LANE: Okay, I just crunched the numbers and at two thousand words and twenty-five cents a word, this stupid ad’s gonna cost five hundred dollars! That’s five months worth of Minwaxing end tables at my mom’s store.
Minwax is a company founded in Brooklyn in 1904 by Arthur B. Harrison. It’s currently headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio. They make Minwax Wood Finish Stain, so Lane is staining end tables (small tables designed to sit next to an armchair or sofa).
This solves the mystery of where Lane gets the money to buy music and other paraphernalia – she gets paid $100 a month (around $25 per week) for staining furniture at the antiques store. It’s not a lot of money, but Lane is thrifty.
Lane refers to it as her “mom’s store”, even though she has a father as well (or she did at the start of the show, anyway). I don’t know if Mrs Kim is the actual sole owner of the store, or if Lane refers to it that way because she sees her mother as the “boss” of the store, being there all the time while her father is mysteriously absent.
LORELAI: Or one of your authors, Faulkner or . . .
RORY: Or Sylvia Plath.
LORELAI: Hm, might send the wrong message.
RORY: The sticking her head in the oven thing?
LORELAI: Yeah. Although she did make her kids a snack first, shows a certain maternal instinct.
William Faulkner (1897-1962), previously mentioned, writer known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County of Mississippi, based on the real Lafayette County of that state. William Faulkner spent most of his life in Oxford, Mississippi, which in his works is renamed Jefferson. The winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature, he is one of the most celebrated American authors, and widely considered the greatest writer of Southern Literature.
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) [pictured], previously mentioned several times, poet, novelist, and short-story writer, best known for her confessional poetry, as well as her 1963 novel The Bell Jar, previously discussed. Her posthumous 1982 Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize. Clinically depressed for most of her life, she killed herself by gassing herself in the oven. Before she did so, she made her sleeping children (two year old Frieda and one year old Nicholas) a snack of bread and butter, opened their bedroom window, and put tape and towels around the door in an effort to protect them from the fumes. Sadly, her suicide seems to have often become a punchline in television comedy, as with this example.
The “big kahuna” is an idiomatic phrase meaning “the boss, the leader, the head of an organisation, the big one”. It’s borrowed from Hawaiian, where the word kahuna means an expert in any field, but is often thought of as referring to a shaman or high priest.
The term became known from the 1959 comedy film Gidget, in which “The Big Kahuna”, played by Cliff Robertson, was the leader of a group of surfers [pictured]. Beach party movies of the 1960s often used the term, such as Beach Blanket Bingo, where “The Big Kahuna” was the best surfer on the beach.
LORELAI: You had these little OshKosh cords and they were way too big and once at the mall, they fell right down to your knees and I said, “Whoa, there, Droopy Drawers!”.
OshKosh B’gosh, children clothing company founded in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. It began in 1895 as the Grove Manufacturing Company by Frank E. Grove, J. Howard Jenkins, and James Clark. Grove was soon bought out and it was renamed Oshkosh Clothing and Manufacturing Company the next year. The B’gosh began being used in 1911, after the manager heard the tagline “Oshkosh b’gosh” in a vaudeville show; it formally became OshKosh B’gosh in 1937.
OshKosh are particularly known for their children’s bibbed overalls, sold since the early twentieth century as a way for parents to dress children like their fathers. They became popular in the 1960s, and since 1984, most of the company’s clothing line is for children. OshKosh have over 300 stores in the US, and are headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s now owned by Carter’s.
Baby Rory would have been wearing corduroy bibbed overalls from OshKosh [pictured].
The Animals [pictured]: English rhythm and blues and rock band, formed in 1962. They were known for their gritty, bluesy sound and deep-voiced frontman, Eric Burdon, most famous for their signature song and international #1, “The House of the Rising Sun”, as well as hits such as “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”, and “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”. After a new line-up, they moved to California in 1966 and achieved commercial success as a psychedelic and hard rock band, with hits such as “San Franciscan Nights”, and “When I Was Young”, before disbanding at the end of the decade. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.
A-ha: Norwegian synth-pop band founded in Oslo in 1982 by Paul Waaktaar-Savoy (guitar), Magne Furuholmen (keyboards/guitar/vocals), and Morten Harket (vocals). Their 1985 debut album, Hunting High and Low, is their most successful – it yielded international hits such as “Take On Me” and “The Sun Always Shines on TV”, and went to #1 in Norway, #2 in the UK, and #15 in the US. They are the most successful global pop act to come out of Norway, and the first Norwegian band to be nominated for a Grammy. Their music has often been included in music soundtracks, they performed the theme song for the 1987 James Bond film The Living Daylights, and are one of the highest-grossing bands of all time.
I feel as if the commercial success and international acclaim of these bands might be what caused Lane to cut them from her extensive list. A-ha is probably a “guilty pleasure” because it is pop, rather than rock.
RORY: Let’s see – “Drummer with strong beat seeks band into the Accelerators, the Adolescents, the Adverts, Agent Orange, the Angelic Upstarts, the Agnostic Front, Ash . . .”
The Accelerators: Rock band from Raleigh, North Carolina, formed in 1982 by singer Gerald Duncan. They released three albums, and broke up in 1991, but Duncan recruited new musicians and brought out another album before retiring in 2000, then making a comeback in 2007 for a final fifth album. They had a bit of a following on college radio, and received some positive reviews.
