The Compleat And Actual Adventures of Marcella White Campbell

Don Draper, life as you know it is about to end, and you have no idea.

A woman wears this expression when she is not trying to decide WHETHER to destroy her husband, but WHEN.

Last Week:

Henry made Betty sad. Conrad Hilton made Don sad. Lee Garner, Jr. made Sal sad. Don made Sal really sad. That episode was very sad.

Luckily, during his evisceration of Don’s perfectly fine ad campaign, Conrad Hilton expressed a desire for fried chicken (oh, and also the moon), or else this week’s foodcap would have just consisted of my crying-in-the-shower Flickr photostream.

I am very, very glad Connie likes fried chicken. Because, you see, I like fried chicken, too.

I don’t care how much of a stereotype it is, I could eat fried chicken every day. Usually, I don’t, because it is a) a hassle and b) deadly. But what Connie wants, Connie gets.

I brined the chicken drumsticks first, in buttermilk, kosher salt, a load of pepper, cayenne, and several crushed (not minced) garlic cloves. I left them in a ziplock bag with the brine for around four hours. Then I mixed flour, polenta, salt, pepper, ground sage, ground oregano, and baking powder, dredged the chicken pieces in that, and fried them in LARD. (My justification is that if I am going to fry chicken once a year, it had better be the best fried chicken on earth.)

To my surprise, the same thing happened to me that happened to Cook’s Illustrated when they made fried chicken: the pieces that sat around coated with flour — the second fried batch — were way better than the first (they are the pretty golden pieces in the photograph). So next time I’ll dredge the pieces and let them hang out for a while. Sidebar: I still have a bag full of brining chicken pieces in the fridge, so I think I will make Cook’s Illustrated’s oven fried chicken recipe for dinner.

A professional chef who is a member of my family by marriage came over and made fried green tomatoes.

While he was here he also made shoestring potatoes dusted in cumin, mostly because he’s cool that way.

I had the idea to make guanciale cornbread with chive butter. I am glad I had this idea.

It tasted exactly like cracklin’ bread, which is by no means a complaint.

And, finally, because I felt so bad for putting fat food on my family, I marinated feta with olives, red onions, olive oil, and mint, then tossed it with arugula and watermelon.

Everything was great. Nothing failed. No one made aspic. The appelkaka is forgotten.

This week:

The title of the episode, “The Color Blue,” stems from a conversation Don and his new mistress Miss Farrell have in bed. Essentially, Miss Farrell believes that no one can truly understand anyone else’s perspective. Don, meanwhile, ever the (m)adman, isn’t concerned with people’s individual perspectives so much as how people can be convinced to see the same things. He delivers the episode’s thesis statement: “people may see things differently, but they don’t really want to.”

This episode’s subplot, where Kinsey tries to best Peggy by finding a great Western Union slogan, actually offers perspective on the main plot: Kinsey, getting drunk in his office, staggers out to chat with a janitor named Achilles. In the middle of their conversation, Kinsey suddenly gets a flash of inspiration, staggers back into his office, and, promptly, passes out. In the morning, Kinsey cannot, for the life of him, remember what the excellent idea might have been.

Kinsey tries to recreate the conditions that led up to the idea — even having a second conversation with Achilles — without success. In other words, he tries to return to whatever perspective allowed him to have the brilliant idea, but it’s gone. Not only are we unable to fully understand other people’s perspectives and thoughts, sometimes we are even unable to understand our own.

Amazingly, Peggy and Don take this situation — in which Kinsey can’t communicate with his own unconscious — and create an excellent ad about communication, selling Western Union with the line “you can’t frame a phone call.” A written communication, in their opinion, is a permanent statement of perspective, just as a work of art or a novel might be. In doing so, they convince Kinsey that their way of advertising — their perspective — is better than his. We actually see the moment where Kinsey “sees things differently.”

Peggy is a better ad writer. Kinsey finally gets it.

Betty gets it, too, where “it” is “Don Draper’s biggest secret.”

The same “perspective” conversation is carried out, one-sided, by Betty herself. Don, a bit overstretched with all the lying, accidentally leaves the keys to his Drawer of Secrets in his pocket. Betty immediately knows what the key is for, and promptly discovers that everything she thought she knew about Don — everything she saw when she looked at him — is completely wrong. It’s important to remember that, while Don is crafting an ad campaign about communication, one that will culminate in the statement that the telephone is ephemeral while paper communications are forever, Betty is finding an entire box full of paper communications — photos, deeds, letters — that tell Don’s real story.

Ironically, prior to this, Miss Farrell has made a hang-up call at the Drapers’ house. I think that, for much of the episode, Betty thinks this is the real secret Don is carrying around — that he’s cheating. But the phone is useless (just ask Conrad Hilton, who doesn’t appear onscreen but calls Don’s answering service; Don is not dancing attendance on him anymore). The papers tell the real story. As long as those papers exist, Don can never be the real Don Draper.

Meanwhile, Don carries on as if everything’s fine, probably assuming Betty’s coldness is about his affair. We’ve always known that Don doesn’t understand Betty, but, clearly, he seems to think he understands her perspective. In an effort to draw her out, he flatters her repeatedly, but he has absolutely no idea what she is really thinking, what she really knows.

Don said, at the beginning of the episode, that “people may see things differently, but they don’t want to.” He’s proven both right and wrong over the course of the story. Kinsey was able to get a new perspective on Peggy, and Betty certainly has a new perspective on Don. But, unlike Kinsey, Betty wanted to find out what was in the drawer. As the decade progresses, Don’s aphorisms about “what people want” are becoming untrue. People are beginning to want truth and answers. As Don becomes farther and farther removed from the new zeitgeist, his advertising is sure to suffer.

Betty just looks at Don, barely speaking. It’s as if she’s trying to see if he looks any different now that she knows a lot of the truth, or that she’s trying to imagine what the world looks like to a man who is now a complete stranger to her, or, maybe, that she is trying to figure out how to look at him. Who is Don? Who is Dick Whitman? What is she going to do now?

Based on next week’s previews, I think Betty’s new perspective is going to lead her right off the reservation.

Next week:

We were so busy stuffing our faces and gasping at this week’s reveals that we didn’t notice that no one ate anything. Miss Farrell offered to feed her brother “some soup.” Betty sits at the dinner table at least twice, but no one talks about what they are eating. Don carries around a slice of maybe cake while drinking coffee. Kinsey steals an apple out of someone’s lunch and gets black-out drunk.

C’mon, Mr. Weiner, give me something to work with. Drunken chicken, maybe? With…soup?