This flex would have instantly made me the single most insufferable casting director in the entire industry. I'm talking vanity plates on my car, commemorative tattoos, the whole nine. I hope real-life casting directors Laurie Schiff and Carrie Audino are out there somewhere, blissfully making people's eyes glaze over by shoehorning this experience into every work party conversation.
When you first see her (Don's POV), you could easily mistake her for her old stylish, carefree, bohemian self. She does, in fact, "look good." But when you see her very briefly from behind, you can see just how flimsy the manic pixie dream girl facade has gotten. She's desperate enough to devise an elaborate "funny meeting you here" plot, complete with prop portfolio, but she's blind to the rest of it. She probably dressed carefully for this encounter, too - the jaunty beret, the necklaces, the cardigan - but was just too fried to look at anything other than her immediate head-on reflection in the mirror. So much of the nightmare of addiction is the fallout caused by short-term thinking...her hair being tangled in just that spot was so tragically realistic to me.
Long story short, those poor secretaries were BROKE broke. My own admittedly modest Lansing, MI income would have to increase from $32.6k to almost $85k in order for me to maintain my current Lansing "lifestyle," such that it is, in Manhattan. I have a used car, a falling-apart house, I don't travel, nothing fancy. In comparison, after adjusting for inflation, Megan made $38,524/year. That would mean she'd still be about $40k shy of having even a minimally comfortable, lower middle class lifestyle in Manhattan on her own salary. I get that HER parents were rich enough to help financially support her where her job could not, but what about the rest of the secretaries?!? And she was DON'S secretary, too...the catbird seat of the secretarial hierarchy! If SHE was making the equivalent of EIGHTEEN-FIFTY AN HOUR in MANHATTAN, I genuinely don't understand how the lower-ranking secretaries could afford to work there for what must have been significantly LESS. The transportation costs getting to and from work, the open-ended hours and long nights, the cost of buying and maintaining presentable clothes and shoes...a lot of those girls would've had to live three deep in a broom closet just to afford to stay in the city on pay THAT low.
This part was craziest of all...adjusted for inflation, the $70/week-in-1965-Manhattan salary would be the equivalent of $38,525 annually, WHICH IN TURN WOULD BE THE EQUIVALENT OF $14,803 IN LANSING. In other words, someone being paid that little in Manhattan would make less than half than I currently am in Lansing (if that makes sense).
My question is whether Matt Weiner based that "$70/week" on a particular historical figure for the pay of 1960s Manhattan secretaries or if it was just a screenwriting error, maybe based on hastily-researched figures for secretarial salaries in 1960s Iowa or Alabama, for example? Anyways, sorry everyone. That is all. I don't usually get this worked up about math, yet here we are.