Those of us who saw the riveting episode of “Mad Men” last night were reminded that, on the day after the Kennedy assassination, life went on — but barely.
In the episode, there were uncanny parallels to 9/11, in the way television coverage dominated our lives on that day, and in the shared sense of collective grief and fear and uncertainty.
But for several characters on the show, it cast a long shadow over one of the series’ most anticipated events, the wedding of Roger Sterling’s daughter, on November 23rd.
The New York Times picks up the story:
“This could have been an awful day,” said the character Roger Sterling on Sunday night’s episode of “Mad Men,” speaking to a half-empty wedding reception. “But here we are, not watching TV, but together watching the two of you.”
The outcome of the Sterling wedding was hotly anticipated among fans of the show ever since this season’s second episode, which was broadcast Aug. 23. In it, Margaret Sterling, the daughter of one of the guys with his name on the door at the Sterling Cooper ad agency, shows her father, Roger, the freshly minted invitation to her wedding, still months away: Nov. 23, 1963. The camera lingered on the invitation itself, inviting reality to dawn on the audience. The date is one day after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
In real life, of course, no one saw this coming. Real-life brides-to-be had watched as the day they had been planning for months was pulled out of their control, and the nation’s grief and confusion — Was there a plot? Were others still at large? — threatened to drown out their wedding bells completely.
City Room called up The New York Times from Sunday, Nov. 24, 1963, and had a look at the wedding announcements. Amid the pillbox-topped veils, the hair flips, the orchids and stephanotis, we found a few New Yorkers who were actually married the day the Sterling wedding was supposed to have taken place. At least some of the announcements were written before the actual wedding day, so there was no way of knowing whether every one of those weddings went off as planned.
City Room contacted three former New Yorkers who were in the paper, and they recalled that day…
Continue at the link for the rest.
posted November 2, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Interesting aticle, as is Mad Men, especially if you were a kid in the 60′s like I was. For me, MM takes me back as an adult to see my life as a kid. I find I even understand my parents more, especially my mom, having had no real idea how really repressed women were back then. I have the DVD’s and have learned a lot from the “extra footage” (in some ways more interesting than the episodes). One thing for certain, the reseach in top notch; NOTHING is “not as it was.” Even the scene where Bets shoots the birds was taken from one of the writer’s real life experience of what her mom did after her neighbor got mad after the dog ate one of them (pigeons). The MM writer said she remembered her mom taking a BB gun into the back yard and just shooting them all down. I could SOooo see my own mom doing that.
As for the wedding cancellations, it’s also interesting to note that in national tragic situations, evil tends to stop too! Father Corapi ofen mentions that after 911, there was not one abortion in NYC in over a week.
On the other hand, if God forbid Obama was killed, I wouldn’t expect life to “barely go on” as was the case in 1963. Not being a fan by any stretch of the imagination, I would certainly ‘respect’ the death of a president, and I would pray for him/family/country, but would have absolutely NO interest whatsoever in watching the coverage. This article made me ask myself why that is, after all, I’m usually glued to presidental funerals (even found myself watching Fords).
posted November 2, 2009 at 2:24 pm
That same day the great C.S. Lewis passed away in England.
posted November 3, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Aldous Huxley also died on the same date. Peter Kreeft, a professor who writes extensively about God and the Church, has written an interesting little book called “Between Heaven and Hell” in which he creates an imaginary dialogue between the three, each representing a strand of belief. Lewis represents Orthodox Christianity, Kennedy a “modernist” view of the Church and Huxley (a Buddhist) the view of estern religious. It’s quite lively and interesting.