Lane’s purple hair is very obviously a cheap wig – it doesn’t fit properly and looks a different style to her real hair. The whole hair dyeing plot in this episode is not possible in real life. You can’t bleach black hair blonde, then dye it purple all in the matter of a couple of hours (it would take days). It also isn’t possible that Mrs Kim wouldn’t have smelled the bleach and hair dye while working in the antiques store on the ground floor.
However, none of this really matters much, as after a very short celebration of her bold new look, Lane has a crisis of confidence, and insists that Rory dye her hair black, so that her mother won’t find out what she did. This is, of course, only adds to the implausibility of the episode.
LORELAI: No, technically, I didn’t drop out. I, uh, I kept going as long as I could while I got pregnant, which I would recommend to any girl. Not the getting pregnant part, obviously. Um, although, uh, if that happens, um, you know. . . it shouldn’t. I mean, it could but you should try to avoid it. . . um, anyway, uh, I got my GED, yeah.
GED, the General Educational Development tests. These are tests in four different subjects which, when passed, provide certification that the test taker has US or Canadian high school level skills. The subjects are: Mathematical Reasoning, Reasoning Through Language Arts, Social Studies, and Science. It is an alternative to the high school diploma. It is only ever referred to as the GED.
In Connecticut, a person is eligible to register for the GED tests once they are seventeen or older, and have officially withdrawn from school for at least six months. There is a test centre in Hartford (the Adult Education Center), and if the person is under 21, testing is free ($13 if over 21 or not a military veteran).
Lorelai says that she never officially dropped out of school, and kept up her studies as long as she could. However, her former school friend Mitzi said that she hadn’t seen Lorelai since she was seven months pregnant, suggesting Lorelai didn’t return to school for the new academic year in September 1984.
At the time, there was a high school for teen mothers in Hartford that Lorelai could have attended, but I’m sure Emily would never have permitted that (the shame! The social disgrace! Lorelai having to mix with working class girls! The horror, the horror!). Lorelai said that her “conservative high school” wouldn’t let her graduate while nursing a baby, so she doesn’t seem to have found an alternative.
Lorelai was eligible to take the GED in 1985, and it would have been easy for her to access the test when she lived in Hartford. I’m guessing she took the GED while she still lived with her parents.
By the way, Lorelai was far from unusual for being a teenage mother trying to balance motherhood and education. By the early 1990s, one quarter of all births in Hartford were to a teen mother, and in 1991, more girls in the city got pregnant than graduated high school.
Lorelai begins giving her careers talk at Stars Hollow High, but it is almost immediately hijacked by students who are more interested in hearing about when she got pregnant with Rory, and whether she regrets it. You get the distinct impression that for these teens, Lorelai has long been a source of fascination (and probably of gossip), and they have been waiting for an opportunity to ask questions about her decision to keep Rory and commit to being a single mother.
Lorelai looks to Debbie Fincher for help, but receives absolutely none – it’s a supervised event organised by the PTA, and yet nobody steps in to ask the students to keep their questions only on the subject of Lorelai’s career, not her personal life. Lorelai could have said something along these lines herself, but she makes an attempt to answer their questions honestly, to show that she’s not ashamed. Unfortunately, she makes a bit of a mess of it – by the end she is very unwisely offering to take them all out for coffee to discuss her life in more depth. Boundaries, Lorelai!
One of the girls asking questions is Riki Lindhome (she’s the one with blonde pigtails), who would play the role of Juliet in later seasons of Gilmore Girls. At that time she had had a small role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She later got her big break in Tim Robbins’ hit play, Embedded, and was then cast in her first film role by Clint Eastwood in Million Dollar Baby (2004). She’s gone on to have a successful career in film and television, and performs in a comedy duo called Garfunkel and Oates with Kate Micucci.
LANE: I finally have a first love, like what you and Dean have.
RORY: Right . . . exactly.
