From 1966 to 1992 there was an incredible beauty parlour called Salon East. It had one employee. A manicurist. Catty, quick, always right. This was advertising world-building the likes of which we’ve not seen in decades.
A customer comes in and complains about dry hands.
Then Salon East’s very own Madge would absolutely cook. She would eye up those dry hands and drop an absolute heater of a one-liner like she was the roast master on cable before dropping those gross talons in nuclear-looking green liquid.
Don’t you worry. That was just sweet, sweet Palmolive dish soap at work.
The customer would gasp and yank their hands out.
Calm. Cool, collected Madge knew exactly what she was doing.
“You’re soaking in it.”
A world with one set. One character. One type of joke. Twenty-six years of advertising gold.
THE WOMAN IN THE CHAIR
Madge was played by the incomparable Jan Miner. She made her Broadway debut in 1960 in a comedy called Viva Madison Avenue!
Yes, a romp about the ad business that lasted two shows and just one night. It’s almost too much to share that she was playing a character named Peggy long before Sterling Cooper.
Six years later the real Madison Avenue would make her immortal.
But she had to audition first. Something an agency exec at Ted Bates suggested she try out for.
So Miner shows up in a room full of younger, pretty manicurists and she thought she was in the wrong place. But she saw through that casting and created the whole Madge character in her head right then and there.
I can only imagine how this must have really rubbed the agency creative team the wrong way. But she became the brand book for Madge and would object to scripts that she felt didn’t work for the character. She promoted herself to show runner of the Madge show.
THE FRANCHISE NOBODY NOTICED
This next part will blow your mind.
There was a Madge for every country.
She became Françoise in France. Tilly in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Marissa in Finland. Sylvia in Denmark. She was Madge again down under and in New Zealand, but locally recast.
Each market got the same salon, the same bowl of Palmolive, the same outrageous gasp. And just a different actress playing Madge.
The brand was basically licensing a sitcom to international markets before Hollywood would actually figure that out.
A world so solid that it survived new cast members on three continents.
THE LOST GENRE
Madge wasn’t the only one running this playbook.
There was a metaverse of service workers delivering single jokes for decades. It was a damn near Avengers of advertising.
There was Mr. Whipple. A grocer who begged customers for over twenty years not to squeeze the Charmin while doing exactly that the whole time.
There was Rosie who pushed Bounty across the diner counter for her two decade long shift.
What about Mrs. Olson, the neighbour who hooked up every young marriage with Folgers since nobody knew how to make good coffee back then.
There was also Cora, the general store owner who recommended Maxwell House. She was hilariously played by the Wicked Witch of the West, Margaret Hamilton.
And as we shared a few weeks ago, the Maytag Repairman, the loneliest man in the whole universe.
These ads worked like gangbusters. A manicurist, a grocer, a waitress, a neighbour, a shopkeeper, a repairman. A whole cast working across competing brands in a shared universe no agency could think of.
Then, just like that, the industry decided they were corny as hell and killed the genre.
But you can’t kill this gold. The smuggest creatives in the business can’t help but reboot it with bigger budgets and bolder concepts.
Flo showed up in 2008 with a white apron and has been shilling Progressive ever since. There’s Jake from State Farm. Mayhem for Allstate.
Flo is the heir to Madge.
PENCILS DOWN
But try to get Madge approved today?
You’d get maybe two years out of her before the CMO left. Madge outlasted six generations of CMOs, six presidents and every agency review along the way. No one dared to deviate from the platform and people still remember the ads.
Brands and agencies today lack the discipline and balls to stick to a world like this.
They add collab stunts, merch and constant rebrands that could never top the hard work of one mean lady doing manicures and cracking unreal one-liners for 26 years.
COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE WATER LILY
Months ago, I foolishly bought a bottle of crème de violette. Oh, the things I’d do for one cocktail in one newsletter. It showed up in the Mr. Peanut issue and has been full-on haunting the Drink Cart ever since.
So just like everyone who saw Madge, that bottle needed a manicure. For this one we’re soaking in The Water Lily.
Unlike the last few weeks this is a very modern cocktail. Invented at Little Branch in New York. A place that I was probably last in around that same time. It’s got a speakeasy-for-beginners vibe and I seem to remember ordering fizz drinks for no reason I can remember now.
And I’m pretty sure another creative director from our agency at the time took glee in steeling a few of the metal straws from the bar. I thought that was the craziest thing I saw on the trip.
Until my creative and business partner Graham invented a cocktail called “The Laser Bomb”. It was actually just a shot of vodka in a Bud Light Lime. I think he got a free mini bottle of Belvedere because his hotel room had an issue. Like all great cocktails it was a mistake.
He even made a website for it. If we had AI and Claude Code back then, this would have really turned into something big.
Anyway, the story goes that a guest named Georgette asked bartender Richard Boccato for something with gin and violet, he built it on the spot and named it after her middle name Lillian.
This is definitely the kind of service Madge would have wanted for us. As long as your hands were beat up like an old boxer’s.
And yes, this is a Venn diagram of cocktail, floral and stunning. And if you ask me, the violette really does still taste like soap and that bottle will likely haunt me for the rest of my life at this point.
The Water Lily
3/4 oz gin
3/4 oz Cointreau
3/4 oz crème de violette
3/4 oz lemon juice
Shake it all with ice, double strain into a chilled coupe glass, and garnish with an orange twist and toast to soaking your hands in dish soap all thanks to Madge.
The Drink Cart is the newsletter version of sitting at a really good bar with someone who thinks too much about advertising and won’t shut up about it. Subscribe to get it on Wednesdays and Fridays.