I guess I wasn't paying enough attention watching the second episode of "Mad Men," but it took a while for the other shoe to drop. Maybe I was distracted by all the tension involved in the wedding plans. Last season Roger Sterling left his wife for a young thing and now his daughter didn't want the golddigger at her wedding—why should she?—and Roger was drinking too much, and the wife, the original wife, was calm and coy, and so the date of the wedding skipped by me. It wasn't until the episode was two-thirds over that the tumblers fell into place. Odd how the mind works. Appropos of what exactly I suddenly woke up.

"Wait a minute," I asked Patricia. "They didn't say the wedding was November 23rd, did they?"

"Why?"

"November 23rd. 1963."

"Yeah?"

"The day after Kennedy was assassinated."

"Right."

"They've just given this poor girl one of the saddest days in American history to have her wedding."

That's part of the sad fun of "Mad Men." Waiting for history to catch up with its characters. To overwhelm them.

ADDENDUM: I wrote the above without realizing that history, or time, had caught up with the final Kennedy brother. Godspeed, Senator.

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