Category: S1Ep13: Concert Interruptus

Pastorella Theatre

The Bangles concert takes place at the Pastorella Theatre in New York City, a fictional entertainment venue. In Italian, pastorela means “shepherdess”, and a pastorella can mean any musical or literary work with a pastoral theme, a church composition for the Christmas season, or a medieval poem or song involving love for a shepherdess. The Pastorella Theatre therefore has a name connected with music.

In real life, The Bangles appeared at the Irving Plaza at 17 Irving Place in Union Square, Manhattan when they played in New York during their reunion tour; the date was October 2 2000. For the concert venue in this episode, the exterior shots are from the Warner Bros. Theater in Burbank, while the interior shots are from The Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles.

The Bangles in Concert

The main event of the episode kicks off when Sookie receives four tickets to see The Bangles in concert that Saturday as a gift from a delighted wedding client named Mr. Birnbaum, and gives them to Lorelai. Sookie says that Lorelai requested them, so perhaps Mr. Birnbaum, who owned a ticket agency, asked Sookie which show she would like to attend, and she asked for The Bangles on behalf of Lorelai.

The Bangles broke up in 1989 and went on hiatus. They drifted back together in 1998, and officially re-formed in 1999 to record a song called Go Get the Girl (written by band members Susanna Hoffs and Debbi Peterson) for the soundtrack to Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Susanna Hoffs is married to Jay Roach, the film’s director.

In 2000 The Bangles did a reunion tour, and that same year was inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame. In real life, Lorelai could not have seen The Bangles in concert in February 2001 as they were not touring then, but working on their next album.

Grinch

Lorelai calls Rory “Grinch” after she nags her mother into donating some of her own old clothes to the charity rummage sale that Lorelai is organising.

This is a reference to the 2000 Christmas film How the Grinch Stole Christmas (often just known as The Grinch), directed by Ron Howard and with Jim Carrey in the title role. The film was based on the children’s book of the same name by Dr. Seuss.

In the movie, the grumpy Grinch steals all the gifts from the inhabitants of Whoville in an attempt to ruin their Christmas (it doesn’t work). Lorelai is saying that Rory is “stealing” her outdated clothes for the rummage sale in order to ruin her life.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas came out in November 2000, so Lorelai and Rory could have seen it earlier in the winter. We already know that Jim Carrey is one of Sookie’s favourite actors, so perhaps she recommended it.

“It was very, very hot”

RORY: Because it’s a charity rummage sale.
LORELAI: I know.
RORY: That you helped organise.
LORELAI: Okay.
RORY: And volunteered to run.
LORELAI: It was very, very hot in that room that day; I was dehydrated. They could’ve talked me into anything.

An in-joke. The set for Patty’s Place, used in the show for town meetings, was extremely hot and stuffy for the cast. The writer (Elaine Arata) must have thought that if the town meetings in Stars Hollow really were that hot and uncomfortable, the characters might have agreed to almost anything just to get out of there.

Concert Interruptus

The episode title is a play on coitus interruptus, a method of birth control where the penis is withdrawn from the vagina prior to ejaculation, also known as withdrawal or the pull-out method. In the same way, the concert in the episode is interrupted when Madeline and Louise withdraw or “pull out” of the proceedings.

Amusingly, Lorelai also ruins or “interrupts” the girls’ chance of achieving coitus with the boys they pick up at the concert, giving it another layer of meaning.