Category: S1Ep9: Rory’s Dance

Fade Into You

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This 1993 song by American alternative rock band Mazzy Star is the “slow song” which plays at the dance, the first one that Rory and Dean dance to. During it they have an encounter with Paris and her escort, and a jealous Tristan watches them while they kiss.

The song is from Mazzy Star’s album So Tonight That I Might See. Released as a single, it reached #44 in the US, the band’s only single to get into the Top 100 – it was #3 in the alternative music charts. Although other of their songs gained some mainstream success, none ever did as well as Fade Into You. It has often been used on film and television soundtracks.

“Of the manor born”

LOUISE: Who’s the dish? … He’s not of the manor born, that’s for sure.

Of the manor born means that someone is from an upper class or wealthy family. It is a common mishearing or deliberate pun on To the manner born, which means that someone is familiar from birth with a particular set of customs or behaviours.

The phrase is a quote from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which says, “But to my mind, though I am native here / And to the manner born, it is a custom / More honour’d in the breach than the observance.”

Louise likes to make literary quotes to show her intelligence, but she only chooses the most hackneyed, and in this case doesn’t even use it correctly.

We’re All Light

This 2000 song by English rock band XTC is the song which is playing when Rory and Dean first arrive at the dance and survey the room, lasting all the way through Louise flirting with Dean.

It is another track from their album Wasp Star (Apple Venus Volume 2), earlier discussed. It is at this point that you realise the DJ at the Chilton school dance is, by an astounding coincidence, playing the sort of alternative rock that Rory, schooled in Lorelai’s tastes, most wants to hear. Let’s face it, her earlier guess of 98° was much more realistic.

Baccarat candlesticks

Emily is horrified to discover that the Baccarat candlesticks she bought Lorelai for Christmas in 1999 were exchanged for a lamp decorated with “leering” monkeys holding coconuts.

Baccarat is a French manufacturer of fine crystal glassware, located in the town of Baccarat. The glassworks were founded in 1764 by King Louis XV. An American subsidiary of the company was created in New York City in 1948.

Emily may have bought the candlesticks from Lux Bond and Green, a jewellery store in West Hartford authorised to sell Baccarat products. A classic pair of Baccarat candlesticks (like the ones in the picture) will set you back around $500, but a fancier double candlestick holder would be over $6000.

I doubt that the same store that sells Baccarat also sells the novelty monkey lamp so there probably wasn’t an actual exchange of goods – Lorelai may have simply made a cash exchange, meaning that she pocketed a tidy profit after purchasing the monkey lamp somewhere else.

(The monkey lamp may have been partly inspired by Daniel Palladino’s first gift to Amy Sherman-Palladino when they were courting – the toy game Barrel of Monkeys, a barrel filled with plastic monkeys that can be interlinked together).

“I heard this place is beautiful”

RORY: I heard this place is beautiful though – old and historic.

The scenes at the school dance were filmed at the Wilshire Ebell Women’s Club in Los Angeles. There is a beautiful and historic private women’s club in Hartford too – the Town and County Club, which is in a 19th century mansion. A number of its rooms can be hired out for functions, including the ballroom. It has the gracious staircase which Sookie believes is necessary for Rory.

The Outsiders

RORY: And these kids at my school – awful. Have you seen The Outsiders?
DEAN: Yeah, I have.
RORY: Just call me Ponyboy.

The Outsiders is a 1983 teen drama film directed by Francis Ford Coppola, adapted from the popular novel of the same name by S.E. Hinton. The movie looks at the conflict between the Greasers, tough working-class teens, and the Socs, a gang of wealthier kids.

The main protagonist is Ponyboy Curtis (C. Thomas Howell), who is one of the Greasers, but is good at school and loves literature; while hiding out after his friend Johnny killed a Soc to defend him, Ponyboy reads Gone With the Wind and recites Robert Frost’s poem Nothing Gold Can Stay.

Rory feels the social difference between she and her Chilton classmates very strongly, identifying herself with a teenager from the wrong side of the tracks, albeit one who loves reading.

It is worth noting that Rory doesn’t ask Dean if he’s read The Outsiders, even though it is a very well known book for teenagers, and often set as a school text. By now she may have got the idea that Dean isn’t much of a reader.

Either that, or Rory hasn’t read it herself, rejecting it as beneath her reading level, or something that is too typically teenage to bother with.