Footnotes to the TV series
RICHARD: Oh, what have you done now?
LORELAI: Nothing. I just, well, I’m putting the bunny back with his little friends and I just sort of massacred them a little bit, but that’s life in the jungle isn’t it?
“That’s life in the jungle” is a phrase suggesting that it’s a tough world out there, and if anything goes wrong you have to take it in your stride. It’s especially applied in the corporate world, and seems to date to the 1980s.
LORELAI: Oh God. Mom has gone a little crazy with the figurines here, huh? A little Kathy Bates. Although you probably haven’t seen Misery, which is a good thing because Rory couldn’t sleep alone for a week after we watched it.
Misery is a 1990 thriller film directed by Rob Reiner, and based on the 1987 novel of the same name by Stephen King. The movie is about a popular romance novelist (James Caan) who is held captive by a crazed fan (Kathy Bates) so he can continue writing about her favourite character, named Misery. The movie was a success, and Kathy Bates won Best Actress at the Academy Awards for her role.
Lorelai is referring to the numerous figurines owned by Kathy Bates’ character, which the writer must be careful not to disarrange when he manages to sneak out of the room where he has been confined. Lorelai must feel that she is in a similar position, and the film also gives us a clue as to how trapped and tortured Lorelai felt when she lived with her parents.
Rory would have only been six when the film came out, so she and Lorelai must have rented it on video at some point when she was older. We don’t know how old she was (it might have been quite recently), but either way it was still too scary for her, and she had to sleep in Lorelai’s bed for a week afterwards.
LANE: My mother has once again set me up.
RORY: Another future doctor?
LANE: A future chiropractor. I think she’s losing confidence in my prospects.
A chiropractor is a practitioner of chiropractic, an alternative medicine practice focusing on manual therapy of the muscles and skeleton, especially the spine. It was founded in the 1890s by D.D. Palmer, who claimed to have gained knowledge of it from the spirit world. Despite being at odds with mainstream medicine, it is well established and commonly sought out, especially for back and neck pain.
Lane seems to think that her mother no longer believes she will marry a doctor, and is now willing to settle for any kind of health or wellness practitioner.
LORELAI: Wow, it’s gonna be just like Lady and the Tramp. You’ll share a plate of spaghetti, but it’ll just be one long strand, but you won’t realize it until you accidentally meet in the middle. And then he’ll push a meatball towards you with his nose, and you’ll push it back with your nose, and then you’ll bring the meatball home, and you’ll save it in the refrigerator for years and . . .
Lady and the Tramp is a 1955 animated musical film made by Walt Disney. Loosely based on the short story, “Happy Dan, the Whistling Dog”, by Ward Green, it tells the story of a cocker spaniel named Lady who lives with an upper-middle class family in the early twentieth century. Lady meets a stray mongrel named Tramp, and they have many adventures together, eventually falling in love.
Lady and the Tramp was the #6 film of 1955, and is now regarded as a classic. It was released on video in 1987 when Rory was three years old; Lorelai might have bought it for her then. It was re-released on video in 1998 when Rory was 14, which is another possibility.
Lorelai is describing the most famous scene from the film: the two dogs share a plate of spaghetti at an Italian restaurant where Tramp has been begging for scraps, and accidentally share a kiss as they swallow opposite ends of the same strand of spaghetti. She goes on to imagine Rory saving a meatball as a memento of her dinner date, something which Rory tries to do.
LORELAI: Uh, where is he taking you? …
RORY: Well, if you must know, he’s taking me to Andoloro’s.
Andoloro’s is an Italian bistro in Stars Hollow that we never hear about again. Maybe it closed down, or subsequent events rendered it so painful in Rory’s memory that it was a forbidden topic forevermore.
Mind you, whatever happened to Chez Fleur, the French restaurant that Sookie, Jackson, Lorelai and Rune went to for their double date?
LORELAI: Me too. We could talk about me for years, and believe me, we will. But let’s focus on you, the lady of the evening. No hooker reference intended.
RORY: Glad to hear it.
“Lady of the evening” is an old-fashioned euphemism for a prostitute. It dates to the 1920s.
LORELAI: I don’t know. It’s just all this love in the air, you know. I miss Max. There’s just been so much going on with your Dad coming home, and family stuff, and your constant existence …
RORY: Thanks for the love.
LORELAI: Any time. So I haven’t had a lot of time to focus on it, and I miss Max.
RORY: I know.
LORELAI: I had a dream about him the other night.
RORY: Really? Dirty?
LORELAI: No, absolutely not. And when you’re 21, I’ll tell you the real answer. Anyway, it’s put me in a funk since then.
Here Lorelai finally admits to Rory that she misses Max, and that is the reason for her depression. Lorelai’s dreams often help reveal her true feelings, and in this case it was a dream about Max that brought her to her current miserable state.
LORELAI: And he’s staring at her like she’s Miss September, and she’s looking at him like he’s Johnny Depp, and I was just babbling like a moron. What is wrong with me?!
American men’s magazine Playboy features a nude or semi-nude centrefold model as their Playmate of the Month, with each one known as Miss January, Miss February, and so on.
John “Johnny” Depp II (born 1963) is an American actor, producer, and musician. He rose to prominence in the police show 21 Jump Street, airing from 1987 to 1991, where he became a popular teen idol. Depp played the title role in the dark fantasy Edward Scissorhands (1990), which established him as a major film star, and gained critical praise for his performances in films such as What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), Ed Wood (1994), and Donnie Brasco ( 1997). He is regarded as one of the biggest stars in Hollywood.
LORELAI: Why were you in the Mideast?
RACHEL: I was doing a photo story on how Palestinian and Israeli families have been affected by the violence.
From this statement, we know that Rachel’s trip to the Middle East was specifically to Israel and the Palestinian territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
In 1948 the Jewish Agency declared the independence of the state of Israel, immediately followed by the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which saw Israel established while the West Bank and Gaza were held by Arab states. Since the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel has occupied territories such as the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan Heights.
It is the world’s longest military occupation in modern times, with no peace agreement in sight. The violence of the conflict is well known around the world, and casualties extend to civilians as well as the military. Most of the casualties have been Palestinian.
RACHEL: Yeah, yeah, well things were pretty crazy over there, not a lot of writing time. But I finished up my assignment, and I flew back to Chicago and I was walking through O’Hare, and I look up and there’s a plane leaving for Hartford in like 20 minutes, and all of a sudden, I’m on it.
O’Hare International Airport is the primary airport serving the Chicago region. Last minute flights such as the one Rachel got on are typically expensive, but because of its size, O’Hare Airport can be relatively flexible, and sometimes you can score a great deal. Today Rachel’s spontaneous flight could have cost her as little as $300, and the flight to Hartford would take around two hours.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 