Picket Fence Post

Item #1: Mad Men Concludes Third Season

Sunday nights are going to seem so dull without those Mad Men characters to entertain and intrigue me. The third season of AMC’s super-cool 1960s drama came to an end last Sunday, capped by one of the best season finales I’ve seen, including a series of intense and poignant scenes among the members of the Draper family. (See my review of the finale here.)

When the season began, Don and Betty had just reunited after she’d kicked him out for his philandering. (Betty only let Don return home because she learned she was pregnant with baby number three.) After one of the most harrowing depictions of childbirth I’ve seen on TV, Betty and Don enjoyed a brief period of emotional connection, topped by a sexy jaunt to Rome as Betty accompanied Don on a business trip. However as soon as they got home, their romantic bubble burst. By the end of the season, Betty learned that her husband had been living under a fake identity, had lied to her about his background and she decided she no longer loved him. After having been pursued by a divorced political aide to the governor who hit on her when he saw a pregnant Betty at a social event, Betty decided to divorce Don in order to marry this other guy who she barely knows.

One of the most heart-wrenching moments of the season came in the finale, when Betty and Don sat their grade school aged children down to tell them that Don was moving out of the house. The little boy clung to his father — literally wrapped his limbs around his dad’s body — while the older, wiser daughter asked her mother if Betty was responsible for driving him away like the last time. Divorce, when children are involved, is messy. When the Drapers are involved, I’ll bet things’ll be extra messy. Next season, we’ll likely see the impact of a divorce on young children, up close and personal. The last TV shows which dramatized this in any real way, without sugarcoating it, were the second season of HBO’s In Treatment and the canceled Sela Ward drama Once and Again.

Item #2: Balloon Boy’s Parents Plead Guilty

The parents of the infamous Balloon Boy, the ones who perpetrated the hoax on the country – telling authorities, while the mother wept into the phone to the 9-1-1 operator, that their young son was on board a runaway helium balloon floating helplessly over Colorado skies — have pleaded guilty to various complaints, according to the Associated Press.

Richard Heene pleaded guilty to the felony charge of “knowingly and falsely influencing the sheriff,” AP reported, while Mayumi Heene pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge of filing a false report to emergency services. A judge will sentence them on Dec. 23.

‘Nuf said.

Item #3: Christmas Card Photos

I’ve been trying to tackle the whole Christmas card photo business — because who, in this day and age, DOESN’T include a photo of the kids in their Christmas cards – in bits and pieces, particularly because we’re hoping to use a photo(s) of the kids AND the Picket Fence Post puppy, Max.

Every year it’s almost as if I wipe from my mind the fact that it’s a nightmare to take a good photo for the family Christmas card. Throw an unpredictable puppy into the mix and I realize that I’ve got my work cut out for me. I already had one photo session with Max, trying to get some good shots of him and realize I’m going to need a lot of “holiday cheer” in order to get a halfway decent snapshot.

Item #4: What the ‘Meep?’

From the everyone’s-gone-nuts files, the principal of a Massachusetts high school has forbidden students from using the word, “meep.” No lie. You say, “meep,” and you could get suspended. School officials said that students had been using the word in a disruptive way and wouldn’t cease and desist.

Seriously, is this really the best way to go? What if students then move on to another word, like, oh, I don’t know, “leap” or “pear” or “deet?” Last time I checked, there were quite a number of single-syllable words out there that students could adopt and utilize in an annoying fashion. My kids can make the word, “mom” sound horrifically irritating. Is the principal going to ban all of the one-syllable words? Instead of banning a silly word like “meep,” why not just discipline students for bad behavior?

Image credit: Carin Baer/AMC.

Mad Men Returns

Have I mentioned that Mad Men’s third season premieres on Sunday night on AMC? I think I may have, once or twice.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a tad bit obsessed with the award-winning drama set in the 1960s which follows the (mostly) men who work for a Manhattan ad agency and their families. I’ve been counting down the days until new episodes air, so much so that I think The Spouse is jealous of my crush on Don Draper (Jon Hamm). He jokes that Mad Men is all I’ve been talking about lately. Of course he’s wrong. Kind of.

