Goodbye, Louise

On Labor Day, my co-worker, Louise, died after suffering for several months from a horrible illness. I haven't been able to cry about it or even truly process her loss in my mind yet. The only thing I've been sure of is that I need to write about it and to memorialize her in this blog.

Louise and I got off on the wrong foot in June 2000 when I first joined the company I am presently working for. We were both legal secretaries who type for attorneys. Back in 2000, we were still using cassette tapes that the attorneys recorded their voices on and then put the tapes in brown envelopes for us to listen to and type. During my first week, Louise would keep a basket of the tapes I had to do, and what was on the tapes was written on the outside of these envelopes. Of course, I tried to take the envelopes that had the things I wanted to do, like long letters where I could just daydream while typing them rather than taking motions that had 75 billion exhibits that had to be meticulously copied and then delivered to the courthouse. Louise noticed this and didn't appreciate it. "I like to pick and choose too!" she said sarcastically, meaning that since I was the "new kid on the block," I should just be happy to type everything that was in there. She was not happy with me and had no problem expressing it. After a few days of this, I said, "You obviously have a problem with me." You'd think I'd said, "You obviously need to be locked up in a mental institution where they throw away the key," because after our exchange, she refused to talk to me period. Not one word. Not a hello, a goodbye, or even a "thank you" one day when I found her glasses on the floor and had gotten down to pick them up to give them to her. This went on for a year, by the end of which, I had a dream that she and I were talking and became friends.  I woke up wishing for that so much but knowing that it would take a miracle for that dream to come true. But shortly after my dream, 911 happened.

Our office is one block from where the World Trade Center terrorist attacks took place. Some of my co-workers watched from our windows and saw people jumping off the Towers. One of my former co-workers, Sally, was so traumatized, she just ran out of our building and walked from our office on downtown Broadway all the way uptown past 101st Street. But Louise and I were both still on our way to work, and our buses turned around. I'll never forget how I felt when I saw smoke and flames coming out from the tops of those beloved Towers in the distance through my bus windows. Our office was uninhabitable for over a month, and when we visited it for the first time about three weeks after the attacks, I saw my sweater still draped over my desk chair, both of which were covered in dust. We realized we had to remain a little longer at our temporary office on Water Street and didn't even want to visit our office again because the electricity was still out and was being run by generators that would shut down the elevators by late afternoon. I knew that Louise was just as shocked and saddened by the Trade Center attacks as I was, so one morning in our Water Street office, I decided to just take a chance and say "Hello" to her. "Hi," she finally said back, her voice still shaken and slightly breathy. That was the moment that my dream came true, and we finally became friends.

Louise was an enigma to everyone at our office.  She was fiercely guarded about her personal life, both past and present, but because we used to see each other every day, she began giving me little glimpses into what her life had been and as it was now in the present.  For most of the years I'd known her, she was a single woman in her fifties and then sixties who lived alone with her parrot, "Scarlett." She never had any children but told me she had been married once and was now divorced for many years.  But even this simple fact was not common knowledge in our firm.  Even our prior boss (a male attorney who is now split from our firm but who had worked with Louise for many years) didn't know Louise had once been married. Several years ago, when she had fallen ill and was briefly hospitalized due to a perforated ulcer, he had answered the phone when her friend called to let us know. "Oh, Louise is in the hospital," he told one of my former co-workers. "Yes. Her partner called to let us know." "Her partner?" my co-worker asked, confused. "Yes," he said. "That lady who always calls here for her. I know that she lives alone, but that woman must be her partner! Have you ever heard her speak about any man since she's worked here?" No, I guess she hadn't to him. But to me, she had.

In addition to her divorce, that surprisingly I seemed to be one of the only people to know about, not only did she have a crush on actor Sean Connery, but she often stayed up late at night to watch reruns of "Married With Children" because "young" Al Bundy reminded her of her ex-husband. "Oh, I've seen that actor in other things today," she'd say, "But now he looks very different. I'm talking about young Al Bundy. I love to stay up late and watch him." Her expression softened when she spoke about him. She spoke about "Al" a lot.

