I Am Sally Draper

     Spoiler alert:  I'm not gonna post a spoiler.

     I will say I was satisfied with the final Mad Men episode. I know some people were disappointed, but some people will always be disappointed. 

     I caught a little of the marathon during the week before the finale and enjoyed many of the comments from viewers, especially from the woman who saw the show as Sally Draper's story. It wasn't until she put it in words that I realized that's exactly the way I saw it. 

     Sally was the character I could relate to. I wasn't a grown-up in the 60s. I didn't know what the workplace looked like. I remember my father wearing a suit and a fedora to work and my mother a housedress around the house. I saw the era and the show through the same eyes as Sally. 

     I noticed all the things that have changed:  the smoking mostly, but also the drinks cart in the offices. Sure, I worked places where there was always a bottle of whiskey under the darkroom sink. And somebody always had a bottle of bourbon in the lower right-hand desk drawer. But that was for emergencies, not everyday consumption. I loved watching the clothes go from shirtwaists to miniskirts. And the men's hair creep below their collars. I am still nostalgic for when men wore their hair longer. It just looked better. 

     I also noticed the things that haven't changed all that much. There is still a glass ceiling and there are still people (men) who are clueless about it. One of my favorite moments of the show was when Peggy pointed out to her relentlessly liberal boyfriend during one of his rants about his support of  "the Negroes" that "I can't do those things, either." Classic moment.

     Watching Sally grow up and figure out the grownups around her was a constant reminder of my own place in that era. I didn't see some of the more shocking things she saw, but I did discover the people who were running the world were seriously flawed. Sally's story helped us remember it was the WWII/Korea generation that created the Baby Boomers.

     Between bringing in the real events and the real products of the times and presenting Sally's view, Mad Men succeeded as both a history lesson and a cautionary tale.