Category: S2Ep21: Lorelai’s Graduation Day

Directions to Washington Square Park

[Rory gets off the bus and looks around. She walks out of the station and onto the crowded sidewalk.]

RORY: Could you . . . um, excuse me, sir, do you know . . . do you know where Washington . . . excuse me, ma’am . . . Washington Square Park?

PASSERBY: End of Fifth.

RORY: Thank you! [to someone else] Excuse me, where’s Fifth?

Rory gets off the bus at the Port Authority Bus Terminal at 625 Eighth Avenue, in the heart of Times Square. She asks strangers for directions – because the super organised Rory has of course headed off to New York without a map, or even looking at a map! Impulsive Rory has taken over, and she doesn’t check anything!

Someone eventually tells her that Washington Square is at the end of Fifth Avenue, upon which Rory starts asking people where Fifth Avenue is. Basically, Rory has been directed to walk along West 41st Street and across (or past) Bryant Park until she reaches Fifth Avenue – it’s three blocks and perhaps 10 minutes walk from the bus terminal. Once on Fifth Avenue, she can walk straight there – but it is a distance of almost two more miles, almost forty blocks, and more than half an hour on foot, carrying a heavy backpack!

Google Maps tell me it would be slightly quicker (by about five minutes) for Rory to walk straight down Eighth Avenue and then approach Washington Square Park on an angle via Greenwich Avenue, but I think the directions she received were less likely to get her lost or confused – just straight across, then straight down. The numbered grid pattern of Manhattan streets makes it relatively easy to navigate the city.

It’s more than two hours from Hartford to New York City by bus, so, presuming Rory was able to get a bus fairly quickly after leaving Chilton, it might be around 11.30-11.45 am when she arrives at the bus terminal. She still has quite a bit more of her journey ahead of her.

“Ask a New Yorker” informs us that New Yorkers are actually very ready, even eager, to give directions to tourists and strangers in town, but you should always ask at least a couple of people, because sometimes their directions aren’t that great. (They know their own small part of the city very well, the rest of it, not so much).

New Yorkers walk an average of five miles a day getting around the city, and they walk fast, so Rory is getting straight into New York mode by hitting the pavement and wearing out shoe leather. Hopefully all that walking around Stars Hollow has kept her fit – although at the start of the episode, she moaned about getting sore feet just walking to Sookie’s house …


Christopher’s Gift Basket for Lorelai

Flowers

$25 savings bond

Youth Hostel card

What Color is Your Parachute?, by Richard Nelson Bolles (a classic guide for job-seekers)

The Graduate on DVD, the 1967 film starring Dustin Hoffman

The Portable Nietzsche, by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kauffman

Application to join the army

Disposable camera

Pearl necklace in a velvet box

They are all traditional graduation gifts, and/or joke gifts. The camera actually ends up becoming an essential item. Lorelai never seems to consider how Sherry would feel about her boyfriend sending another woman flowers and jewellery.

“You drank some Boone’s Farm out of a bota bag and knocked a beach ball around?”

MICHEL: It was dignified, as most French ceremonies are. Poetry was read, a string quartet played, a ballerina performed.

LORELAI: You drank some Boone’s Farm out of a bota bag and knocked a beach ball around?

Boone’s Farm, originally an apple wine, now a flavoured malt beverage, due to changes in tax law. It’s made by E&J Gallo in California, one of the biggest wine producers in the world. It’s popular with college students because it’s cheap and sold in convenience stores.

A bota bag is a traditional Spanish wineskin or canteen, often made from goatskin. Modern bota bags have a plastic lining and nozzle.

Beach balls are commonly tossed around by US college students on spring break or at graduation celebrations. Lorelai is teasing Michel by pretending that his graduation in France was the sort of drunken frolic stereotypically enjoyed by American college graduates.

Rory Skips School

Rory walks through Chilton’s front gates with Paris, Paris doing all the talking. As Paris heads to her locker, Rory looks around apprehensively, then walks back through the gates. She’s not only skipping school but also missing out on a meeting of the school paper which she told Lorelai she had after school, meaning she wouldn’t be at the graduation ceremony until 6 pm. This doesn’t seem like something a really keen journalist would do. Perhaps Rory hopes to make it back to school in time for the meeting.