Besides looking just like Al Bundy, she told me that her ex-husband used to enjoy going to the racetrack a lot, and the two of them had gone there often and even saw Secretariat win the Triple Crown at Belmont in 1973. She said it was such a thrill to have been there in person! She and I even had a racetrack-oriented joke between us: We all had been having trouble with our computers, and one afternoon, a man named Dan who worked for the computer company, "Corstar," had called about coming to fix them. One of the attorneys named Ed took the phone message and had written down: "Corstar's Dan called." Louise brought me the note from the bulletin board and said, "Look at this. Ed took a phone message, and he wrote 'Corstar's Dan!' I mean, who called us anyway? A racehorse? That's how they name racehorses, you know! Sometimes they use the horse's father's name and then pair it with the name of the horse. That's what this looks like - Corstar's Dan - a racehorse!"  She always came up with silly things like this to ease the tension of our law office and to make me laugh.

Louise was thin and tall, always wore plain, comfortable pants and t-shirts, and wore her long brown hair wrapped up in a simple bun. The only make-up she used was concealer, and she had tube after tube of it in all different shades in her work drawer.  But again, because she said very little about herself, nobody would have expected how much into hairstyles she was. "I love to go to the beauty supply shop at lunchtime," she told me one afternoon. "When I was younger, I was really into hairstyles." She'd watch hairstyle shows on TV and give me pointers on how to keep my own long hair tangle-free.  "The key is to run your fingers through it first, and separate the sections before you use the comb." Thinking about hairstyling, I had gotten her to watch one of my favorite TV shows, "Mad Men," and she liked it and watched the entire Season 1 but lamented: "That Peggy, always wearing her hair in a ponytail! This is supposed to take place in 1960, right? Women did NOT wear their hair in ponytails in 1960!" I explained to her that was the point of Peggy's character in Season 1. She was supposed to be awkward and out-of-style. But Louise was always set in her ways, and she seemed fixated on the idea that they should not have had Peggy's character wearing a ponytail in 1960. I believe that's why she wouldn't continue onto Season 2.

Sometimes, I liked to imagine what Louise had been like as a young woman in the late 1960's through the 1970's. I pictured her lounging around in her apartment, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. She told me that back then, she woke up every morning and immediately grabbed for a cigarette, smoked it, then took an aspirin, washing it down with a cup of coffee.  In those days, she worked for a law firm she spoke very highly of. I believe it was there that she met the man who I think was probably the love of her life. Again, she only told me snippets, but apparently she had what she described as a secret relationship with one of male partners at the firm, and she told me that part of the thrill was all the "sneaking around" - the idea that people could only guess at what their actual relationship was, but nobody really knew. But "NG," she would say to me, meaning, "No Good!" She said that these things always ended badly, but at the time.....

"I tell you this because you and I have been friends for a long time, right?" So many things Louise said to me were prefaced like this. She was a worrywart who always had a lot of concerns regarding procedures at work and the way she perceived people were treating her. One former attorney she worked with once told me: "Louise is constantly worrying about nonsense!" She and I had a lot of chats about things that bothered us. We always talked about our work, what the attorneys thought about our work, and what our other co-workers thought about us. Sometimes, she'd obsess on something that happened during the day and kept on bringing it up to me again at various times, over and over, reiterating things like: "When I told her she came back late for lunch, I was just joking. I didn't mean to accuse her of coming back late for lunch, it was just a joke. It was because she came back carrying all these bags, saying I've discovered Chambers Street! So I told her she was late. But I didn't mean to say she had done anything wrong by shopping and coming back a few minutes late." Sometimes I vented to her about other people too. She always listened, and when I'd apologize later for my somewhat angry rants, she'd say: "Listen, we're friends. We help each other out."

She often took me even further into her confidence. A few years ago, we sat together during our office Christmas party, and I believe she took the opportunity that I'd had a little too much to drink to tell me a strange story about how years ago, one of her female friends came back to her apartment and made a pass at her. She said she told the woman she was NOT interested in her and to please not do that again. I think she believed I wouldn't remember this story the next day, but even when I'm very drunk, I always remember everything, and I'm always in control of what I'm doing. Of course that didn't prevent me from dropping my pizza bagel onto the floor at the ferry station on my way home from the party. A woman in line behind me ordered the man working behind the counter to get me another one since I'd dropped it. The worker was annoyed, looked me in the eye, and asked, "Was it MY fault that this happened? Or was it YOURS?" "Mine?" I answered feebly. But the woman didn't care, she still ordered the worker to give me another pizza pretzel. I wish I had this woman to walk around with me as my staunch supporter on a daily basis!

