Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Photo of the Day: Meet Me at Don Draper (Or Is That Dick Whitman?) Way



A day late and a dollar short—that’s the story of my life. That explains why I was utterly mystified when, checking my Facebook feeds last night, I noticed a co-worker’s mysterious reference to “Don Draper Way.”

It wasn’t until this morning that I read that yesterday, key creative people from perhaps my favorite drama series of the last decade had shown up only a block from where I work, at Rockefeller Center. Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, star Jon Hamm, and fellow cast members January Jones, Christina Hendricks, John Slattery and Elisabeth Moss had appeared at the Time and Life Building (headquarters for Sterling Cooper and Partners) as part of a promotion for the final season (or, rather, the last half of the final season), which begins airing April 5.

The fascination in all this wasn’t only that street signs at the corner of the building were altered to read “Mad Men Ave.” and “Don Draper Way.” But the image you see here—which I got around to taking this morning, nearly 24 hours after the show’s major players had come and gone—is a temporary artwork that tips its hat to the show’s famous opening—a silhouette of Don Draper on a bench, in a casual, who-cares pose, cigarette in hand, just after his counterpart—the doppelganger he has spent a good decade and more fleeing—falls endlessly from an office high up in one of postwar Manhattan’s iconic skyscrapers.

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