I’m having recovered memory with the return to TV of “Mad Men” on AMC. I feel a tingle of recognition just looking at the dress, the cars, the interiors seen on that series.

It’s a snapshot of who we were; of what America was on the cusp of the 60s when all the classic looks and all the classic ways seemed suddenly old-fashioned.

Of course there had been great change the decade before too, when, with the war finally over, the 50s blew in and almost overnight women stopped wearing shoulder-length hair.

Almost overnight their padded shoulders disappeared and their hemlines dropped to the long swoony length we see on this series.

I came awake in that decade to find myself in a household with three people born in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Our parlor was a real throwback with heavy dark tables, a piano from the Gay Nineties and a high-backed davenport with thickly crocheted doilies held in place by slender metal stake-to-the-heart skewers.

But by1950 even just calling a sofa a ‘davenport’ seemed old fashioned.

Ditto calling a living room a ‘parlor.’

Once these three died, my newly-small family moved to a place where, in that Holy-of-Holies the TV room at least, we had furniture of the kind called Danish Modern.

By then more than a dozen years had passed since the men came back from the war; since the women were urged to return to kitchen and nursery after their years in the factories.

“Scamper on home,” they were told, “And look! What shiny new toys we’ve invented to make housework seem like an actual science!”

It was salesmanship, pure and simple - which brings us back to  “Mad Men” whose very name is a play on words, at once evoking the terms “ad men” and “Madison Avenue,” the latter virtually synonymous with the world of marketing.

Here in this new season it’s now the fall of ’64, meaning Kennedy is gone.

But other changes are far more subtle.

The women look only slightly different from the way they looked the year before: Peggy’s flip is now a bubble, the same hairstyle I sported in high school (after 60 long minutes under the Conehead hairdryer and 20 more of teasing and spraying, that is.)

So too, by November of ’64, super-curvy Marilyn was more than two years in her grave. Do the women’s bodies on “Mad Men” reflect a corresponding shift in notions of physical beauty? Was I imagining it Sunday night or did the Joan Holloway character appear slightly less sumptuous-looking than before? It’s possible that the actress who plays her wore a fat-suit in the early seasons, fat-suits being key items in the world of wardrobe, as I learned when, in the beginning years of our local children’s theatre Kidstock, founder and director Brian Milauskas lent one to my little boy so he could impersonate our heftiest Commander-in-Chief for the Fifth Grade’s big Celebrate Our Presidents Day. (Amusing visuals available by entering  “Terry Marotta,” “Mad Men” and “William Howard Taft” on any search engine.)  

So the changes might have been subtle but they sure were real. After all, the Beatles had landed on our shores the January before and sensitive instruments that they are, the young were already clicking like Geiger Counters.

In sum it isn’t often American get to see themselves as they really were in a given historical moment. I say hats off to creator and head writer Matthew Weiner for trying to show us.


See Terry’s writing daily and leave your own remarks for all to see by commenting at her blog “Exit Only” www.terrymarotta.wordpress.com  . Talk to her there by clicking on ‘comment’ at the top of any posting, or by going to www.terrymarotta.com , or writing her care of Ravenscroft Press, Box 270, Winchester, MA 01890.