RORY: Do you happen to know where the almonds I made for table five went?
LORELAI: No.
RORY: ‘Cause they were here last night before Sookie’s dinner.
Rory spends six hours wrapping Jordan almonds in tulle as wedding favours for Sookie and Jackson, only for Lorelai to eat some of them, because Gilmore girls are fun and quirky, and do what they want. Good work teaching your daughter that stealing is cute, Lorelai. Keep at it – just a few more examples, and I’m sure the message will sink in!
Also – six hours to make forty wedding favours? How slowly does Rory work? Each one should only take a couple of minutes.
Lorelai invites Christopher (another woman’s boyfriend!) to Sookie and Jackson’s wedding, as her “plus one”. At last her interest is piqued when he casually accepts this invitation, and she asks him if maybe he should run this plan past Sherry.
Christopher tells her that Sherry is out of town (as if that has somehow negated her very existence), and that they haven’t been getting on very well lately. Before she left on a business trip – more evidence that it was Sherry’s business trip they were on before, not Christopher’s, by the way – they agreed that they would take this time apart as an opportunity to do some thinking about their relationship.
This is all Christopher’s narrative of course, we don’t know if all, or any, of this is true, or if Sherry would have a different version of events. However, Christopher says he had already decided that he is going to start looking for an apartment so he can move out. Even though Christopher and Sherry are not actually broken up yet and Christopher has not told Sherry he’s moving out, nor has he made any moves to do so, Lorelai is now perfectly satisfied about taking Christopher to the wedding.
Note that Christopher hands Lorelai his coat to put over her bare shoulders, and that she sits increasingly closer to him during this scene, as he tells her about Sherry. She keeps her leg crossed away from him though, as if not ready to be completely vulnerable to him. We also get another reminder that the wedding is on Sunday, in case we’ve forgotten about it.
LORELAI: Twelve, including a few bars of “I’ll Go Home with Bonnie Jean”.
One of the songs from Brigadoon. The song is sung by Brigadoon villager Charlie Dalrymple, who marries fellow villager Jean McLaren in a traditional Highland celebration. The connection with weddings is presumably what puts it in Lorelai’s mind.
LORELAI: How dare you accuse my face of that! My face is calling Gloria Allred when we get home.
Gloria Allred (born Gloria Bloom in 1947), attorney known for taking high-profile and controversial cases, especially those involving the protection of women. She represented Nicole Brown Simpson’s family during the O.J. Simpson murder trial in 1995. She has been inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
CHRISTOPHER: Please, I saw what your face was doing … It was counting up how many Brigadoon references you could come up with to torture him with at a later date.
Brigadoon, a 1954 musical film directed by Vicente Minelli, based on the 1949 Broadway musical of the same name by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. The film stars Gene Kelly, Van Johnson, and Cyd Charisse and is about two American tourists on a hunting trip in Scotland who get lost in the woods and discover a miraculous village named Brigadoon, which rises out of the mists for one day every hundred years.
The film received lacklustre reviews and failed at the box office – unlike the stage musical, which was a big success.
Jackson is dismayed when his father hands him a kilt to wear to his wedding on the weekend. It’s a family tradition, and both Jackson’s father and grandfather were married in kilts, suggesting that the Belleville family have Scottish heritage. (Which made more sense when Jackson’s surname was Melville, which is a Scottish surname, while Belleville is French – although there is a historical relationship between France and Scotland, so it’s not unrealistic either).
I am not able to identify Jackson’s tartan – it looks most like a Buchanan Clan tartan, but I suspect it’s fictional.
Note that Jackson’s father is played by the real life father of Jackson Douglas, the actor who plays Jackson Belleville.
LORELAI: But if you’re gonna be in the area Thursday night, you can come with us to the dinner.
CHRISTOPHER: But it’s Sookie’s rehearsal dinner.
LORELAI: Oh, she would love it. She’s cooking for a thousand. It’ll be fun.
Sookie and Jackson’s wedding rehearsal dinner is on Thursday, and Lorelai invites Christopher to it, since he already offered to take Lorelai and Rory out to dinner that night. The Gilmore girls are strangely un-curious about how and why Christopher is suddenly so available for outings with them, and neither bothers to ask where Sherry is, or why she isn’t coming too.
Note we get another day of the week reference to keep us on track. The wedding rehearsal is Thursday, the elections are Friday, the wedding is on Sunday. Got it?
RORY: But if I win then I have to be vice president next year. Plus, I’ll have to spend my summer in Washington for some junior leadership program, which means six straight weeks of me and Paris together in a dorm room.
The program that Rory and Paris will be attending in Washington DC during their summer vacation seems to be similar to the real life Global Young Leaders Conference, where high school students from the US and around the world learn communication, decision-making, and negotiation while interacting with real life leaders, diplomats, lobbyists, and journalists. There are also visits to embassies and cultural landmarks.
Unlike the six weeks Rory has in front of her, the real life program only lasts for ten days, students are housed in a hotel, not a dormitory, and it costs thousands of dollars to attend. Rory never even mentions paying, so perhaps Chilton are footing the bill, or Rory and Paris will be offered scholarships.
RORY: Um, actually, I have to get home. I have to review my campaign platform …
LORELAI: Yes, our little Hillary Clinton here is running for student body vice president.
Hillary Clinton (born Hillary Rodham in 1947), former First Lady of the US from 1993-2001 as the wife of President Bill Clinton. In 2000, she was elected as the first female senator for New York, becoming the first First Lady to hold elected office and the first to serve in the Senate.
In a later season, we learn that Hillary Clinton is one of Rory’s heroines.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 