Coming soon on Mad Men

Can't wait for tonight's episode of Mad Men on AMC.

It's a show about folks who work for a Madison Avenue advertising agency, Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Pryce. The year is 1965.

I didn't work for a Madison Avenue agency but came close. I worked for one less than a block away.

Creator Matthew Weiner says he never worked in advertising. He must have lots of
former agency people as advisers, because his characters are spot on.

• Protagonist Don Draper is a troubled creative genius with enough baggage to sink the Queen Mary. The actor who portrays him, Jon Hamm, attended my alma mater, the University of Missouri. But I'm much better looking.
• The father of smarmy account guy, Pete Campbell, is killed in a plane crash early in one episode. By the end of the hour, Pete, a typical agency whore, is pitching the airline's account. 
• Copywriter Peggy Olson has worked her way up from the secretarial pool. Since it is the mid-sixties and the women's liberation movement isn't yet underway, Peggy hasn't achieved the career status of the men she works for. But any viewer who ever worked for an agency recognizes that will soon change. Peggy's smart. Within a few years, she'll leave this group of losers to start her own shop.
• Perpetually over-served agency partner Roger Sterling, though he doesn't yet know it, will someday be honored by Tanqueray, which will name its premium vodka, Tanqueray Sterling, after him. 
• Voluptuous redhead Joan Holloway manages the office and for years has been having a torrid affair with a married partner. I worked in an office managed by a voluptuous redhead who for years carried on a torrid affair with one of the married partners.

Here, in case Weiner runs out of story lines, are some free ideas for future episodes, drawn from the 35 years I spent in the business. I'm not saying all these incidents happened to me per se.  But, like Forrest Gump, I was there for all of them.

• Peggy is invited along to a dinner at The 21 Club for a liquor client, but only because Roger thinks the client's wife will need someone to talk to. At the bar, Roger orders eight rounds of martinis made with the client's brand. Peggy dutifully downs them all. During dinner, Peggy, who, is seeing double, projectile vomits all over the client and his wife.
• Pete, who has been driving the creatives insane as they frantically prepare for a big pitch, insisting on stupid changes and proclaiming "they won't like that" even though he has no idea what the prospective client wants, flies to Chicago to make his pitch. Ten minutes before he is to stand in front of the client, he realizes he forgot the case containing the agency's layouts and storyboards. Fax machines and the Internet haven't yet been invented so he is screwed. When they hear the news, the creative department goes out to celebrate and signs Pete's name to the bar tab.
• Roger charters a yacht to impress a big-spending client, and invites key agency members to join them for a weekend cruise. A few hours into it, a hopped up hooker, who has been flown in from Vegas because Roger knows she's the client's favorite, falls overboard. Joan jumps in and saves her but swallows so much water she has to be airlifted to the hospital.
• During one of his dark moods, Don hops in his Caddy and takes off for California to visit the grave of the widow of the dead GI whose identity he assumed. Driving through Missouri, he hears on a small town radio station a spot for Dryden's General Store, which he decides is the best advertising he has ever heard. He drives to the store, learns the 13-year-old son of the owner wrote the commercial, and offers the boy a job at Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Pryce, telling him, "You don't need a high school education to work in advertising." 

OK, I'll admit it. That last story isn't true.

But what Don said is.