Louise had been extremely healthy for many years and had the best attendance out of everyone in our office. Even after her perforated ulcer surgery, she returned to work after a mere three weeks when most people who had that same surgery would have taken at least six. She often told us that we were really her family because outside of the office, she had no family (she and her sister were estranged, and she had only a handful of friends).  I think that's why she always wanted to be at work - because it was lonely at home, and she wanted to be with "her family."

Last winter, she left work after being diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus. She had treatment and was in and out of the hospital. One afternoon, she called the office, and I answered it. "I'm so glad you answered and that I got to talk to you!" she said as if she realized this would be our last conversation. I told her how I always think of her when I watch Pat and Jamie on NY1 in the mornings because we both always watched them before we left our house for work, and she and I used to joke about their banter and just about them in general. Then her voice turned serious, and she said, "I wanted to make sure I told you this: That all these little things that used to concern us during the day, all these worries about work and people and all the little problems we used to worry about? Well listen, they just don't matter. Nothing that gets us upset during the day is important. Try not to let those things bother you at all, because after all, it's just not worth it."

Obviously, it's hard to lose a family member, any relative or close friend, but there's something different about losing someone who you've seen almost every day for the past fifteen years that is a special kind of loss that just breaks your heart. They're a part of your everyday routine, and that brings you comfort. It's scary when they go. You just expect them to always be there.

Breathtakingly Beautiful "Mad Men"

 

"And then I realized, I don't know anything about you."  These are Sally Draper's words to her father, Don, during an "edge of your seat" episode of this season's "Mad Men," its sixth.  I enjoyed every minute of Season 6 which led up to a breathtaking finale which saw Don's life unraveling into misery until the finale's very last seconds. I'm already longing for "Mad Men" which used to air every Sunday night, but maybe blogging about its finale will help me miss it less tonight.

"Mad Men's" writer and creator, Matthew Weiner, kept the manuscripts for Seasons 1 and 2 in his briefcase for ten years before he sold the show to AMC. It's obvious that he spends a lot of time thinking about his characters because each season plays out like a mini novel with plot twists and foreshadowing elements planted so purposefully, I enjoy them even more during second viewings when I already know how things turn out but can appreciate the genius of what he'd been doing to lead up to all those "a-ha!" moments.

"Mad Men" takes place in the 1960's, and Weiner takes great care to make sure everything in each show is authentic to the sixties, even down to the train route Don takes.  "Mad Men" IS Don Draper, an advertising executive on Madison Avenue who grew up poor but stole a dead soldier's identity and privileged background.  Even Don's wife, Betty, doesn't know this fact or anything about his past until Season 3 which prompts her to divorce him.  Their children, Sally, Bobby and Gene still don't know, and a major storyline of Season 6 involves Sally's frustration at knowing so little about her dad.

Sally's quote at the beginning of this post was uttered after she spends the night talking to an intruder who breaks into Don's and his new young wife Megan's apartment while Don is high at the office on a speed trip injection that all the ad execs received from a "Dr. Feelgood" who told them it was vitamins and would help them work faster on their new Chevy account.  Megan is out late schmoozing with theater people in hopes of landing a play even though she's already a soap opera star.  So Sally is alone with her younger brothers, startled out of her sleep by an older African-American woman who claims to be her "Grandma Ida."  She tells Sally that she raised her handsome daddy.  Since Sally doesn't know anything about her dad, she believes that Grandma Ida really was invited to the Draper residence in the middle of the night and doesn't think it strange that Grandma is wrestling with their TV while commenting that it's screwed in "good!" Finally, Sally comes to her senses and sneaks in a call to the police, but Grandma Ida catches her and suddenly isn't so "grandmotherly."  She holds Sally hostage, and when Don arrives home, he finds the police in his apartment and Sally feeling guilty.  The next day, Sally tells Don that she was stupid to believe Grandma Ida's story, but Don assures her, "I left the door open.  It was my fault." 

All of Season 6 is essentially about Don "leaving the door open," and about doorways in general.  In past seasons, Don's door is always shut as he carefully protects his successful adman persona, while inside feeling like the poor, neglected farm boy he truly is.  But this season, Don's door to his past opens up to us through flashbacks of a teen aged Don living in a whorehouse.  He spies on the prostitutes through the doorways which sheds some light on why he is now a chronic cheater who has trouble trusting women and sustaining mature and healthy relationships with them. 

