CSotD: Unrepressed memories
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Okay, after two days of "Guess you had to be there" Andy Rooneyisms, here's a Pardon My Planet that falls under the category of "I was there and I still don't believe it."
While the young folks — that is, everyone under about 55 — get all rhapsodic about "Mad Men," I watched a little bit and said, "Yeah, I don't need the flashbacks, thanks."
The parts they got wrong were annoying, but the parts they got right … eeesh. What the hell were we thinking?
What the hell was I thinking?
Well, I was thinking about making a living. (See below, "Juxtaposition of the Day.") Still, one should take a little responsibility …
We can start with the lunches, when I was selling commercial time for a TV station. Six martinis is comic exaggeration, but three isn't. You'd call a client, you'd meet at the restaurant. Start with a martini or a Manhattan, have some lunch, have two more drinks, head back to the office.
Never mind the fact that you drove. Just putting in four more hours on three drinks was pointless. Who the hell shows up for work drunk?
Right. We did.
Well, we showed up for work sober. Then we got drunk.
And it wasn't always with a client. My boss and I would go out, have lunch and a few pops and shoot the breeze. He'd just scribble some random client's name on the tab to get it past the bookkeeper at the station.
One time, when we had gotten a little closer to those six martinis, he asked "Who do you want to be today?" and I gave a wise-ass answer based on the then-current Bicentennial hoopla and he laughed and signed the tab.
A month later, the station was sold and the new VP/station manager arrived in town. As part of the process, he met with the sales manager to go over things, and Larry said he walked in and saw the restaurant tabs on the guy's desk. Sticking out of the pile, he could see the corner of the one that listed the client as "James Madison, Virginia Legislature," which, at an opportune moment, he snagged and shoved into his pocket.
Fortunately, the new VP/station manager was also an alcoholic and so the two of them got along pretty well until the ax fell on both their heads, by which time I was long gone.
Earlier, I'd freelanced for a small agency in Denver, and amassed other painfully-amusing-in-retrospect stories, like the brochure we did for an old hotel in Estes Park which was being turned into condos (no, not that one), based on the theme "Own a Piece of the Gracious Past."
When it opened, we went up for the big event, which featured some ghastly champagne — Franzia Brothers or Cribari, I forget which — and a chance for the artist and I to actually tour the place we had never seen but had fulsomely (yes, that's the word I want) praised in terms of Scott and Zelda but which we now realized was more in line with the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
The developer — and I am not making this up — went on to become a major player in the prison privatization racket, I suppose on the theory that you could make the rooms even less appealing if their prospective residents weren't going to have any choice in the matter.
We also did a brochure for a swingin' singles apartment complex called "Woodsmoke," into the text of which the client had the word "natural" inserted before every noun, because each apartment had its own fireplace. The brochure came with a 45 rpm record of a John Denver knockoff singing, "Woodsmoke is my Rocky Mountain home, where everything I want to have is there to call my own …"
For some reason, the agency owner decided I should meet the guy who recorded the jingle, so we went to his house and down to his basement recording studio and watched four people finally sing a jingle perfectly, only to have the take ruined by one of his kids flushing the toilet upstairs.
Then we piled into the client's car and went to a nightclub, where he got up on stage — we were well past six martinis by now — and introduced me as Stanley Myron Handelman, who was at the time a regular on Dean Martin and Johnny Carson's shows. And so I spent the evening signing autographs and declining invitations to dance from young drunken women with large glowering drunken boyfriends.
Worst part of it is that the guys who make the most money doing all this are the ones who are not only not disgusted by the life, but who enjoy it and are good at living it.
And, yes, I suppose that's part of the message of Mad Men, but if people really got it, they'd be repulsed by the show instead of fascinated. There's an interesting exploration of that phenomenon in the current New Yorker, by the way, but …
… the good doctor speaks for me.
Juxtaposition of the Day
(Agnes)
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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