I am crazy for vintage design. For furniture, my favorite styles come from around the 1940s, when styles began to incorporate the smooth lines and honey colors of Mid-Century Modern but still retained a few decorative flourishes from the Art Deco days.

My pre-Mr T apartment sported a real dining room, and I decided it needed real dining room furniture. As usual, this meant searching Craigslist and Ebay for super-cheap versions of the vintage styles that I love. The sideboard and china cabinet came from a DC-area government scientist who talked my ear off about politics and science. The pieces had been in her family since they were first purchased in the 1940s. I know less about my dining table and chairs, which came from Boston via Ebay, dropped at my door by a curmudgeonly man with a trailer.

Here’s a tiny bit of my dining table legs (which isn’t terribly relevant to this post, but I can’t resist the puppy photo of Zoe):

And here’s a chair:

Cut to last week, when Mr T and I were finishing Season 2 of Mad Men. There was an episode where Don visited an old friend in California. He was shown fixing the leg of a wooden chair. And when he turned it over, we saw this:

I can’t tell you how bizarrely excited I was to see my chair on Mad Men! When the new season starts, you can bet I’ll be watching extra closely in case any of my other vintage possessions show up in the background.

Have you ever had a copy of your possessions turn up in a very unexpected place?