As Lane compares her feelings for Dave for how Rory feels about Dean, it couldn’t be made clearer that not only does Rory not love Dean, but that perhaps she never loved him – not in the all-consuming way that most young girls feel about their first love (and not in the all-consuming, obsessive way that Dean and Jess feel about Rory). Love is much more complicated for Rory, because the message she received from her parents’ situation is that first love doesn’t last, it doesn’t work out, and it may in fact be a mistake with far-reaching consequences.
No wonder Rory quickly backs out of the conversation.
LANE: I’ve never really felt this way before. I mean, Henry – yes, but we never spent any real time together. It’s not just puppy love, you know, it’s different.
Puppy love is an informal term for feelings of romantic love experienced by a child or someone in early adolescence. Often these crushes are on someone that the young person doesn’t know, such as an actor or pop star. Lane seems to be saying that her attraction to Henry was not only immature, but barely based on reality, as she didn’t really know him.
RORY: Only to a guy with sunglasses and a dog selling pencils.
The stereotype of a blind man selling pencils on street corners to survive was an old one even in the 19th century. It seems to be a particularly New York trope, and there is a real life tradition of blind people selling pencils on the city’s streets. There are some iconic photographs of blind men selling pencils in New York, although I haven’t seen one with a guide dog, and most of them don’t wear dark glasses.
Rory is simply saying that a blind person could see that Lane is in love.
Lane admits to Rory that she’s in love with Dave almost straight away. I wonder if this contrast with how Rory feels about Dean is giving Rory any second thoughts about her decision to remain with her boyfriend?
RORY: [starts applying the purple dye] So have you mentioned dyeing your hair to the band yet? LANE: No, but they’ll be cool with it. They’ve all got tattoos. Dave and Zach have musical themes and Brian’s got Snoopy.
RORY: Poor guy.
LANE: Yeah, but he’s a slamming bass player.
Snoopy, Charlie Brown’s dog in the Peanuts comic strip, previously discussed and frequently mentioned. He is a black and white beagle. Comic strip creator Charles M. Schulz based him on his childhood dog Spike, who was a pointer crossed with an unknown hound – presumed to be a beagle, as Spike looked very beagle-like. The name came from Schulz’s mother, who had said if they ever got another dog, she would have named him Snoopy. In the comic strip, Snoopy has an older brother named Spike who lives in the Californian desert. Snoopy has his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and is a mascot of the NASA space program.
Note how quick Lane is to defend Brian when Rory says something pitying about him. Lane may have only been in the band for a week or so, but she already feels protective of her band mates.
[Rory and Lane are in the bathroom. Lane’s hair is bleached blonde.]
LANE: It’s weird.
RORY: Like straw.
LANE: I feel like I should be singing ‘If I Only Had a Brain.’
“If I Only Had a Brain”, a song composed by Harold Arlen with lyrics by Yip Harburg, for the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, previously discussed and frequently mentioned. In the film, it is sung by Ray Bolger, who played the Scarecrow, imagining all that he could achieve, if he only had a brain instead of straw stuffing in his head (just as Lane feels that her bleached hair is like straw).
There seems be yet another dig at blondes here, that dyeing your hair blonde automatically makes you brainless.
The song that is playing while Rory dyes Lane’s hair purple.
“I Don’t Mind” is a 2000 song by all-girl dream-pop band Slumber Party, from their self-titled debut album. The band received rave reviews from critics, but never made much of an impression on the public. The general consensus is that they just sounded too different from other bands in the early 2000s, and the word “underrated” for once doesn’t seem out of place here. Another shout-out to a girl band!
The opening stanzas say:
I don’t mind if you find someone’s God, if he were different than mine every time, by design He’s hearin’ you and you
I just wanna be true Live my life in the summer night with you Whenever I go, remind me I’ve been gone for so long
The lyrics suggest that Lane is open to a relationship with Dave even if he doesn’t’ share her religion or worship God the same way. It ends on a worrying note:
I don’t mind if you find The girl of your dreams and leave me behind
It’s as if Lane is already fearing for the future and preparing to let Dave go, when she’s only just fallen for him. Fortunately, this level of pessimism is unnecessary right now.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 