Category: S1Ep9: Rory’s Dance

The Group

This 1963 novel by Mary McCarthy is what Rory is reading while waiting in line to buy tickets to the winter formal. Tristan teases her for this by saying “how novel”.

The Group is about eight young women, educated and from wealthy backgrounds, and their lives after graduation during the 1930s. It explores the various issues they have to face, such as sexism, child-rearing, financial problems, family strife, and sexual relationships, mostly revolving around the men in their lives, whether husbands, lovers, fathers, or employers.

Striving for independence, they are hampered by an era where women are restricted in their options, and although the novel is not a feminist work, it casts a sharp eye on female lives and ideas, and shows how the personal is political. The novel is partly autobiographical and spent more than two years on the best-seller list when it was published.

Rory may have been drawn to the novel because it examines the choices of educated young women after graduation – especially because the women in “the group” are characterised as intellectuals sensitive to art and beauty, rather than politically aware or active. The literary one of the group, Libby MacAusland, and her subsequent disastrous career may have been of interest to Rory as well.

(Unexpected connection: Mary McCarthy is the sister of Kevin McCarthy, who starred in Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

Flip Book

EMILY: I figure if I got enough pictures I could at least line them up in chronological order and pretend I was there … Maybe bind them together, make a flip book out of them.

A flip book is a book that has a series of illustrations, with each one varying slightly so that when the pages are turned rapidly it gives the illusion of being an animated picture.

Oscar Levant

Lorelai jokingly tells Emily that if Rory grows up bitter and filled with regrets, she could become a crazy Oscar Levant type of celebrity.

Oscar Levant (1906-1972) was an American pianist, composer and comedian. A serious composer who wrote numerous film scores for Hollywood and appeared in several films as a pianist, he was famous for his eccentricity and acid wit. He was a panellist on radio and TV for many years, and was open about his many neuroses.

Sookie’s First Aid Kit

As she was first characterised as highly accident-prone, it makes sense that Sookie is always equipped with some basic first aid equipment, which she offers to Lorelai when she hurts her back while making Rory’s dress.

Ace bandage: Ace is a popular American brand of elastic bandages, first produced in 1918 – the name stands for All Cotton Elastic. The brand was bought by 3M in 2009.

Percodan: The brand name of a strong painkiller which combines aspirin and the semi-synethetic opioid oxycodone, manufactured by Endo Pharmaceuticals. It’s only available on prescription, and is now considered a fairly old-fashioned medication, with use declining.

Vicodin: The brand name of a strong painkiller which combines paracetamol with the semi-synethetic opioid hyrocodone. It’s only available on prescription, and can be addictive; it is sometimes (illegally) used for recreational use.

Darvocet: The brand name of an opioid painkiller manufactured by Eli Lilly and Company. It was taken off the market in 2010 due to concerns about fatal overdoses.

Muscle relaxant: A drug used to treat muscular pain and spasms, nearly always with sedative effects. They can be addictive, and are only meant to be prescribed for short-term use. Sookie’s reluctance to use “the very mild” drug’s name suggests that it may be Diazepam, previously known as Valium.

You can’t help wondering if Sookie’s clumsiness might have been increased by a dependence on prescription painkillers.

V.I.P.

LANE: Because I have to go home soon and my mom threw out our TV when she caught me watching V.I.P. So I’m bored and I need some entertainment.

V.I.P. was an action-comedy television series starring Pamela Anderson as Vallery Irons, a woman who works at a hotdog stand but is mistaken for a bodyguard when she accidentally saves a celebrity. She cashes in on her fifteen minutes of fame by becoming the head of a security agency called V.I.P. (Vallery Irons Protection), and hires some real bodyguards to do the actual work. Despite her lack of skills or training, it is Vallery who ends up saving the day much of the time.

The satirical show became many people’s guilty pleasure for its sense of campy fun and never taking itself seriously. It ran from 1998 to 2002.

“Gentleman caller”

The Golden Girls

RORY: He’s my … gentleman caller.
LANE: Okay, Blanche.

Rory is referring to Tennessee William’s 1944 play The Glass Menagerie, where the mother Amanda, a faded Southern belle, is obsessed with finding a suitor, or “gentleman caller”, for her daughter Laura, who has crippling shyness.

I believe Lane’s response is likely a reference to the sitcom The Golden Girls, which originally aired from 1985 to 1992. It featured four older women sharing a house together in Miami, Florida; Blanche Devereaux (played by Rue McClanahan) was a slightly man-crazy Southern belle who’d grown up on a plantation. The character was inspired by Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, and Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind.

The Golden Girls was a ratings winner which received numerous awards, and is considered one of the best TV sitcoms of all time. It continues to gain new viewers in syndication, and has aged extremely well.

EDIT: Edited in response to reader Holly, who suggested it was more likely that Lane was referring to Blanche in The Golden Girls than to Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire.

Tom Waits

LORELAI: Or it’ll be all sparkly and exciting and you’ll be standing on the dance floor listening to Tom Waits with some great-looking guy staring at you so hard that you don’t even realize that Paris and Tristan have just been eaten by bears.

Tom Waits (born Thomas Waits in 1949) is an American singer, songwriter, and musician with a distinctive gravelly voice. His first album came out in 1973, and his most recent album in 2000 was Mule Variations, which came out in 1999, and was his most commercially successful album at that time; it won a Grammy Award. Waits has gained critical acclaim and a cult following over the years, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011.

98°

RORY: Trust me, I’ll hate it. It’ll be stuffy and boring, the music will suck and since none of the kids at school like me, I’ll be stuck in the back listening to 98° watching Tristan and Paris argue over which one of them gets to make me miserable first.

98° is an American boy band consisting of Nick and Drew Lachey, Justin Jeffre, and Jeff Timmons. Their first album was released in 1997, and their Revelation album was released in September 2000, not long before Rory’s dance. The biggest hit from the album was Give Me Just One Night, which went to #2 and was their biggest success. They have sold over 10 million records globally, and had eight hit singles in the US. The band went on hiatus in 2003, but reunited in 2012 and are still touring and producing albums.