Speaking of Don Draper . . . when we last saw the character at the end of the sophomore season,  his wife/at-home mother of his children, Betty (January Jones) had just allowed him to move back into their suburban home. Betty had made Don spend several weeks in a hotel after he humiliated her by cheating on her AGAIN, this time with an older business associate whose husband was Don’s client. However after learning she was pregnant with her third child, Betty reluctantly decided to proceed with the pregnancy (after flirting with the idea of obtaining an illegal abortion, it was 1962) and let Don back home. The question remains about whether she’s forgiven him or whether he’s going to stop his rampant cheating.

My Pop Culture column this week at Mommy Track’d is all about not just Betty, but all the women of Mad Men.

Oh, Miley

Miley, Miley, Miley. I don’t know what to make of the recent evolution of this 16-year-old Disney star, the face of the Hannah Montana franchise, of which my 10-year-old daughter is so fond.

 What I’ve been seeing as of late has not been promising.

Take, for example, her performance at this week’s Teen Choice Awards – and the ensuing debate over whether she was actually pole dancing while dressed in sexy, butt-revealing attire backed up by dancers in bras and short-shorts – which made me deeply sad. Sure, a tween/teen star needs to evolve into a more mature image, take on older material in order to continue growing as an artist, but this road that Miley appears to be traversing . . . nothing good seems like it’s gonna come from this. Lest we forget, Britney Spears was once a squeaky clean Mouseketeer. And when Spears, I mean Cyrus, invoked Britney during her Choice Awards performance, I shuddered.

John Hughes, Creator of 1980s Teen Flicks

You might’ve heard that the director/writer of some of Generation X’s best loved teen films — Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Some Kind of Wonderful and Pretty in Pink– passed away last week. Since then, there’s been all manner of tribute and appreciations for Hughes, including a great one in the Boston Globe by Wesley Morris.

An excerpt, referencing the world of Hughes’ films:

“There was no war, no sweeping social movement during this period. Just Ronald Reagan and sad old Grenada. No one talked about race or AIDS. The world revolved around detention, crushes and proms. Sometimes it was just ‘Pretty in Pink.’ But what redeemed these movies was their sideways cool. May all so-called misfits be as hot as Eric Stoltz and Mary Stuart Masterson. And on his uneven playing field, Hughes did come up with achingly human characters. They were always on the sidelines or reluctant to get in the game — even their own. [Molly] Ringwald’s Samantha in ‘Sixteen Candles.’ [Jon] Cryer’s Duckie in ‘Pretty in Pink.’ Masterson’s Watts in ‘Some Kind of Wonderful.’ And, best of all, Jeannie Bueller and Cameron Frye in ‘Ferris Bueller.’ Jennifer Grey was the seething Cassandra of that movie, desperately trying to expose the little brother as the brat [Matthew] Broderick so star-makingly was.”

Do you have a favorite 1980s/Hughes flick? Mine’s a tie between Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club.

Image credit: Chris Pizzello/AP via Star-Ledger.

The only way The Spouse is gonna see me wearing a yellow polka dotted dress and heels while in the kitchen, looking like a happy domestic goddess is in this image, circa the 1960s and AMC’s Mad Men web site. (I couldn’t resist having my Mad Men doppelganger toting a newspaper. And coffee. Not unlike today, or most days when I have my morning java and read the newspaper. Except that I don’t dress like that.)

AMC’s Mad Men web site has a new app where you can Mad Men-yourself, select your body type, hair, eyes, nose, clothing, extras and your scene, anything from a bar with Don Draper and the offices of Sterling Cooper, to the Drapers’ kitchen with Betty. For this blog, I chose the latter. And then laughed at the unlikely image.

For those of you counting down at home, the third season featuring Don Draper & Co. premieres on August 16.

