Footnotes to the TV series
EMILY: We’ve never really been home at the same time. I mean, we got married, we went to Europe, we came back, he went to work, and it’s been that way ever since.
Confirmation that Richard and Emily spent their honeymoon in Europe – it feels as if them travelling to Europe every two years in the fall is an attempt to revisit their honeymoon.
EMILY: You did not see me twitching.
LORELAI: Mom, when Dad was talking about the vase, you were pulling a full-on Tabitha.
A reference to the sitcom Bewitched, broadcast 1964-1972, and continuously televised in syndication since then. It stars Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha, a witch married to a mortal named Darrin, who vows to lead the life of an ordinary suburban housewife. However, her disapproving family often meddle in their lives, forcing Samantha to use her magic to fix the situations they get them into it.
Popular for its snappy dialogue, great cast, and special effects, it offered a critique of women’s roles as well as providing an example of a happy and successful mixed marriage during the era of segregation. Many episodes touch on issues around prejudice against race and religion, and it can also be read as an allegory of closeted homosexuality, or anyone unable to be their real self. Samantha’s meddling mother Endora, played by Agnes Moorehead, is not a million miles away from Emily herself.
Tabitha is the daughter and eldest child of Samantha and Darrin, who went from a baby to a toddler, then a young child during the series run. She has supernatural powers, and could perform magic by twitching her nose (like her mother). Her parents would tell her, “Mustn’t twitch”, in an effort to teach her to control her magic.
Unlike with other references that Emily doesn’t get, she knows who Tabitha is. Perhaps she and Lorelai even watched it together during Lorelai’s childhood.
LORELAI: Ooh Dad, see if you can find a pair of the new Chanel patent leather pirate boots stuffed back behind your Churchills.
Chanel, fashion brand, previously mentioned.
Patent leather is that shiny, almost plastic-looking, leather, and pirate boots, more correctly cavalier boots, are knee-high boots with a cuff around the top. A pair of Chanel boots of this type could cost around $1000 today. The boots sound suspiciously like something Amy Sherman-Palladino would wear.
RICHARD: You know what else I noticed?
RORY: What?
RICHARD: A first edition Flaubert, mint condition, shoved behind several of my Churchill biographies.
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), French novelist [pictured]. Highly influential, he is considered the leading exponent of literary realism in France. He is especially famous for his debut novel, Madame Bovary (1857), previously discussed.
Richard never specifies which book he has a first edition of, but fans often assume it is Madame Bovary, since Rory likes it. A first edition of even the English translation would cost tens of thousands of dollars, making this very unlikely. However, the first edition of the English translation of Three Tales (1877), published by Chatto and Windus in 1923, can be picked up for as little as $50, and is a very handsome volume. This would be my pick for Richard’s first edition.
Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965), British statesman who served as Prime Minister from 1940 to 1945, and then again from 1951 to 1955. He is especially famous for his inspiring wartime speeches, and is considered one of the most significant figures of the twentieth century.
Richard does not say whether he means biographies by Churchill or about him, but probably the latter, since Churchill only wrote two biographies (not several, although Richard could have multiple copies of each).
LORELAI: Oh, oh. Well, uh . . . ugh, why don’t we move Aunt Cecile? She was always so annoying at parties. She loved the knock-knock jokes.
RORY: Mom! … You can’t just kick out Aunt Cecile.
LORELAI: Knock-knock. Who’s there? Pineapple. Pineapple who? That’s where it ended. Never fully grasped the knock-knock concept.
EMILY: She was a complete idiot. Okay, it’s decided – Cecile goes.
Aunt Cecile is one of the deceased Gilmores currently in the mausoleum, and is almost unanimously voted out to the annex as the least popular corpse, due to her habit of telling incomplete knock-knock jokes. I assume she is the sister of either Trix, or Richard’s father.
Cecile, an Anglicised French form of Cecily, was most common around the turn of the twentieth century, although it has never been very popular in the US. By the mid-twentieth century it was fairly rare.
Note that Emily is dressed in black, suitable for her role discussing death and burial.
EMILY: So I went inside and looked around and it occurred to me that there’s a very limited space there … Now of course there’s a slot open for me and Richard and you and Rory, but after the two of you – that’s it. No more room for anyone else.
