Footnotes to the TV series
LORELAI: Did they just leave to take a shower together? .. They bounced in together, they bounced out together.
Has Lorelai ever heard of a house having two showers? Well, yes – her own house has two bathrooms, so she must be aware that two people can shower independently. This is a breathtakingly rude and creepy comment to make while your hosts are just out of the room – cooking you a roast chicken lunch, no less, and trying to help your kid get into Harvard.
DARREN: Here’s some of my Harvard yearbooks, peruse them if you like.
Yearbooks are published annually to commemorate the past year of a school, college, or university. They came out of the personal scrapbooks students put together in the 18th century, and the first formal yearbook was produced in 1806, at Yale.
The picture is for the 1974 Harvard yearbook, the year that Darren graduated, meaning he was born around 1952 and is about fifty years old in this episode. Notice that it is actually for both Harvard and Radcliffe – Radcliffe College was a women’s college founded in 1879, designed to be an all-female counterpart to the all-male Harvard. Harvard became fully co-educational in 1970, and in 1999, Radcliffe merged with Harvard.
JENNIFER: Uh, do you wanna pick a time [to talk] now or later . . . ?
RORY: Later’s fine.
JENNIFER: I’ll make a note in my PalmPilot.
Palm was a line of personal digital assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones developed by California-based Palm, Inc., originally called Palm Computing, Inc. Palm devices were the first popular handheld computers, helping to pave the way for smartphones. The first Palm device, the PalmPilot 1000, was released in 1996. The most recent one, the m505, had been released in January 2002, and cost around $300-400.
DARREN: Jack’s pre-med at Princeton and Jennifer is bound for Harvard, like you Rory.
Jack is in a pre-medical program, an educational track that undergraduate students pursue before they go to medical school and study to become doctors. Their undergraduate studies typically focus on subjects such as biology, chemistry, physics, neuroscience, and behavioural sciences. He is attending the same university that Christopher was supposed to attend.
Jennifer can’t really be bound for Harvard at this point – notifications to applications haven’t been sent out yet. She has already applied, or will apply very soon, and Darren is obviously confident she will get in. He seems very confident Rory will as well, unless he’s just being polite – he hasn’t even seen her transcript yet.
Jack and Jennifer are played by Matt Newton and Jeanette Brox – they had both been in Judging Amy and Family Law, although not in the same episodes. Granville Van Deusen, who plays their father Darren, was also in Judging Amy, and like Jeanette, had been in General Hospital spin-off, Port Charles.
DARREN: I collect memorabilia, too. I’ve got each year’s Harvard team pennant going back to 1927 … It’s all over the walls at the rec room.
LORELAI: See, see, lots of paraphernalia.
Lorelai is crowing because Rory felt upset when she was told that having Harvard paraphernalia on her walls was a sign of being immature and desperate. Now she can see that Darren, a real Harvard graduate, has masses of Harvard memorabilia all over the walls of his recreation room. She had the real Harvard spirit all along!
Of course, Darren waited to graduate before he started collecting Harvard memorabilia – Rory has been putting it on her bedroom walls since she was a young girl. I’m not sure you can say she and Darren are exactly the same, although he is clearly a bit of a Harvard tragic as well.
RORY: I read a lot. I’m into the Russians lately.
DARREN: Tolstoy, Turgenev?
Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883), Russian novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright and translator. His 1862 novel Fathers and Sons is regarded as one of the major works of 19th century fiction, and he helped to popularise Russian literature in the West. He was friends with Gustave Flaubert, another author Rory likes, and an influence on writers such as Henry James and Joseph Conrad.
Tolstoy is a favourite of Rory, and Gogol’s Dead Souls is referenced again in this scene.
DARREN: Modern painting is my passion. I’ve got a Hockney, a Kline – what I don’t have is a Diebenkorn so please don’t ask, “Where’s the Diebenkorn?” … I only recently got into sculpture. My latest acquisition, it’s a Zoltan Kemeny. Very provocative. Don’t you just love its audacity?
David Hockney (born 1937), English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century. Some of his paintings sell for tens of millions, and his 1972 Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) [pictured] sold at Christie’s for more than $90 million in 2018, briefly setting a world record for most expensive artwork by a living artist sold at auction.
Franz Kline (1910-1962), painter seen as one of the most important artists of the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s. He was a member of the informal art group, the New York School, and his work has been revered since the 1950s. An untitled work from 1957 sold at Christie’s for more than $40 million in 2012, the record price for one of his works. The previous record holder was his 1958 Crow Dancer, selling for $6.4 million in 2005. Some early works of his sold for around $20 thousand in the 1990s (Darren may have picked up a bargain?).
Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993), painter and printmaker. His early work is associated with abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s he began his extensive series of geometric, lyrical abstract paintings. Known as the Ocean Park paintings, these were instrumental to his worldwide acclaim. Diebenkorn’s 1984 Ocean Park #126 became the most expensive picture by the artist auctioned when it went for $23.9 million at Christie’s New York in 2018.
Zoltan Kemeny (1907-1965), sculptor, painter, designer, and fashion editor born in Transylvania in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (present-day Romania). He is known for his relief sculptures and collages assembled from sand, stone, wood, twine, buttons, and beads.
MARIE: How about drinks? Iced tea, water?
RORY: Iced tea’s good.
Iced tea, tea that has been chilled and often sweetened with sugar or syrup, usually served with ice cubes. In the US it is traditionally served with a slice of lemon as a garnish on the side of the glass. Iced tea began to appear in the US in the 1860s, and became increasingly popular after being served at the 1904 World’s Fair. Most tea in the US (85%) is drunk as iced tea, rather than a hot drink, and it is particularly associated with the Southern states of the US.
DARREN: You came bearing gifts?
RORY: What? Oh, this. No, this is not a gift. These are my records – grades, SATs.
Some fans are horrified that Lorelai and Rory do not bring a small gift to their hosts, as a thank you for their hospitality (a common polite custom in the US, as elsewhere). However, considering that Rory is trying to get into Harvard with Darren’s help, a gift may feel uncomfortably like a bribe in this situation.
It would be inappropriate to bring a gift to your college interview for this reason, and this is almost an informal college interview. I am unable to tell from Darren’s response whether he expected a gift, but in any case, he doesn’t seem disappointed not to receive one.
I would welcome comments on this – are Lorelai and Rory guilty of a breach of etiquette, or are they keeping their hands clean of corruption? Does Darren look perturbed when he thinks Rory is presenting him with a gift, as if he thinks she is doing something wrong?
LORELAI: Oh, that would be the year the pumpkins arrived late.
DARREN: Sounds like a Dr. Seuss book.
Dr. Seuss, the pen name of Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904-1991), children’s author and cartoonist. His work includes many of the most popular children’s books of all time, selling over 600 million copies and being translated into more than 20 languages by the time of his death. He has won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award for his works Horton Hatches the Egg (1958), and To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street (1961). His birthday, March 2, has been adopted as the date of National Read Across America Day, an initiative on reading created by the National Education Association.
He is the author of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which was made into the 2000 family film The Grinch, previously discussed. To me, The Year the Pumpkins Arrived Late doesn’t really sound very much like the title of a Dr. Seuss book.
People pronounce his pen name as “Soose”, to rhyme with moose, but his middle name is actually said “Zoice”, to rhyme with choice.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 