There’s this new film that’s recently been released and I’m in a quandary about it. It’s directed by Sam Mendes, the guy who directed last year’s major downer, 1950s-era Revolutionary Road  starring the wonderful Kate Winslet. I went into that film with big expectations, seeing that I’m such a Winslet fan, plus I was suckered in by the trailer. However as much as I wanted to, alas, I absolutely did not like the film. Hated the ending. And whenever I looked at Leonardo DiCaprio playing the thirtysomething suburban dad who takes the train into the city to work, I just kept thinking, “He’s no Don Draper.” (For the uninitiated few, Don Draper is the lead character – played by Jon Hamm – on the amazing AMC drama Mad Men.)

There were people in the theater watching Revolutionary Road with The Spouse and me, fellow suburban dwellers, who were laughing out loud at parts that were NOT funny, or at least they weren’t intended to be gut-busters. Afterwards, while I was in the restroom, a couple of women, friends I’m guessing, who’d seen the film spied The Spouse waiting in the hall and told him they felt sorry that he’d had to sit through it. One remarked, “My husband would kill me if I made him go see this.”

Hence my hesitation with Mendes’ new film, Away We Go, about a thirtysomething, unmarried and unmoored couple who are about to become first-time parents. After learning that the man’s parents are moving to another country, the couple decides they need to find the best location in which to raise their baby and, perhaps, be in close proximity to some family and friends. Their journey takes them to visit said friends and family all over the place where they observe all variety of parenting styles and attitudes, from completely laissez faire to some serious attachment parenting. It stars The Office’s John Krasinski and Saturday Night Live’s Maya Rudolph.

Although it’s garnered mixed reviews, I’m still tempted to see it because I don’t think I can rely on the movie reviewers, seeing as though they’re the ones who convinced me to go see Revolutionary Road in the first place. The Spouse and I don’t get to go out to many movies together, so I want to chose which films I see on the silver screen and blow babysitting money on wisely.

Has anyone seen it and if so, what did you think?

Are therea ny films to which you’ve had to literally drag your spouse and later regretted it? (Link to the film trailer here.)

Item #1: Primetime Adoption Stories

If you’ve been watching House, 30 Rock and/or Brothers & Sisters lately, you might’ve noticed that they have at least one thing in common: Storylines involving career-oriented women who are seeking to adopt children. Sadly, thus far in the season, none of the fictional women has had any good news to report, and, in at least one case, a woman’s busy work schedule was held against her. I wrote about these primetime adoption stories in a column over on Mommy Track’d.

Item #2: Proposed Ban on Fast Food Ads

Question for the universe: Who buys fast food for young children? The kids, who have no means of getting to McDonald’s and likely don’t have the spare cash for a Big Mac? No, it’s not the 3-year-old toddling down to the local fast food joint on his own. It’s the adults in that 3-year-old’s life who buy him the fatty food. Adults, my friends, can just say, “No,” no matter how many tempting McDonald’s ads the kids see on TV.

In fact the adults can use these ads as teachable moments to explain to their little charges how the folks who created the ads don’t care about children, that they’re just trying to persuade kids to spend their parents’ money and eat things that are bad for them. At the same time, the adults can explain the concept of moderation, that having a burger and fries every once and a while, is fine. If you don’t teach kids about moderation as well as how to say, “No” to tempting advertisements, you’re doing your offspring a disservice as we live in a world that’s saturated with ads and bad food. 

That being said, I, a big First Amendment cheerleader, think it’s unnecessary to enact a ban on fast food advertisements during kids’ programming, no matter what the National Institutes of Health and the National Bureau of Economic Research say in a new study, claiming that if there were a ban on such advertisements, childhood obesity could be cut by 18 percent. (If networks want to voluntarily suspend that type of advertising, that’s their decision.)

“The study measured the number of fast food ads kids watched and found a fast food TV ad ban for children’s programming would reduce the number of overweight children aged 3 to 11 by 18 percent, and for adolescents (12- to 18-year-olds) by 14 percent,” according to Ad Age.

There’s a button on TV remote controls that says “mute” which you can tell your children to push when an ad comes on TV. There are DVDs you could have them watch which are commercial-free. And there’s also another handy button you could also use. It says, “off.”