The Adolescents: Punk rock band formed in Fullerton, California in 1980 by bassist Steve Soto. Part of the hardcore punk movement in southern California in the early 1980s, they were one of the main punk acts to come out of Orange County. They went through constant line-up changes, and released nine albums before Soto’s death in 2018, then another in 2020. Their self-titled debut album was one of the best-selling from the California hardcore scene, selling 10 000 copies.
The Adverts [pictured]: English punk band who formed in 1976 and broke up in 1979 after the accidental electrocution of their manager. They were one of the first punk bands to have chart success in the UK – their 1977 single “Gary Gilmore’s Eyes” reached #18 on the UK charts, and was considered one of the best punk singles of the 1970s. Bassist Gaye Advert (born Gaye Black) has been described as the first female punk star, which might be another reason Lane is drawn to them.
Agent Orange: Punk rock band formed in Placentia, California in 1979 – like The Adolescents, they were leading lights in the 1980s southern Californian hardcore punk scene, and were also founded by Steve Soto. They were one of the first bands to mix punk with surf rock, for a distinctively Californian punk sound. They brought out three studio albums, and are still going, despite the deaths of three of their bassists.
Angelic Upstarts: English punk rock band formed in 1977, described as one of the most politically-charged and thought provoking of the era. Their politics are anti-fascist and socialist working class, pioneers of the Oi! subgenre that unites punk and skinhead cultures. They have released twelve studio albums, with the most recent in 2016. Their debut single, “The Murder of Liddle Towers”, was included inMojo‘s list of the best punk rock singles of all time.
Agnostic Front: Hardcore punk band formed in New York City in 1980 by lead guitarist Vincent “Vinnie Stigma” Cappuccio. They are considered an important influence on the New York hardcore scene, as well as pioneers of the crossover thrash genre that fuses thrash metal and hardcore punk. From the beginning, they have had a strong connection with skinheads, like the Angelic Upstarts. They’ve had twelve studio albums, most recently in 2019.
Ash, previously discussed. This is now the third time this band has been mentioned. It is a favourite of both Rory and Lane.
Just from the bands starting with A, we can see that Lane’s favourite bands tend to be hardcore punk and alternative/indie rock.
LORELAI: This is an uncontaminated area. I even cleaned the table using something other than the sleeve of my sweater and spit.
Although there are several jokes in the show about Lorelai’s poor housekeeping skills, their home never looks dirty, or even very messy – cosy clutter and a light layer of dust is about the worse we ever see. (It’s hard to make a television set, which is not lived in, really look like a dirty house).
It does make sense that Lorelai is not keen on housework – besides being a single parent working full-time (and until recently, studying part-time), which is reason enough. She worked as a maid for several years, and her job is to run the inn and keep it looking nice now, so it’s believable that she wouldn’t feel like taking care of the house as well when she gets home from work.
This song by alternative rock band Modest Mouse is playing in Rory’s bedroom during the opening scene. Only later do we discover Lane is in her bedroom, and it is she who is listening to it.
“Tiny Cities Made of Ashes” is a track from the band’s 2000 album, The Moon & Antarctica. The first to be released by the band on a major record label (Epic Records), it led to fans being worried that they would lose their unique sound. However, the album received positive reviews, with some critics feeling that it was actually the band’s “weirdest” album. It was ranked as one of the best albums of that year. The album went to #120 in the US, and has been certified gold, having sold almost half a million copies.
Knowing that Lane is in Rory’s bedroom the whole time in this scene, it seems a bit strange that Rory doesn’t share the big news of the Harvard application arriving with her best friend. I suppose it’s something Rory wants to experience with Lorelai first, and perhaps she doesn’t want to shove her academic opportunities in Lane’s face – and she also knows Lane is too busy concentrating on writing her band ad to listen. Still, it’s a slightly melancholy indication that their lives are going to continue in different directions.
RORY: Oh, geez. Let the record show that when my application to Harvard arrived, we were watching The Brady Bunch Variety Hour … Man, this morning I was reading Dead Souls – it couldn’t have come then?
Dead Souls, a 1842 novel by Russian author Nikolai Gogol, widely regarded as a classic of Russian literature. The novel chronicles the adventures of a mysterious traveller and the people he encounters, and was intended to represent a modern-dayInfernoof Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Gogol himself saw his work as an “epic poem in prose”, and within the book characterised it as a “novel in verse”. Gogol intended the novel to be the first part of a three-volume work, but burned the manuscript of the second part shortly before his death. Although the novel ends in mid-sentence, it is regarded by some as complete. It is very possible that Rory is reading Dead Souls for English Literature at school.
LORELAI: Are you sure that’s not just the sight of Robert Reed in the tight clown pants?
Robert Reed, born John Robert Rietz Jr (1932-1992), actor best known for playing father Mike Brady in The Brady Bunch, and its various specials and spin-offs. From the very beginning, Reed was unhappy with his role as Mike Brady, feeling that the show was far too silly for a serious classically-trained Shakespearean actor such as himself. Although he got on very well with the rest of the cast and behaved professionally at all times, he often argued with the creator and producer over the scripts (he was allowed to direct a few episodes to appease him). Despite this, he appeared in all the specials and spin-offs, and actually really loved doing The Brady Bunch Variety Hour, as it gave him the opportunity to sing, dance, and have fun.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 