Category: S3Ep13: Dear Emily and Richard

Rory Phones Lorelai in a Panic

RORY: I’m here all by myself and I’m trying very hard to be calm but I’m starting to feel nauseous, and the hospital has a smell, and there are noises, and those gowns do not stay closed and I’ve seen a lot of butts today! And –
LORELAI: Okay, sweetie, calm down.
RORY: I need you … I need you, I need you here, I need you now. I cannot do this alone. I need my Mommy, and dammit, I don’t care who knows it!

Rory has been consistently shown as needing Lorelai’s help to handle even small personal crises, but this time, surely no one can blame her for desperately calling her mother for help. She’s a young adult thrown in the deep end, and must be both hungry and exhausted by now.

Even now, she probably wouldn’t have called Lorelai, except that that she was told that she might well be accompanying Sherry, a woman she barely knows, in order to help her through the birth itself. Rory notoriously doesn’t cope well with “icky” things – even planting bulbs in the garden is gross for her – so you can imagine the trauma witnessing a birth would cause.

Sheldon Harnick

RORY: [on phone] So, we’ll see you next Friday at three. And once again, sorry for the short notice. Okay, bye. [hangs up]
SHERRY: Great, who’s next?
RORY: Um, Sheldon Harnick.

Sheldon Harnick (born 1924), award-winning lyricist and songwriter best known for his collaborations with composer Jerry Bock on musicals such as Fiddler on the Roof. His musical Dragons was performed in New Jersey in late 2003, and this is possibly what Sherry is working on promoting.

Sherry says that Sheldon Harnick “hates pregnancy”, so Rory suggests they tell him Sherry has a plumbing issue instead. In real life, Sheldon Harnick is married to actress Margery Gray and is a father, so it doesn’t seem likely he’s really that panicked by pregnancy. In 2011, he was a special guest to a performance of his songs by Kate Baldwin who was seven months pregnant at the time, and they sang a duet together.

Sherry now has Rory handling her business calls at the hospital! Yes, at night! Rory is a people pleaser, specifically an adult pleaser, who genuinely likes to help, so she complies with this obviously terrible treatment.

Flashback 3

In this flashback, Lorelai’s pregnancy has become known to her parents, and Emily and Richard meet with Christopher’s parents, Straub and Francine to discuss it. Straub and Francine are both angry and upset – Francine cries and says she feels sick, while Straub says that everything has been ruined.

The Haydens can only see Lorelai and the baby as a problem to be got rid of. Straub suggests an abortion, and Francine that Lorelai be “sent away” – meaning to a home for unwed mothers, where her baby will taken away and adopted out. Francine’s ideas for handling teen pregnancy are very much outdated, as her plan sounds like something from the 1960s. By the early 1980s, such homes had been closed down and replaced with teen parenthood centres, for young parents to get help.

Richard then tells them his plan – Lorelai and Christopher will get married, they will live with he and Emily, and Christopher will be given a job at the same insurance company Richard works for.

Lorelai and Christopher are listening to the discussion from the stairs, like children – they aren’t invited to be part of it or make any contributions. Lorelai is angry at being left out of the decision-making process, but Christopher passively accepts Richard’s plan, saying that it doesn’t sound too bad, and they will need their parents’ help. Neither of them acknowledge the fact that Richard is essentially forcing them to get married.

While Lorelai still feels independent and rebellious, even though she is now pregnant with an unplanned baby, Christopher is ready to cave in to Richard. Lorelai demands to know what happened to their plan of backpacking around Europe after graduation, and she must already know that Christopher’s adventurous talk was just that – all talk. If Lorelai wants to forge an independent life for herself and her baby, she will have to do it alone.

A quick note that Christine Rose, who appears in this scene as Francine Hayden, went on to play Milo Ventigmiglia’s character’s mother in the TV show, Heroes.

DVD Player

EMILY: I don’t need a DVD player.
LORELAI: Well, why not? Then you could buy all those musicals you love and watch them whenever you felt like it.

DVD player, a machine for playing DVD (Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) digital optical discs. They first became available in the US in 1997, and by the middle of 2003, DVD rentals outsold video rentals for the first time.

Sara Moulton

EMILY: Lelaini made a roast before she left and I heated it up … I even added a little wine to the pan to keep it from drying out.
LORELAI: Well, who died and made you Sara Moulton?

Sara Moulton (born 1952), cookbook author and TV chef. She began working with Julia Child on TV in 1979, went on to a regular position with Good Morning America until 1997, and hosted Cooking Live until 2002, after which she began her new show, Sara’s Secrets. Her first cookbook had come out the previous year in 2002, Sara Moulton Cooks at Home. She continues to be a popular author and TV host.

C&H Pure Cane Sugar Dancers

LORELAI: The C&H Pure Cane Sugar dancers?
EMILY: Lorelai, please, we don’t have a buffer here tonight.

Lorelai refers to the popular television commercials for the California and Hawaiian Sugar Company (C&H Sugar), which processed sugar cane from Hawaii at their plant in San Francisco until 2016.

In the 1960s, the commercial depicted happy Hawaiian children singing and dancing to the company’s jingle in a very cute and innocent way while they suck on big sticks of sugar.

Honolulu

LORELAI: Leilani, huh? Very exotic name.
EMILY: She’s from Honolulu.

Honolulu, the capital and largest city of the state of Hawaii. Honolulu’s tropical climate, natural scenery, and extensive beaches make it a popular destination for tourists.

Leilani is a popular Hawaiian name (technically unisex, but nearly always given to girls) which can be translated as either “heavenly flowers” or “royal child”.

Lauren Graham was born in Honolulu, and this is yet another reference to her home state on Gilmore Girls.

Sherry at the Hospital

SHERRY: I’m lying in a bed. God knows what’s gonna happen … And she goes back to work. I would love to go back to work, but I can’t because I have to stay here … She’s not here. None of my friends are here. Christopher isn’t here. No one is here. No one but you. Thank God you’re here, Rory. I don’t think that I could do this by myself because this wasn’t supposed to happen until next week. I wrote it down. I wrote it down. I wrote it down!

Sherry is frightened and worried at being left alone to give birth, and seizes on Rory as the one person who can help, in the most inappropriate way possible. Rory is barely eighteen and still at school, with minimal practical skills of any sort, having travelled alone by public transport in midwinter at night for more than four hours! Yet somehow she is now the designated assistant to Sherry.

For someone who was so gung-ho to have kids, Sherry’s suddenly got very cold feet on the idea, and says she would prefer to be at work. (Yes, at night. Everyone works at night, apparently).