Mark “Baz” Lurhmann (born 1962), Australian director, writer and producer of films, television, opera, theatre, music and recording. He is the most commercially successful Australian director, with four of his films in the top ten highest worldwide grossing Australian films of all time. He is best known for his “Red Curtain” trilogy of films: Strictly Ballroom (1992), William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet(1996), and Moulin Rouge! (2000). His films are known for their eccentric and flamboyant style, lavish sets, bright colours, fast-paced camera cuts and zooms, and highly choreographed, hyperbolic sequences.
JACKSON: Oh, thanks to my best new friend Ermenegildo Zegna.
Ermenegildo Zegna (born 1955), Italian entrepreneur and CEO of the luxury fashion house Ermenegildo Zegna, founded in 1910 by Zegna’s grandfather, after whom he is named. Ermenegildo Zegna Group is the largest menswear group in the world by revenue. Although there are only a few Zegna boutiques in the USA, Jackson could have bought his suit at any number of department stores, including Saks, Bloomingdale’s, and Neiman Marcus.
Sookie only means that Lorelai is wearing dignified flowing robes, like the ones on the statue, but it’s not very tactful, because Lorelai has become sensitive about her height since Rune, and being compared to an enormous statue clearly doesn’t please her.
Liza flashes three fingers at Zach when she says this – if he “reads between the lines” of her fingers, there will be only one, to mean she’s “giving him the finger”.
The finger, otherwise known as the flip off, the bird, or the highway salute, is one of the most widespread obscene gestures throughout the Western world. It is thousands of years old, and most likely originated in Ancient Greece.
Bush League is American slang for something which is of an inferior standard; unsophisticated, unprofessional, mediocre.
The slang comes from baseball, where the small-town teams below the minor league became informally known as the “bush league”, because of their rural origins, and because they often played on rough fields bordered by bushes. The slang dates to the very early twentieth century.
Note that the role of the repellent Zach is portrayed by Seth MacFarlane, who Daniel Palladino (the writer of this episode) worked with on his animated television sitcom, Family Guy.
LIZA: Of course, we’re breaking up ’cause we’re transferring to different schools. He’s going to Florida State, I’m going to U. Mass . . . although I’m kinda going to miss this place.
Florida State University [pictured], a public research university in Tallahassee, Florida. Founded in 1851, it is the oldest higher education institution in Florida. It’s student activism in the 1960s and ’70s earned it the epithet, “the Berkeley of the South”.
University of Massachusetts, the only public research university system in Massachusetts. It has five campuses (Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth, Lowell and a medical school in Worcester), a satellite campus in Springfield, and 25 campuses in California and Washington. The campus in Amherst is the largest, and the oldest, dating back to 1863, when it was called Massachusetts Agricultural College. It became Massachusetts State College in 1931, and was granted university status in 1947.
LIZA: I had to run here straight from work – Kinko’s.
Kinko’s, previously discussed. There were several Kinko’s (now called FedEx) in Hartford at this time. Liza is the second person in the show to work at a Kinko’s.
LORELAI: Yeah, I never leave home without all the essentials: mirror, makeup, picture of Shaun Cassidy.
Shaun Cassidy (born 1958), singer, actor, writer, and producer. He is the son of Oscar-winning actress Shirley Jones and Tony Award-winning actor Jack Cassidy, the half-brother of David Cassidy from The Partridge Family, and the brother of actor Patrick Cassidy.
While still in high school, he signed a record contract and forged a career as a teen pop idol. His biggest hit was “Da Doo Ron Ron”, which went to #1 in 1977. At the same time, he starred in The Hardy Boys Mysteries on television, and had a role on General Hospital.
During the 1980s and 1990s he concentrated on stage acting, performing on Broadway and in the West End. He wrote his first television pilot in 1995 while appearing in Blood Brothers on Broadway alongside David Cassidy, and has gone on to have a successful career as a screenwriter and TV producer.
Lorelai implies she had a crush on Shaun Cassidy when she was a little girl, although also, a bit oddly, that her make-up routine dates to the same period, when she would have been aged 8 to 12. This actually makes more sense for someone Amy Sherman-Palladino’s age, as she would have been around 14 at the end of Cassidy’s pop star career.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 