Category: S1Ep6: Rory’s Birthday Parties

Edith Wharton

EMILY: Well I wanted everything to be perfect. What do you think?
LORELAI: I think Edith Wharton would have been proud, and busy taking notes.

Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author whose work centres on the lives on the American upper classes in the late 19th century. Her novels and stories are noted for their ironic tone, and the critical eye she turns on a world which was fading away. Most of the wealthy people in Wharton’s works lead quietly miserable, empty lives, which is probably a dig from Lorelai at Emily.

The Waltons

LORELAI: And while some have called it [giving birth] the most meaningful experience of your life, to me it was something more akin to doing the splits on a crate of dynamite.
RORY: I wonder if the Waltons ever did this.

The Waltons (1972-1981) was a wholesome family drama TV series about the Walton family in rural Virginia, and their experiences living through the Great Depression and World War II. It was based on the film Spencer’s Mountain, from a novel of the same name by Earl Hamner Jr., who would go on to be an executive producer on the TV series. Extremely popular, the Waltons won several Emmy Awards.

The Waltons had a couple of things in common with Gilmore Girls. Both shows were set in small towns with quirky townsfolk, and the protagonist of The Waltons, John-Boy Walton (based on Earl Hamner Jr.) went to university in a nearby town and became a journalist, just like Rory Gilmore. Both shows were filmed at Warner Brothers studio, and the set for the Waltons’ house was used for The Dragonfly inn in Gilmore Girls.

Denny’s

RORY: So do I look older?
LORELAI: Oh, yeah. You walk into Denny’s before five, you’ve got yourself a discount.

Denny’s is a chain of American diner-style table-service restaurants that are open all the time, not closing at night or on holidays unless forced to by state or local regulations. Founded in 1953, there are more than a thousand Denny’s restaurants in the United States. There is a Denny’s in Hartford that Rory could walk into before five o’clock.

Some Denny’s restaurants do give senior discounts, but as they are franchised there is no across-the-board senior discount program. I can’t find anything about them giving senior discounts before 5 (is that am or pm?). They do have a 55+ menu though, which is cheaper and with smaller portions.

Cinderella

LORELAI: Let me see. Maybe we should really embrace the whole tulle thing. Go totally modern Cinderella.

Lorelai is referring to the 1950 animated Disney film Cinderella, based on the French fairy tale by Charles Perrault. Cinderella was a massive critical and commercial success for Walt Disney, and was the #3 film of 1950. It is considered one of the greatest animated films of all time.

In the film, Cinderella wears a silver-white ballgown which is made blue in promotional materials; reproductions of the dress made for children and teens tend to be made from tulle.

Neither Lorelai nor Rory ends up wearing a tulle dress to Rory’s first birthday party, so I’m not sure what happened to the dresses Emily bought them. As Lorelai tells Emily they wore them to the party, maybe she tore all the tulle off and they wore the slip dresses that were underneath? Or perhaps Lorelai is simply lying.

At the very least, the lacy green cardigan that Rory wears wasn’t made by her mother – Lorelai wore it to Friday Night Dinner in Kill Me Now, and Rory must have borrowed it.

Rory’s Birthday Present from Emily

Lorelai claims that she’s helping Emily pick out the “perfect present” for Rory during their joint shopping trip. Given how expensive her own gift to Rory is, does anyone else think that Lorelai is actually (consciously or unconsciously) sabotaging Emily’s gift-buying so that she can’t compete with Lorelai? Instead of something valuable, she ends up with a cheap, tacky name bracelet that doesn’t really seem like something Rory would appreciate.

On the other hand, the bracelet does seem like something Lorelai would have liked as a teenager. The shopping trip becomes the kind of outing that she and her mother might have learned to enjoy together if Lorelai hadn’t got pregnant. Through it she can vicariously experience what it would have been like to have her mother buy her the things that she valued, such as junk jewellery and celebrity tee-shirts, instead of the pearls and cashmere that Emily would have given her as suitable gifts for a young girl of good family.

It is another sign of Lorelai’s immaturity and ego, and also how deep down she still longs for a relationship with her mother. If not deliberate sabotage, it’s a hint that she may not know Rory as well as she thinks she does.

Pashmina

LORELAI: Twelve dollars is a perfect present, Mom. She’ll love that.
EMILY: Can I at least get her the pashmina also?

Pashmina is a fine cashmere wool, first made in the Himalaya region of Kashmir in India, and used to make shawls, scarves, and wraps. Woollen shawls from Kashmir have been known since the Bronze Age.

There was a fad for pashmina in the 1990s which led to practically any good quality woollen accessory being sold as “a pashmina”, so there is no guarantee that Damien’s is selling the authentic article. In fact they most likely aren’t.