By the start of Season 6, Don is pulling away from Megan and is having an on-again/off-again affair with Sylvia who is the wife of his downstairs neighbor and friend, Dr. Rosen.  During one of its "off" periods, Don wants Sylvia back so he begins leaving his back door open so he can sneak downstairs and spy on her through her front door (again, the door symbolism) without Megan or Dr. Rosen finding out.  His leaving his back door open is what allows Grandma Ida to get in that night poor Sally was held hostage.  But Sally becomes even more damaged after Don wins Sylvia back, and Sally catches them in the act through an open door in the Rosen's apartment.  Don is devastated, and he fears Sally will tell Megan.  When he sees Sally later on back at the apartment, she won't talk to him, so he speaks to her through what, but of course, the bedroom door:  "I know you think you saw something," he tells her, but "I was comforting Mrs. Rosen."  I know she's a teenager, but if Sally believes THAT, Don has got a bridge to sell her.

Which brings me back to the Season 6 finale.  Don is on a downward spiral.  He's drinking constantly and clashing with his co-workers, and seemingly tired of living up to the image that everyone has of him yet was built on a lie.  It's two days before Thanksgiving, and Don is getting drunk in a bar when a preacher tries to talk about God to him. Don punches him out, and the next thing we see is a flashback of a preacher being thrown out of the whorehouse where teen aged Don lives.  Don follows the preacher out down his front steps and watches the preacher gather himself together.  The preacher tells him:  "The only unpardonable sin is to believe that God cannot forgive you."

Next, we flash back to Don the man who is spending the night in the "drunk tank" for punching out the preacher in the bar. This night changes Don, maybe.  The next morning, he resolves to change and make a fresh start. He goes to work without having a drink and prepares to pitch the agency's campaign to the Hershey's Chocolate Bar people.  He tells them that when he was a boy, his dad would take him to the drug store and tell him he could pick whatever he wanted.  He says that he always chose the Hershey's bar because "the wrapper looked like what was inside."  Of course, the story he is telling the Hershey's people is completely untrue.  Don's dad was an angry, poor farmer who never bought him a chocolate bar.  We also know that Don is the opposite of a Hershey's bar because his "wrapper" isn't anything at all what he is like on the inside.  Don's hand begins shaking because he is going through alcohol withdrawal, but suddenly, we know he is going through more than that. He is having a complete breakdown in the middle of an important sales pitch.  "I grew up in a whorehouse in Pennsylvania," he begins.  This is a HUGE moment in "Mad Men" history.  Don's fellow partners don't know that Don didn't grow up with the same privileged backgrounds that they did.  After Don's admission, "Mad Men" can never be the same.  He continues to tell his TRUE Hershey's bar story by saying that the only time he ate Hershey's bars was alone in a room at the whorehouse when one of the prostitutes would buy him one after seeing him go through a john's pockets.  This is the true story, and the next morning, on Thanksgiving, his partners inform him he will be taking a mandatory leave of absence, effective immediately. 

But in the final minutes of the finale, Don doesn't seem to care.  He picks up his children, Sally, Bobby and Gene, and takes them for a car ride during which his son Bobby exclaims, "This is a BAD neighborhood."  We don't know where Don is taking them, until the camera pans out, and we see that same white whorehouse we've been seeing all season long in the flashbacks featuring the teen aged Don.  It is worn out and broken down now, but it is positively the same house.  He tells his kids, "This is where I grew up."  Finally, we know that Don is going to begin opening up to his kids and telling them the truth about his childhood.  It may be a small first step, but through all the turmoil of Season 6, we feel like we've gone full circle with Don.  We can finally begin forgiving Don for the things he's done because we realize he is willing to change. Just like the preacher said:  "The only unpardonable sin is to believe that God cannot forgive you."  Beautiful, breathtaking, "Mad Men."

 

 

 

 

Which Is Really Longer -- A Day Or Twenty Years?

 

 

 

Sometimes a day feels like forever. I've always liked movies that take place in one day. Like Spike Lee's "Do The Right Thing." So many things happened in that one steaming hot day -- the pizza shop got trashed, then set on fire, a young boy got saved from almost being run over by a car, a young man got murdered, and that's just to name a few. Most days are not quite that eventful.  Most days are ordinary, and they seem to fly by. 

