Footnotes to the TV series
SOOKIE: Oh, God, I killed a Viking. Oh, you should fire me, or make me pay the cost of a new stove out of my paycheck.
LORELAI: Well, whatever you want.
SOOKIE: I can’t afford a new stove! Those things are expensive.
Viking make premium cooking appliances, including gas stoves and ovens. A standard Viking stove will set you back around $15 000 today, so Sookie is not kidding that she can’t afford to replace the one she damaged out of her own funds.
This song by Macy Gray plays while Lorelai and Rory are fighting about her refusal to attend Chilton, with Rory listening to it in her bedroom while Lorelai has it on in the living room. The top-selling single from Macy Gray’s debut album, and her best-selling single to date, it went to #5 in the US and won a Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. This is a rare example of the Gilmore girls enjoying Top 40 music, which was usually treated disdainfully by the show.
During their argument, Lorelai says to Rory that she got “knocked up at sixteen”. In fact she gave birth to Rory when she was sixteen and six months old, so she must have got pregnant at fifteen.
[Rory starts walking quickly down the street, and Lorelai follows her.]
LORELAI: Oh, you’re gonna have to walk faster than that. You’re gonna have to turn into friggin’ Flo-Jo to get away from me.
Flo-Jo was the name given by the press to American track and field athlete Florence Griffith Joyner (1959-1998), who won gold and silver medals for running at the 1984 and 1988 Olympic Games. She is considered to be the fastest woman of all time.
This country song by George Strait plays while Lorelai and Rory leave the diner and walk past the hayride after arguing about Rory’s unexpected reluctance to attend private school. The song is from the 1992 album Pure Country, the soundtrack to the musical western film of the same name, which had Strait in the lead role of Wyatt “Dusty” Chandler. The movie bombed, but the soundtrack was a commercial success, and is George Strait’s best selling album. Heartland went to #1 on the US Country charts.
The novel that Rory was reading the week before; her total absorption in the novel is what Dean says first attracted him to Rory. The debut work of French author Gustave Flaubert and first published in 1857, it is considered a literary masterpiece.
Madame Bovary is about a beautiful well-educated young woman who finds herself trapped in a dull marriage to a village doctor. Her longing for romance, fostered by reading popular novels, leads her into affairs with other men, with tragic results. The theme of infidelity is one which will be important in Rory and Dean’s relationship, and the hint is right there in the pilot.
The novel that Rory is reading. Written by Herman Melville and first published in 1851, it is regarded as one of the Great American Novels and is Melville’s best known work. The novel is about the obsessive quest by a sea captain for revenge against a great white wale named Moby Dick.
Rory tells Dean that she thinks it is “really good”, and that it is her “first Melville”, although she admits that it is a cliche to have Moby Dick as your first Melville. Herman Melville has ten other novels still available, and presumably Rory plans to read more of them.
Is the fact that Rory is reading this novel when she meets Dean an early warning of his own obsessive nature? Or perhaps, like Huck Finn and On the Road, it’s another novel about a specifically American journey, this time upon the sea. The sexual innuendo of a “big Dick” when meeting Dean probably isn’t to be disregarded, either.
DEAN: Well, maybe you could show me where this Miss Patty’s place is.
RORY: Yeah, I guess so. I really don’t have anything important to . . . let’s go.
Miss Patty’s School of Ballet, seemingly always known as Miss Patty’s Place, is a very significant location for Dean and Rory’s future relationship. And it was the first place in Stars Hollow they ever went to together.
DEAN: Lorelai. I like that.
RORY: It’s my mother’s name too. She named me after herself. She was lying in the hospital thinking about how men name boys after themselves all the time, you know, so why couldn’t women? She says her feminism just kind of took over. Though personally I think a lot of Demerol also went into that decision.
Demerol is a brand name for Pethedine, a synthetic opioid medication and the most common narcotic pain relief given in US hospitals during childbirth.
Lorelai’s choosing to give her daughter her own name is another suggestion that she hoped Rory would be a “do-over” version of herself.
DEAN: My family just moved here from Chicago.
RORY: Chicago. Windy. Oprah.
Chicago is a city in the Midwestern state of Illinois on the shores of Lake Michigan; it is the third-largest city in the United States. It has a massive suburban sprawl, so that Dean could be from a town quite a distance from the city itself, and still claim to be from Chicago. This doesn’t seem unlikely.
Reduced to a babbling state by Dean’s attention, Rory blurts out the only two things she knows about Chicago.
One is that its moniker is The Windy City, even though meteorologists will tell you it’s no windier than any other city in the US. Some say the wind is that which comes off the lake, others that the nickname was an insult from rival cities to mean that citizens of Chicago were full of hot air.
The other fact Rory knows about Chicago is that it’s where The Oprah Winfrey Show is broadcast from. Celebrity talk show host Oprah Winfrey’s television show went from 1986 to 2011, and was the highest-rated daytime TV show in the United States, if not the world.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 