Skipping school for no reason, especially at this crucial point of the school year, seems like something Chilton wouldn’t be very impressed about (let alone Paris). However, we never see Rory face any consequences for it. Perhaps she made up the work she missed, or Lorelai wrote the school a note or something to explain her absence.

Note that even while approaching the school with Paris, Rory is already looking away as if wishing she was somewhere else, or looking for an escape route.

MIT vs Berkeley

PARIS: Branch is a graduate of MIT and Henemen went to Berkley. Berkley! I mean, he may have majored in Math but what did he minor in? Bean sprouts? Forget it.

MIT, previously discussed.

Berkeley, the oldest campus of the University of California, a public research university founded in 1868, previously mentioned. The oldest university in California, Berkeley hosts many leading research institutes, including the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and the Space Sciences Laboratory. It founded and maintains close relationships with three national laboratories, and has played a prominent role in many scientific advances.

Among its alumni, faculty and researchers, Berkeley has more Nobel laureates, Turing Award winners (25), Fields Medalists (14), and Wolf Prize winners (30) than any other public university in the nation; it is affiliated with 30 Pulitzer Prizes, 19 Academy Awards, and more MacArthur “Genius Grants” (108) and National Medals of Science (68) than any other public institution. The university has produced seven heads of state or government; six chief justices,  22 cabinet-level officials; 11 governors; and 25 living billionaires.

It is also a leading producer of Fulbright Scholars, MacArthur Fellows, and Marshall Scholars. Berkeley alumni, widely recognized for their entrepreneurship, have founded numerous notable companies, including Apple, Tesla, Intel, eBay, SoftBank, AIG, and Morgan Stanley.

The writers seem to love giving supposedly smart Paris silly and ill-informed things to say, and this time it’s that Calculus teacher Heneman can’t be any good because he went to Berkeley – one of the best universities in the world, with a powerhouse record in Mathematics and Science.

Her questionable belief seems to stem from the fact that Berkeley is in California, and therefore “hippie”, and from the the university’s history in the 1960s, when it had a reputation for political activism. I find it hard to believe that an intelligent student in 2002 could be basing her ideas about Berkeley from events which occurred twenty years before she was born!

Calculus

PARIS: I said, I’m not taking AP Calculus from Henemen.

Calculus, is a branch of mathematics focused on limits, functions, derivatives, integrals, and infinite series. This subject constitutes a major part of contemporary mathematics education. It has widespread applications in science, economics, and engineering.

In Season 1, Rory implied she was studying Trigonometry, usually part of pre-calculus mathematics courses. Most likely, she is now preparing to take AP Calculus in her senior year.

Sting, Screech

LORELAI: Hey, try to seat us next to a celebrity on the Concorde, like Sting or Screech or someone.

Gordon Sumner, known as Sting (born 1951) [pictured], English musician, singer, songwriter, and actor. He was the frontman, songwriter, and bassist for new wave rock band The Police from 1977 to 1984. He launched a solo career in 1985, and incorporates elements of rock, jazz, reggae, classical, new age and world music in his compositions. He has won 17 Grammy Awards, 3 Brit Awards, a Golden Globe, and an Emmy, has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, received the Ivor Novello Award for Lifetime Achievement, and been inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. As a member of The Police, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003. One of the world’s best-selling musical artists, he is regarded as one of its greatest living songwriters, and one of the great musical stars of the twentieth century.

Samuel “Screech” Powers, a character from Saved by the Bell, previously discussed. Portrayed by Dustin Diamond (1977-2021), Screech was a geeky high academic achiever who lacked common sense and social skills.

Concorde

RORY: I’ll … book the Concorde.

The Concorde, a Franco-British supersonic airliner. Its first flight was in 1969, and it began flights between New York and Paris in 1979, taking just three and a half hours to cross the Atlantic, less than half the usual time. The planes were luxurious, and travelled faster than the speed of sound, flying quicker than the Earth’s spin.

On 25 July 2000, a Concorde crashed in France, on its way to New York. Everybody on board was killed, including four people who were on the ground. It was the only fatality Concorde ever had, but it damaged its reputation. Service was suspended until November 2001 while the crash was fully investigated, and the Concorde was retired, its last flight to New York in October 2003. Rory doesn’t have much longer to book that Concorde!