When I was a child, "twenty years ago" seemed like an entire lifetime.  I guess it still seems like a long time, but not nearly as long as it used to.  For instance, my mom and I were shopping at the mall yesterday, and I pointed out to her which stores were new and which stores were around when I was a kid.  There are about two stores still in existence in our mall that were also there when I was a kid.  All the others are new, but by "new," I don't mean the ones that had just opened two months ago, or even two years ago.  When I say "new," I mean that they've been open for about the last twenty years!

 

Time jumps around so much in our memories, some things we strain to remember, yet other things seem like they just happened yesterday. For some reason, when we think about the future, it seems like certain days will take forever to get to.  My daughter was crying over Spring Break because she'd had so much fun with my younger niece, and she didn't want her to go back home which is miles and miles away from us.  It prompted a memory in my older niece who is now a teenager. She asked, "Remember that time when I cried so hard when I had to go home after a visit?  I clung to you and wouldn't let go, and my dad had to pry me off of you?"  I do remember that time very clearly. I had no idea that she remembered it though.  She did cry, and it made me cry, because I knew it would be at least a year until we saw each other again.  I had to ask my brother for help because if she clung to me any longer, I'd have burst out in tears, and I didn't want to make my niece any more upset because she had only been about four years old.  My niece continued, "That was probably the last time I really cried."  Unlike me.  I cry or at least get teary-eyed just about every day.  I'm not sure whether it's due to being overly sensitive or just sleep-deprived.  I told my niece, "I know she's upset because they won't see each other for a while, but maybe someday, they'll both live near each other.  If they both wind up going to college on either the East Coast or the West Coast, they can even be roommates together!"  The thought warmed me.  "Well," my niece said. "That's a LONG time from now."  I thought for a moment.  "It's only about eleven years from now."  It seems like a long time, but eleven years can go by pretty fast. "I still remember very clearly the day I first saw you when you were one week old," I told her.  "That was even longer than eleven years ago.  Your dad brought you out and you had really long legs." 

 

Time jumps seem smaller as you get older.  Sunday night, "Mad Men" began its new season.  That show always has time jumps.  Sometimes it is a year and a half, other times only seven months.  I hear that next season will be their last. I think they should end the series with a huge time jump, like into present day.  I would love to see what happened to all those characters.  Why not be clever and move them into present time, something we can relate to?  If they do a time jump like that, it will be a more than forty-year time jump.  But if they don't do a time jump that long, and they just end the series in the sixties, I'll always wonder what happened to those characters and how they turned out.  If they do a time jump at all, it will probably be just a year again.  Or maybe it will be twenty years, smack into the decadence of the 80's.  Twenty years is really not that long of a time.  But then again, at other times, a day can seem like forever.

Happy Father's Day To Those Whose Fathers Never Grew Old

Freddie Rumsen from "Mad Men"

Father's Day has been a bittersweet day for me ever since my dad passed away when I was fifteen. My mom was concerned about me and my brother not having a father figure to help raise us since we were both teenagers.  My brother found a mentor in college, but I didn't think I needed one. Even though I was so young, I felt my personality had fully formed by then, and I knew that I was the person I was because I had my father to teach me for fifteen years.  My brutal honesty comes from him.  Probably part genetics and partly from observing his behavior.  My mom used to say to him, "Why can't you put on a smile for our friends? Why do they have to know you're in a bad mood?" and my dad would answer, "Because I AM in a bad mood.  Why should I have to be phony and pretend?"  Whenever we went out for dinner, and the waitress was OVERLY bubbly, my dad would raise his left eyebrow inquisitively as if to ask: "Is she for real?"  I immediately knew exactly what he was thinking.

Besides being honest, my dad was also very moral. His best friend, Hans, told me a story once of how my dad got upset when one of their mutual friends had a girl sitting on his lap.  He exclaimed to Hans, "Why is he letting her sit on his lap?  He's engaged to another woman!"  I share his love of music, and he helped me study for the Co-Op Test so I could ace it and get into Hill, the highly-esteemed high school of my choice. After that, I believed I had truly completed my childhood, so I found the idea of a replacement dad insulting.  I would never want to replace my father. I would never need to.  I felt that way for a really long time.

