Truth in Advertising

How is it that some folks can have their cake and eat it too? While others are scrambling for a piece of dried-out melba toast?

I am off all week. I don't have the funds or the motivation to do something with myself, so I have been living rather like the college student I used to be--sleeping a lot, eating lots of cookies, and enjoying lots of television and movies accompanied by a bottle of red. I was asked today by three different people how I am doing with my week off. My response is that I absolutely love it.

Sure, I am rather lonely sometimes. But I am lonely when I have 84,000 things to do, places to go, people to be. So no great revelation there. There are several things I should be accomplishing this week around the house, but I just am not in the mood. I am enjoying he hell out of doing very little, answering to no one, and just doing my thing which is apparently a whole lot of nothing.

I never wanted a career in the post-feminist sense. I wanted to be an actress, not work nine to fine five days a week doing what the rest of the working world did. But my kind of actressing has yet to pay a single bill, so it's off to work I go.

I have had jobs since I was twelve years old. Babysitting year-round (I started at $2 an hour.) My cousin and I ran a snack bar at the pool the summers we were newly minted teenagers. I started working as a page at the public library the day after I turned 16 and I held that job through most of college. I worked in retail a lot. I waitressed. I temped. I spent seven years in a common-law marriage with an evil bloodsucking corporation. I ended up back at my first post-college gig, in a college library, which is why I have the glorious gift of spending the week between Christmas and New Year's on a mini-break from life as I know it.

I went to college because it was expected of me, because I loved learning, because I wanted to study shoes and ships and sealing wax and speak of cabbages and kings. It was a glorious four years. But as my best friend and I would half-joke at that time, we really went to college to get a husband. Like it was finishing school. And we were living fifty years earlier than we actually were. We didn't want careers, really, though we were certainly awfully bright and we were hard workers. We didn't expect things handed to us. But we assumed that since we hadn't found the one in high school, we would in college.

She actually did. She also went on to be the breadwinner in her household, and her one is now the stay-at-home dad to their two amazing kiddos. That's how it worked out. That is what happened to feminism.

I found the one, too, but he ended up being the one who got away. So post-graduation off I went, not so gently, into that good night of going to bed early to wake up and take that morning train.

The past weeks I have been obsessed with Mad Men. This is the most perfect show I have ever seen on television. Not one episode has let me down. And there is so much going on the world of those Sterling Cooperites, the one they inhabit by day and the one they inhabit by night and the one that turns on its axis 24-7 all around them.

Women living in this man's world had few choices. Abortion was illegal. Adultery was commonplace. Polio was still having its way with their kids. Ladies were expected to attend secreterial school and then type up memos and land a husband, or go off to a woman's college and get married after a brief stint as an artist or a model or an actress. Clothing was restrictive and uncomfortable but it made you look good. You got a wash and set once a week. Your lips were the rubiest of reds. And every night you had a rump roast and a cold beer set up at the dinette for your man, after spending the day in suburban banality tending children, ironing laundry, picking up dry cleaning, and firing your maid.

Then the sixties really got started. And some women yearned for more. They fought hard battles to get more. They burned their cone-shaped bras and wore their hair long and started running their own ships rather than acting as deckhand for one captained by a man. Sex and drugs and rock and roll reigned. Home and hearth, not so much.

Fast forward to the new millenium. We are gender-bending more than ever in terms of choices, what we are capable of, what we want, what we need, what we do. And it's all very confusing. Because with this Ms. title comes a lot of loss. Manners, etiquette, elegance. It is looked down on to not want a career, to want to build a home without simultaneously building your own corporate empire. Your daddy isn't footing the bills one day and your husband the next. And it is interesting because the feminine mystique was never supposed to be about women having to work--feminism is about choices. To be able to choose to be the woman you wanted to be. One who climbs that corporate ladder. One who sleeps with whomever she wants whenever she wants. One who wants five children and one who wants none. One who chooses to live as an artist, a mom, a wife, a best friend, a girl Friday, a presidential candidate. We don't need to stand by our man. We don't need a man at all. And we need to be all of this, all of the time. We are supposed to have it all, but who has it all? Not one person I know in either sex. And why should they? If we have it all, we wouldn't have dreams.

Life for the ladies has always been rough. But the more separate but equal we become, in myriad ways the harder it becomes to be a woman. I relish these days we live in, the opportunities available to me whether I take them or not. Vaccines, and thongs, and not a single white glove in sight. Civil "rights." Equal pay for equal work (which I do not think I have actually ever experienced, but it's a swell theory.) But a week spent home alone, and I fantasize that I could probably live quite cheerfully in a garter belt and Pucci shift planning meals, and redecorating the living room, and dining out in the city to charm the senior partners once a month, and doing some docent work one morning a week at the museum, and having a couple of kids and a doting bankrolling husband and a white picket fence to hide all my racy longings behind.

Mad (wo)men, indeed.