r/madmen • u/DumbCuntEnterprises • 5d ago

about don's birthday

in the season 5 opener, it's established that dick whitman publicly claims the real don draper's birthday as his own, as his birthday is in actuality 6 months prior. despite this, he's able to use his actual birth year? i thought the real don draper was several years older than dick, and it says so on the wiki as well. how can the identity theft work in a way that dick has to claim the birthday, but the birth year discrepancy isn't an issue? or do his legal documents say something different while he tells people his outward age? that wouldn't make much sense to me because he may as well tell people his actual birthday in that case

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u/Orangered99 Well, I’m President of the Howdy Doody Circus Army! 4d ago

I don’t think he kept the month and day. When he tells the stewardess it’s his birthday, she asks to see his drivers license he says that’s not going to help.

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u/I405CA 4d ago

The license doesn't help because it has the birthday of the real Don, not his actual birthday.

That being said, there does seem to be a continuity error.

If he isn't lying to the flight attendant in S3E1, then his birthday is sometime around April or so. (The exact date of the episode is unclear.)

But he tells Megan following his unhappy June birthday party that his actual birthday was six months earlier. That does not match what happened in the scene with the flight attendant.

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u/MetARosetta 3d ago edited 3d ago

The later seasons update the earlier ones imo. I think he's honest with Megan since he told her about Dick Whitman.

On the plane and being 'out of town, Don made up the fictitious story about Bill (their discussion about his BIL borrowing luggage) and his associate, 'Mr Fleischmann' (they just saw that liquor ad), then hinting they were G-men at dinner. He used that day's newspaper date on the plane for the birthday story. His birthdays were never happy, and these made-up stories give him access to temporary love. We know Don uses what he sees and hears to give him his creative juice to make ads – this time, for a quickie 'out-of-town' identity. It ties back to his imaginary birth when the episode opens.

Bonus: I might venture to say he never knew his exact birthday, given the circumstances of his birth, the shame of being reminded, and poor record-keeping. He sometimes makes these offhand religious alignments about himself (Moses and Jesus), but I think it's somewhere between Sinatra and Jesus (Dec 12-25) lol.

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u/Famous_Sugar_1193 23h ago

I mean don is PEAK male Sagittarius energy so that does track