Month: September 2017

Country Club

In real life the main country club in Hartford is the Hartford Golf Club in West Hartford. It does look like the sort of place where Richard Gilmore would feel at home.

It doesn’t have a rose garden, which Emily told Richard to be sure to show Rory at the club. However, Elizabeth Park in West Hartford has a famous historic rose garden and is less than ten minutes drive from the golf club. While this probably wasn’t what the scriptwriter had in mind, in real life it would be possible to take Rory golfing and to see a rose garden in the same morning.

Exterior shots of the golf club were filmed at Brookfield Farms in Thousand Oaks, California – the same place exteriors of the Independence Inn were filmed.

Tiger Woods

EMILY: [gives Rory a hat] Here you go. Now you look just like Tiger Woods.
RORY: Wow, that’s some hat.

Eldrick “Tiger” Woods (born 1975) is a professional American golfer and among the most successful of all time. He became the World #1 in 1997, less than a year after turning professional.

I can find no instances of Tiger Woods ever wearing a woolly hat such as the one Emily gives Rory, and clearly it’s going to take much more than a hat to make Rory look anything like Woods.

Doublemint

LORELAI (referring to the double twin wedding): It’s like a really snooty Doublemint commercial.

Doublemint is a peppermint-flavoured chewing gum made by Wrigley. For a long time, their advertising used identical twin sisters as models in their advertisements. The longest-running Doublemint Twins were Linda Ryan Puffer and Lisa Winters Cox, who appeared in six commercials together between 1985 and 1995.

Teacher in the Charlie Brown cartoon

LORELAI: You don’t care at all, do you?
MICHEL: To me you are the teacher in the Charlie Brown cartoon.

Michel is referring to the popular Peanuts cartoon strip by Charles Shultz, featuring Charlie Brown as the main character. In the original cartoons, adults were referred to but never drawn, and this continued with the first television special.

The 1967 Peanuts television special You’re in Love, Charlie Brown had a classroom scene which had interaction with a teacher named Miss Othmar. Her voice was represented with a wah-wah sound made by a trombone. Since then all adult voices have been represented by the trombone sound.

The reference is made by people to indicate that they’re not listening, or that what they’re hearing is going over their heads. It seems an odd thing for Michel to know about, but perhaps he watched a lot of cartoons when he moved to the US to improve his colloquial English.

 

Jordan almonds

MICHEL (to Lorelai): Guests are checked in, baskets are given out, and 200,000 tons of Jordan almonds have been delivered.

Jordan almonds are almonds with a pastel-coloured sugar coating. They are traditionally given as wedding favours. Originating in Italy, they may not have a connection with Jordan, but the derivation of the name is uncertain.

Antonio Banderas

LORELAI (to Mrs Shales): Why don’t you go up to your room and have a fabulous bubble bath, and I’ll send up some wine and a masseuse who bears a remarkable resemblance to Antonio Banderas.

Antonio Banderas (born 1960) is a Spanish actor. Successful in Spain during the 1980s, he made the transition to Hollywood in 1992 with The Mambo Kings. His breakthrough role was in Philadelphia (1993). His biggest success in the late 1990s was playing the title role in the action film The Mask of Zorro (1998).

Lorelai uses the term masseuse incorrectly: a masseuse is a woman who performs massage for a living; a man in the same role is known as a masseur.