Speaking of Hans, he was very helpful to me when my dad died. When my father went out of remission, Hans brought in some cassettes of my dad's original songs into the hospital. He played a song called "Shadows Falling."  It had lyrics that reminded me of my dad as a young boy growing up: "Wish I could return somehow to walk upon the sand, catch the wind and rainbows and feel a welcome hand."  The lyrics made me cry after we left the hospital room, and all the way down the elevator, continuing into the parking lot.  No one knew how to comfort me.  Hans said, "Joan and I have fixed up the house.  We have the guest room finished.  You should come over and stay with us on weekends."  He, his wife, Joan, and son, Eden, took me in for many weekends, and Hans told me endless stories about my dad.  But I knew he couldn't replace him. 

Hans and I always remained in and out of touch.  A few years ago, we hadn't spoken to each other for a while.  We'd let too many years go by.  I didn't even know if he still had the same phone number, so I did a Google search.  I found a picture of him outside a school where they were testing for asbestos.  He was wearing a Bluetooth. Cellphones and Bluetooths were still new.  I asked my husband, "What is that thing people wear in their ears?  They're like cellphones, right?" and he answered, "They are Bluetooths.  Old men wear them."  Something about that statement just got to me: "Old men wear them."  I kept on recalling the image of Hans wearing his Bluetooth, and I knew then I had to get back in touch with him, and I was lucky to find him on Facebook.  We've been in touch ever since, and I now call him my Second Dad.

Another example of my longing for a father comes from an unlikely place:  My favorite TV show, "Mad Men." I've been faithfully watching since Season One, and I've seen most episodes at least twice.  One of my favorite characters, Peggy Olson, had started Season One as a secretary, but one day after participating in a focus group where the secretaries tested lipsticks, she makes a comment in front of "old-time ad man" Freddy Rumsen. She hands him a wastebasket where women had dabbed their lipstick onto tissues, and she tells him, "Here's your basket of kisses."  He asks her where she had heard that, and she says "I just thought of it."  Then she tells him that she didn't choose any of the shades of lipstick because someone already took her shade, and she says, "I don't think anyone wants to be one of a hundred colors in a box." Freddy sees potential in Peggy and suggests she be promoted from secretary to junior copywriter because she is creative and has a natural way with words. Peggy's career has soared since Season One, and it was really all thanks to Freddy Rumsen.  Even late in the current season, Freddy and Peggy have dinner, and he encourages her to go for a better copywriter job at a competing ad agency.  Their friendship has lasted.  I never knew why I was so drawn to this story until I realized that, in my mind, the Freddy/Peggy friendship/mentorship is like a father/daughter relationship.  Freddy is considered old-fashioned and out of date. My dad never became that.  He was always young. I never thought I'd have a need for an older father, or even a father figure at all since becoming an adult.  But between Hans's Bluetooth and Freddy Rumsen's belief in Peggy, I realize it must be something innate.

Are You a Larry or a Betty?

Lately, I've come to the conclusion that most of us are either Larrys or Bettys. For instance, I am definitely a Larry.  I'm loud, speak my mind, and focus on things the average person would never focus on, i.e., how many pieces of shrimp are put into my Kung Pao Shrimp, and I'd notice if one day there were fewer than usual.  Betty Draper is soft-spoken, only speaks up when near nervous breakdown, and is focused on one thing and one thing only:  how to keep the "perfect image" of herself glimmering in everyone else's eyes.

I'm sure we all fall into both categories at different times.  Sometimes (although rarely), I do have a quiet day  (most likely because I'm just tired).  But it really does seem when I look around that I primarily see Larrys or Bettys.   Larry David is the same in every episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm."  He has no boundaries, and what you see is pretty much what you always get.  On this season's "Social Assassin" episode, Larry's friends use these traits to their advantage:  They are afraid to tell their loved ones to stop doing the annoying little habits that drive them crazy (like the wife who drives her husband crazy by saying "LOL" whenever she thinks something is funny rather than actually laughing or the mother who drives her daughter crazy by smacking her lips and saying "Ahhhh" every time she takes a sip from a drink she really enjoys) so they simply ask Larry to do it.  Of course, there is some blackmailing involved, but personally, I don't think it would have been all that hard to convince Larry to just "tell it like it is" even without the blackmailing! He's a Larry, he loves the truth and welcomes conflict if it means standing up for something he believes in.

