PARIS: [on phone] Hola, es Paris. Voy a comer la cena de cas de Rory. Hay mucho mac and cheese!
Paris’ nanny is Portuguese, yet Paris speaks Spanish to her here (is Nanny bilingual? Why can’t she speak English?).
She says, “Hi, it’s Paris. I’m going to eat dinner at Rory’s house. There’s a lot of mac and cheese!”.
She doesn’t translate “mac and cheese” into Spanish, which would be macarrones con queso. Probably because American mac and cheese feels like a completely different dish to what a Spanish-speaker would be expecting, unless she couldn’t think of the right word for it.
Paris is allergic to dairy products, which was introduced in the episode, “Concert Interruptus” (Lorelai ordered her a cheese-free pizza). Someone eating something they’re allergic to isn’t a “splurge”, it’s a potential medical emergency!
Paris asks if Stars Hollow, a town of less than 10 000 people, has a 24-hour pharmacy in case she has a severe allergic reaction. Unbelievably, they do! In real life, the nearest 24-hour pharmacy to them would be in Waterbury or Hartford.
Rory may simply be lying, eager to keep Paris there so she is not left alone with Jess. If so, she’s taking a bit of a risk with Paris’ health in the process.
The care package is a more elaborate version of what Luke brought Lorelai for the Bid-on-a-Basket Fundraiser when they ate a picnic in the gazebo, as if Jess is trying to give Rory even more. It might be another sign that he is paying too much for her or offering Rory too much. He’s all for the big gestures – similar to Dean and his gift of a car.
The food is brought in a box which once contained bleach. I’m not sure if there’s any significance to that, but it’s provocative (sperm is often said to smell of bleach, for example) and slightly off-putting.
JESS: He wasn’t sure how long your mom was gonna be gone for.
RORY: Just tonight.
Emily invited Lorelai to spend the weekend with her, then turned up to collect her on Friday morning (rather than Saturday morning, as a weekend would suggest). Rory indicates that they were only spending Friday night at the spa, yet at the end of the episode, Emily and Lorelai are said to be leaving early when they go home on Saturday morning.
Either Rory is psychic, or she is trying to discourage Jess from thinking he can hang around or pester her all weekend. She may be protecting herself from Jess even more carefully than she protected herself from Dean, out of worry that sex might be on the menu as well as macaroni cheese.
Good thinking, because Jess needs only the slightest encouragement to invite himself to dinner, which was his plan all along.
EMILY: They certainly do like their tofu here, don’t they?
LORELAI: And the word steamed. Well, they have dessert at least. Cookies sweetened with sprouted mung bean.
Tofu ends up being the villain of the piece, once again. Vegan food nearly always seems to be treated as some sort of disgusting torture on Gilmore Girls! The cookies would be made from sprouted mung bean flour, and I have seen them spruiked as a healthy detox snack. The recipe said they taste like peanut butter cookies without the peanut butter. So um … like nothing???
I don’t actually think it’s very believable that a luxury East Coast spa would serve only this kind of food for dinner. They exist to pamper people, and the ones I saw were handing around cocktails and glasses of wine while people were having pedicures in their robes – exactly the sort of thing Emily and Lorelai would have enjoyed. It seems more like something a Californian health and wellness sort of spa would serve. However, we need an excuse for them to leave to get a steak dinner, so this is it.
A fictional shade of lipstick, a joke based on the sometimes bizarre names chosen for lipstick colours. It appears to be a MAC lipstick, Lorelai’s favourite make-up brand, and according to the Gilmore Girls Instagram page, it’s a dark red matte colour.
You can now buy “Vicious Trollop” lip balm on Etsy, but apart from not being actual lipstick, it’s nowhere near the right colour.
This is the song which is playing at the spa while Lorelai is having her facial alone, and when Emily goes to her room and begins chatting.
“Deora Ar Mo Croi” is a song by Irish singer Enya, from her 2000 album, A Day Without Rain. The lyrics were adapted by Enya into Irish Gaelic from a poem by Roma Ryan, written in English. Roma Ryan is Enya’s chief lyricist.
A Day Without Rain was hugely successful internationally, selling 7 times platinum in the US and reaching #2 in the charts. Its popularity surged after 9/11, when Enya’s soulful laments seemed to perfectly capture the nation’s mood. The album was #6 in the UK and #7 in Ireland, and was most successful in Germany and Australia, where it went to #1.
The song’s title can be understood as “Tears In My Heart”, and its lyrics can be roughly translated into English thus:
How wonderful, from morning to night
the sweet voices beside me
and happiness everywhere, without sorrow,
joy in my heart forever.
If I walk away from life,
the sun and the moon at my back
I lack nothing but memories of my own world
Tears in my heart, sadly.
Apart from being believable as the sort of relaxing music that might be played at a spa, the song touches on the emotion behind Emily and Lorelai’s relationship, and that it is hard for Lorelai to simply “walk away” from her life and her memories without losing an awful lot in the process.
PARIS: This was the big night you had planned – a rendezvous with Mr. Peanut?
Mr Peanut is the advertising mascot for Planters Peanut Company, depicted as a peanut in the shell dressed as a gentleman, in top hat and monocle. Planters was founded in 1906 in Pennsylvania; Mr Peanut was created in 1916 after a schoolboy named Antonio Gentile won a design contest, with alterations made by artist Andrew S. Wallach.
Rory opens the door to Paris dressed in pyjamas decorated with Mr Peanut-like figures. (Rory’s pyjamas often have food themes; Lorelai said her “cutest” pyjamas had cupcakes on them).
PARIS: I tried to stay home and study myself but I can’t. I don’t know what anything means anymore. I mean, I can’t even read my own handwriting. What does this say? The person who wrote this should be dressed in a clown suit, stuffing bodies under their porch.
Paris is referencing John Wayne Gacy (1942-1994), serial killer and sex offender who assaulted and murdered at least 33 boys and young men. Gacy regularly performed at children’s hospitals and charitable events as “Pogo the Clown” or “Patches the Clown”, personas he had devised. He became known as the “Killer Clown” due to his public services as a clown prior to the discovery of his crimes. He buried most of his victims beneath his house, usually in the crawl space.
His conviction for thirty-three murders (by one individual) then covered the most homicides in US legal history. Gacy was sentenced to death in 1980, and executed by lethal injection in 1994.
Paris talks about her work as if it looks as if it was done by a mental case, but although he pleaded insanity, John Wayne Gacy was deemed to be sane and in complete control of his faculties when he committed his crimes.
(This is yet another mention of clowns on Gilmore Girls).
[Picture shows John Wayne Gacy dressed as a clown].
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 