off or give him the same bitter rejection she does Don, but instead she smiles, seems reassured, kisses him passionately (ick!) and goes home to have it out with Don. (Like many women, she seems only ready to give up one man when she knows she has another lined up to take his place.)

Betty: I want to scream at you for ruining all this. But then you’d try to fix it and there’s no point. There’s no point, Don.
Don: You’re very upset, I understand. I know it’s painful but it’s going to pass.

Stunned when Betty tells him she no longer loves him, Don tries more condescending reassurances, but the days of that working on Betty are past, and, like her, we know he’s really trying to convince himself that she’ll wake up and be her old self in the morning. While he staggers up to their bedroom in the dark, looking shrunken and devastated by her rejection, Betty settles in to watch the TV, looking strangely at peace even as the endless reality of death unspools before her eyes as it has across the entire nation for days.

Shot has been fired….you cannot hear it in this version of the tape. ~ Newscaster about the slo-mo silent replay of Oswald’s death.

In the morning – a National Day of Mourning on which very few people would be working -- Don leaves the icy house (around which cold fall winds can be heard whistling like a man walking past a graveyard), as well as his equally icy wife and his puzzled children, to flee to the safety and comfort of his remaining zone of power, the office (and only because, as he says, “all the bars are closed.”) There he finds the one person we’d expect, his female counterpart and protégée, Peggy, who has fled her sister’s house because her mother’s grief left no room for anyone else’s feelings, just as Betty’s left no room for Don’s. Ambition undimmed, Peggy’s on the job as always, realizing that the upcoming Aqua Net hairspray campaign that she created has to be killed.

No moment tells us what’s changed more shockingly than the reveal of the storyboards for a TV commercial featuring two couples in an open convertible. What a few weeks before was just an innocent story is now an uncanny duplicate of the Zapruder film, a romance turned to tragedy. We’ve left the era of women being worried about their hair being blown around and entered the era of men worrying about their heads being blown off – in both the U.S. and Viet Nam. The Aqua Net 50’s and the early 60’s of JFK’s New Frontier, with its promise of shiny happy change, are both over, and the mid to late 60’s – which will bring darker, grimmer and more profound changes to America -- have begun.

Are we going to the funeral? ~ Bobby