Betty Draper of "Mad Men" is Larry's polar opposite.  An episode of "The Mountain King" illustrates the essence of Betty the best:  In this episode, Betty and her friend Sarah Beth both lust after a man named Arthur Case.  He horseback rides at the same stables that Betty and Sarah Beth do.  He's engaged, Betty's married to Don Draper, and Sarah Beth has a husband too, although lately Sarah Beth has been confiding in Betty that her marriage is on the rocks. One day, when Sarah Beth is not at the stables, Betty takes the opportunity to set a lunch date for herself, Arthur, and Sarah Beth.  When the date and time arrive, Arthur and Sarah Beth meet for lunch, but Betty purposely cancels at the last minute so that Arthur and Sarah Beth are left alone together. Some days later, Sarah Beth calls Betty on the phone and tells her how distraught she is because she and Arthur have been having an affair! Betty must know deep inside that she has had a hand in making this affair happen.  Does she feel guilty? It's hard to say when you're dealing with a Betty. Sarah Beth hysterically tells Betty something to the effect of: "Well, you liked him too!"  Betty answers:  "Liking someone and having an affair with them are two different things entirely!"  Beneath the quiet, demure exterior lies a cobra waiting to strike! 

But still, no one ever suspects such behavior from a Betty.  Even Sarah Beth has no idea at all that Betty had a hand in her downfall with Arthur Case. Bettys are quiet and soft, and Larrys are loud and brazen. It's obvious that the Larrys annoy the Bettys, but what the Bettys don't realize is that the Bettys bother the Larrys every bit as much.   Bettys' voices may be quieter, but when they scheme out in public on their cell phones with their confidantes, those of us with good hearing can still hear them!  The fact that the Bettys are underhanded bothers the Larrys simply because they themselves don't operate this way.  Larrys don't like sneakiness.  Of course, Bettys would never really categorize themselves as sneaky.  Bettys just carefully choose the words they speak.  Also, because Larrys speak at face value, the Bettys think the Larrys will take THEM at face value.  What they don't know is that Larrys are always reading between the lines when speaking to Bettys. They don't take the Bettys' words at face value (although the Larrys let the Bettys believe they do).           

Keeping all these Larry and Betty traits straight can be confusing. But the most confusing of all (which is also the most satisfying) is to find a cross between the two.  It is not found very often, and is very rare indeed, but I can think of one Larry/Betty cross and this is yet another character on Mad Men -- none other than Betty's husband, Don Draper.

Most people think of Don as a womanizing business executive who assumed a dead soldier's identity in order to get to the top.  This much is true, but despite that, Don still inhabits just as many Larry traits as he does Betty traits!  My favorite example of this is when he writes and publishes an ad in the New York Times entitled, "Why I'm Quitting Tobacco."  What happens is that one of Don's agency's most important and longest-standing clients,  Lucky Strike, maker of cigarettes, quits the agency in order to consolidate their company with another agency.  It had been months in the making behind Don's agency's back.  Don finds out about it through the grapevine, and although everyone else at his agency worries that losing Lucky Strike will make their agency go under and/or damage their reputation, Don decides to take matters into his own hands.   He turns the tables on Lucky Strike by publishing the article which makes it sound like their severed relationship ended amicably because Don no longer had the conscience to promote something that was bad for people's health.  This is ingenious! Everyone at the agency is appalled.  How could Don have made such a bold move without consulting anyone first? How could he have had the guts to have done something so public?  Lucky Strike was sneaky in conspiring behind Don's agency's back knowing full well that their move might cause the agency to go under.  Don is sneaky too, but he also lays things out in the open and no longer behind anyone's back.  At the end of his article he proudly states that his agency "welcomes all business" because he and his agency believe that "our best work is still ahead of us."  Lucky Strike now no longer has the opportunity to make Don's agency look bad. I think Don's move proves he embodies the perfect "marriage" between a Larry and a Betty! 

I do believe that there is room in this world for Larrys, Bettys and the Don Draper Combo.  The important thing is that WE know which one we are because most people seem to be in denial.  I know I am a Larry, but it doesn't mean I don't like Bettys.  After all, I do have, and proudly display, my very own  Mad Men Betty Draper Doll!