Item #3: Q&A with Blogging Sisters/Mad Men Fans

I’m so missing Mad Men these days. Sunday nights just aren’t the same. In a moment of missing Don Draper & Co., I decided to e-mail two sisters in the NYC area who blog about Mad Men on their witty site, Basket of Kisses (a reference to Peggy Olson’s genius quip from season one). They fielded several of my questions for my Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum blog Q&A including this one about Betty Draper:

Meredith: Betty Draper: Victim, emblematic of young mothers of her era, or narcissistic and spoiled?

Roberta Lipp, Basket of Kisses: Well, both. She is well educated, and now she is full-time devoted to making her house look sparkling and meals on the table. And I think that Don having a secret identity expands the metaphor of a young woman involved with a closed off man who feels like a stranger. But yes, she is spoiled and narcissistic. She has been taught that looks are a woman’s only value, and she looks like she looks. She has some character traits that I’m not a fan of. But I very much feel Betty’s pain. 

Read the entire Q&A here.

Image credit: Greg Gayne/Fox via TV Guide.

The Eldest Boy wanted me to buy him a $45 LaDainian Tomlinson jersey so he could dress up as the San Diego Chargers star for Halloween over his football gear.

Initially, I said, “No.” (Actually, in my head I thought of a more colorful response.)

Then I gave the request more thought. The Eldest Boy hadn’t been thrilled with the birthday present he received from The Spouse and I back in August. (In fact, it’s still sitting in the box in our garage. We haven’t returned it because The Spouse and I can’t agree on whether it should be returned . . . long story.) So I suggested that I return his birthday gift and instead buy him the jersey for his birthday present, enabling him to dress up as Tomlinson for Halloween.

Only he didn’t like this idea. “But I don’t want to wear it after Halloween,” he said.

“You mean you only want to wear it for the two hours you’re trick-or-treating?” I asked.

“Yeah. I wouldn’t wear it after that.”

“No. (*pause, breathe*) Absolutely not. No way. I’m not spending $45 for you to wear something for two hours.”

While his birthday gift remains in the garage, I was finally successful in convincing him to dress up as another football player: Tom Brady. He could wear the jersey he already owns, over his own pads, and — best part – carry a crutch.

The Eldest Boy remains lukewarm to this costume. I think it’s funny, plus it didn’t cost us a dime, my favorite kind of get-up.

Now if I can just figure out how to put my own hair up into an early 1960s beehive for a Mad Men-style costume party for tomorrow night, it’ll all be good. (I’ve already bought nuclear bomb-proof hair spray.) I’m going for the look of one of the gals in the Sterling Cooper secretarial pool. The Spouse is aiming for Paul Kinsey, as The Spouse sports a goatee, a goatee which prevented him from dressing as the hunky Don Draper.

Image credit: Sport Station.

Years ago, I wrote a column that somewhat embarrassed The Spouse. It asked one, central question: How do sleep deprived parents of young children enjoy “private time” together? (And those moments at midnight, when you’re both exhausted and about to fall asleep, didn’t count. The key word here is “enjoy.”)

After taking an informal survey of my friends at the time, I learned that many of them had invested in solid bedroom door locks and took advantage of the fact that their kids would be transfixed by the TV, so they kept a variety of videos and DVDs that their kids liked on hand, hoping that the glow of the TV would maintain their children’s interest and keep them away from Mommy and Daddy’s bedroom for a little while, say, 10 minutes. In addition to those suggestions, friends also offered horror stories of getting caught in the act by their children, every parents’ nightmare scenario.

I’ve never really seen that horrifically awkward moment depicted well on TV. Until this past Sunday night, when Desperate Housewives – in the midst of a major creative comeback – had a storyline about Gabby and Carlos Solis being observed by their daughter Juanita, whom they initially told that they’d been wrestling. It was priceless. And funny.

The other parental intrusion scene I’ve seen recently happened on Mad Men – during an episode called “Three Sundays” — when two grade school-aged offspring barged in on their parents, Don and Betty Draper. When asked what they were doing, their father shouted, “Sleeping!”

The link to the Desperate Housewives’ video is here, but DO NOT WATCH it with kids around or when they’re within earshot. Trust me on this.