Apparently the Gilmore family mausoleum is now almost full, and only has four spaces left. Emily is very concerned about Lorelai getting married, because there would be nowhere for her husband, but she never seems to consider that Rory could very well marry one day, and married or not, both of them are capable of having children (or further children, in Lorelai’s case). Where they are meant to go is never even discussed, and it really sounds as if the Gilmores’ mausoleum has pretty much seen its quota filled by now.
Lorelai suggests that she and Rory could be buried in the same space – a callback to them sharing a bed in the potting shed, and a sign that she really sees Rory as an extension of herself. Rory pleads for more boundaries by saying she’d prefer her own space. Even in death, Lorelai wants to keep Rory enmeshed with her, rather gruesomely.
Emily says the cemetery offered them the opportunity to buy an “annex” for extra family members. I don’t think this is an option in real life, although they have two public mausoleums at Cedar Hill where future generations of dead Gilmores could be stashed. Richard’s mother Trix dies during the series run, and surely other elderly Gilmores as well – how long are those extra four spaces going to last, and how long can they keep kicking existing Gilmores into the annex, which is also of finite space?
In A Year in the Life, Richard Gilmore dies and is buried in a plot with a headstone, not in a mausoleum. Maybe they really did run out of space?
EMILY: Well, I visited the family mausoleum today … I just wanted to check on things, make sure they were keeping it up, changing the flowers, you know.
A mausoleum is a building which contains a burial chamber with spaces for the dead to be interred. They have existed since ancient times for rulers, the nobility, and gentry, and became particularly popular in Europe and its colonies in the 18th and 19th centuries as burial options for the wealthy.
In real life, Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford [pictured] has mausoleums for burials, usually owned by wealthy and prominent families, many of them of historic significance. The Gilmore family mausoleum is presumably one of them.
LORELAI: How are you Mom?
EMILY: Also fine.
LORELAI: Oh, look at that. All three of us fine, just like The Judds.
The Judds were a country music duo composed of Naomi Judd and her daughter Wynonna Judd. They were one of the most successful country music acts in history, releasing six studio albums between 1986 and 1991, winning five Grammy Awards and eight Country Music Associations, and had 25 singles in the charts, 14 of which went to #1. They were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2021.
The third Judd is Naomi’s other daughter, Ashley Judd, an actress with a long career starring in several successful films. Her most recent film at this time was Someone Like You, earlier mentioned as one of the possible “disgusting cow movies” of 2001.
[In the picture, Naomi is in the middle, Ashley on the left, and Wynonna on the right].
Emily goes to to the kitchen to get more bread (wherever is the cook or the maid during these dramatic kitchen scenes? Do they just happen to be on a break in the middle of a meal, or in the toilet? Is there another food preparation or storage room somewhere? Even weirder, are they just out of shot and actually present the whole time?).
Lorelai apologises to Emily for not trusting her motives in helping, saying that she isn’t used to people doing things without strings attached. Emily immediately realises that Lorelai is talking about her and Richard, but Lorelai continues thanking her, saying she didn’t have anywhere to turn and was all out of ideas, and that she doesn’t know what she would have done without Emily. Hm, maybe she needs to thank and apologise to Rory as well now?
Emily thanks Lorelai, and then gives her parting shot – with a wicked smile, she tells her the DAR will be holding all their meetings at the Independence Inn from now on. She leaves, seemingly without the bread she supposedly came in for. Emily wasn’t joking either. A year later, there is mention of the DAR meetings still being held at the inn.
Of course, the DAR would have been free to book the Independence if they wanted to anyway, and Emily has organised things so that the inn Lorelai manages gets more business. It’s up to the viewer whether she has really taken revenge on Lorelai, or is trying to give her even more help. Or both!
Note how beautifully this scene is composed and shot, and that here is the colour red again to indicate strong emotion. Lorelai in red with a red light on her hair, vase of red flowers, red strawberries on the cake, little red desserts, red grapes, a red pepper in the fruit bowl (slightly oddly). Only Emily remains in cool blue and silver, her emotions under control.
The show ends with another Friday Night Dinner – not the one immediately after the Thursday night scene at Stars Hollow High School, but the following one, more than a week later. Lorelai tells Emily that work began on the house the previous morning, so that we know they have already done the termite fumigation, and everything is on track for their house to be fully repaired.
Getting a house’s foundation repaired usually takes about three days, so it might be be finished over the weekend. Even allowing for extra time because the damage was so extensive, we can feel confident that Lorelai’s house will be completely fixed by Tuesday or Wednesday at the latest (in time for the next episode!).
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 