My Mini-Don Draper Experience

Last Thursday was my birthday. I got older and I am now old enough that this bothers me. I work 4 days a week 10 hours a day so Thursday is my Friday. I had a ton to do that, but I had dreams of leaving work early enough to go watch a movie by myself. I spent most of the morning working on an article for an Environmental Journal on carbon sequestration (I was also submitting this as a paper for a class), but at around 2:30 I was done. Not with the work I had to do, but with being in my office, so I made my escape.

For those of you who are not Mad Men fans you will likely not understand this, but I pulled a Don Draper. I sneaked out of the office to see an art house film in the middle of the day. I put on my black fedora and walked around downtown SLC for a while. I stopped in one of my favorite stores Misc. and was dismayed that she had no men's clothing that day. I then went to Jitterbug on 3rd South and may have bought a pair or two of vintage cuff links, may have. I then stepped into The Copper Onion and sat and the bar and had a drink(bitters and soda with an orange slice and a muddled cherry...I felt so inclined plus it resembled an Old Fashioned) before my show began.

I then sat in the back of an empty theater and watched Howl. The James Franco biography of Allen Ginsberg. The film itself was excellent, despite it's clumsy editing and disjointed story line, the animated sequences that illustrate Ginsberg's opus work would be compelling cinema on their own. It also had Jon Hamm in it which if you are pulling a "Draper" makes anything better.

There is something I love about seeing movies alone. It frees you from thinking about anything other than yourself and the celluloid. Seeing a movie like Howl that asks much of it's audience's imagination in total silence takes a movie to an even greater cerebral place. You allow yourself to become immersed in both the words written of a poem that shifted a generation and the artistic license that a filmmaker a generation removed attached to that work. There is a moment of magic that occures when the lights dim in a theater and images begin to flash on screen where the anticipation builds as you are about to enter a place you've never been before and will be able to escape your daily confines for 90 minutes (or 3 hours if its Kevin Costner and you may go back to back at work if its The Postman). Feeling that while you should be at work is even better.

That night was followed by dinner with friends at Moki's in Taylorsville and staying up till the wee small hours of the morning finishing my article (I'll let you know if it gets published, but I got a 97 on the paper).