Ivan Boesky

RICHARD: Welcome, everyone, to the first official board meeting of the StyleAid Corporation. Will everyone please take a seat?

CHIP: I feel like Ivan Boesky.

Ivan Boesky (born 1937), former stock trader who became infamous for his prominent role in an insider trading scandal that occurred in the United States during the mid-1980s. He was charged and pleaded guilty to insider trading, was fined a record $100 million, served three years in prison and became an informant. The character of Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street is partly based on Boesky.

“Michel ate pasta?”

GISELLE: I am. I will miss him so much when I go home, but thank goodness, he will have an extra five pounds to remember me by after eating all my pasta today, that dirty thieving boy.

LORELAI: Michel ate pasta?

GISELLE: Well, yes. Michel loves pasta, he eats it all the time.

LORELAI: Not around us. Here it’s all no-carb, low-cal, let me see if I can eat less than the lab rats do.

Michel and his mother Giselle are having a wonderful time together treating themselves to luxurious meals, and there must surely be some malice involved when Lorelai decides to “out” Michel as a fad dieter to his mother (it feels like a subtitute for a different kind of “outing”, and just as much of a betrayal).

When Michel and his mother leave together laughing and joking over coffee, Lorelai looks utterly disgusted by them, and mutters, “That is so wrong”. It seems that it’s wrong for any other mother to befriend her child and joke with them while pigging out and drinking coffee!

“She doesn’t have a baseball bat in her hands, does she?”

PARIS: First, let me say that I’m glad to see you all here today, at the beginning of what I think is going to be a very exciting experiment.

BRAD: She doesn’t have a baseball bat in her hands, does she?

A reference to the 1987 crime film The Untouchables, directed by Brian De Palma, screenplay by David Mamet. It is based on the 1957 book of the same name, a memoir by Prohibition agent Eliot Ness. The film follows Eliot Ness, played by Kevin Costner, as he forms his Untouchables team to bring Al Capone, played by Robert De Niro, to justice during Prohibition.

The Untouchables was a commercial success, and received positive reviews from critics. While the film is based on historical events, it is a work of fiction.

Brad is referring to a scene in the film where Al Capone beats a henchman to death with a baseball bat while they are seated at a dinner table. In real life, Capone beat three associates with a baseball bat in 1928 before having them shot when he received word they were plotting to kill him. It did occur at the dinner table, after Capone made sure they were thoroughly drunk.

David Letterman’s House

LORELAI: Honey, you gotta ease up on that love potion you’ve been giving him or he’s gonna start showing up at David Letterman’s house soon.

In May 1988, David Letterman was stalked by a mentally ill woman named Margaret “Peggy” Ray, who stole his car, camped on his tennis court, and repeatedly broke into his house. Her exploits gained national attention, and Letterman joked about her on his show sometimes, but without ever naming her. Ray served 34 months in prison and psychiatric hospitals for stalking Letterman, but refused to continue her medication upon her release, and went on to stalk astronaut Story Musgrove. She killed herself in 1998. Both Letterman and Musgrove expressed sympathy for her – “A sad ending to a confused life”, said a spokesman for Letterman.

Another rather distasteful joke about mental illness and suicide, and the implication that it is somehow Rory’s “fault” that Dean is behaving so obsessively. There does seem to be a slight acknowledgement here from Lorelai that Dean’s behaviour is abnormal and unhealthy.

Dean Obsessively Calls the House

DEAN [on answering machine]: Hey, it’s me. Uh, it’s four o’clock, call me when you get home. [beep] Hey, uh, it’s four thirty. I’m home, call me. [beep] It’s quarter to five – where are you? I’ll try paging you. [beep] It’s five-thirty. Did you get my page? Call with the answer … Hey, I totally forgot you were getting home at six …Hey, it’s five forty-five and I just thought I’d see if you got home early.

Dean has always had an obsessive streak and a trigger-finger when using the phone – something which Rory originally found endearing, and accepted with complacence. But now that four calls during a study session while she’s home alone has ballooned into fourteen calls while she’s staying late at school to work on a group project, she’s starting to see that Dean is not so much clingy as stifling. Even after he remembers Rory is staying back until 6 pm, he still calls her, on the off-chance she got home early!

Dean the Determined

LORELAI: Dean the determined.

An obvious play on epithets historically given to royalty – Ivan the Terrible, James the Just, Alfred the Great, Gerald the Fearless, Philip the Handsome, and so on.

There was a real royal with this epithet – Antonio the Determined [pictured], who managed to rule Portugal as Antony I for at least twenty days during a succession crisis. Although Philip II of Spain prevailed, Antonio did not gracefully admit defeat, but attempted to rule Portugal from the Azores, where he established an opposition government that clung on for three more years. He went into exile in France and England, taking the crown jewels with him.

In Antonio’s case, “determined” seems to be a polite word for “desperate”, or even “delusional”. Dean will likewise do his darnedest to grimly hang onto Rory, even when he knows he’s lost.

Mötley Crüe Book

LORELAI: Uh, you’ve gotta read this Mötley Crüe book. I swear, you get to the point where Ozzy Osbourne snorts a row of ants and you think, it cannot get any grosser, and then you turn the page and oh, hello, yes it can! It’s excellent!

Lorelai is reading The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band, a 2001 collaborative autobiography of Mötley Crüe by the band members – Tommy Lee, Mick Mars, Vince Neil, and Nikki Sixx. The gritty tell-all book received rave reviews and was on the New York Times Bestseller List for four weeks. It was made into a film in 2019.

The next page, where it gets “grosser” than snorting ants involves Ozzy Osbourne, from Black Sabbath, licking urine (his own and someone else’s) from the pavement.

Lorelai is a heavy metal fan who loves scandalous and outrageous autobiographies, so this book is a natural fit for her.

Business Fair Pitches

Louise – a lipstick tracking device (rejected as not unisex enough)

Madeline – locker robot to help with homework and carry stuff (rejected as too complex)

Paris – flashy locker first aid kits

Richard says that he loves Paris’ idea, and Rory, as group leader, immediately accepts it as the product they are running with. We never get to hear Brad and Chip’s ideas, which seems rather unfair. Neither of them protest though. Probably because they’re too frightened of Paris.

The Pigeon Sisters and Opus

PARIS: I’m sorry, group leader, could you ask the Pigeon sisters if there is a point to this opus?

The Pigeon sisters are characters from the film The Odd Couple, previously mentioned. They are English sisters named Cecily and Gwendolyn Pigeon who live in the same building as Felix and Oscar. They were played by cousins Monica Evans and Carole Shelley in the original Broadway play, the film, and the 1970 sit-com, although their roles were gradually phased out in the television show.

The Pigeon sisters are friendly, flirtatious, ditzy, and as their name suggests, slightly bird-brained, rather like Louise and Madeline. Paris has no problem tearing down her friends in public; no wonder that Rory isn’t sure whether Paris is her friend or not.

An opus is an artistic work, especially one on a grand scale.

LoJack

RORY: Louise, what’s your idea?

LOUISE: A lipstick LoJack.

LoJack is a recovery system for stolen cars that uses GPS to locate vehicles, notifying police of its location and allowing recovery in less than half an hour. The LoJack system was created and patented in 1979 by William Reagan, a former police commissioner. Its name is meant to be the opposite of hijack.

Although we haven’t developed a LoJack system for lipsticks, there are now similar systems in place to find computers, laptops, and phones, and even lost car keys can give off a sound to alert the owner to their position, so Louise’s idea was ahead of its time.