The Booster Club Meeting

Lorelai attends a meeting of the Booster Club, held in the dining hall at Chilton on Saturday (?) evening. The other members are Ava, Mena, Aubrey, Ginger, and a nameless, voiceless fifth woman with long dark hair.

You can see the Booster Cub serves as a grown-up parallel to the Puffs, with Mena in charge, like Francie, but Ava doing most of the talking, like Ivy. Lorelai and Rory even meet with their respective groups in the same dining hall.

The Booster Club are planning their annual fall fundraiser – this year they are raising funds to have the school’s auditorium refurbished. Their last fall fundraiser was a terrible failure: they had a luncheon with a silent auction and a salsa band, but everyone was struck down with food poisoning before the auction even had a chance to start, so they lost money.

I can’t imagine which catering company they found that gave them all food poisoning, or why it didn’t immediately refund their money! However, it means Lorelai is able to step in to save the day, as she manages an inn where the fundraiser can be held, and has a chef who won’t give them food poisoning. As a result, Lorelai ends up being quite popular with the Booster Club.

The Booster Club

LORELAI: I’m gonna join the Booster Club, mmkay? The Booster Club, I’m going to boost.
EMILY: Well, the Boosters are a very fine organization.

Booster clubs are common at high schools and universities in the US. They are run by parents as fundraising efforts to boost the school’s coffers, especially to pay for supplies, equipment or trips that the students need.

Chilton seems unusual in only having one booster club. Many schools have two – an academic booster club, and an athletics booster club.

Emily’s Barbecue

[Emily walks out onto the patio]
EMILY: What is this, a refugee camp? Come inside and eat at the table.
LORELAI: Mom, the whole point of barbecuing is to eat outside.
EMILY: Animals eat outside. Human beings eat inside with napkins and utensils. If you want to eat outside, go hunt down a gazelle. Make your decision, I’ll be inside.

More of Emily’s repressed, WASPY-y attitudes to eating, where pizza is something you only eat in a Turkish prison, and eating outside is something for animals or people in refugee camps. I can only think this attitude comes from country club barbecues, where the food would be cooked outside by the catering staff, but served indoors at tables like any other meal.

You can see how a lot of Lorelai’s poor dietary choices come out of a rebellion against her mother’s strict views on what foods are acceptable. Note that Lorelai and Rory immediately begin gnawing on corn cobs while hunched over in a corner, exactly like wild beasts, or starving people, comically fulfilling Emily’s expectations of what eating outside does to someone.

Poppin’ Fresh

[they walk out onto the patio, where a chef is cooking on the grill]
RORY: Hey, cool!
LORELAI: What’s up, Poppin’ Fresh?

Poppin’ Fresh, otherwise known as the Pillsbury Doughboy, is an advertising mascot for the Pillsbury Company’s refrigerated dough product line, created in 1965. His slogan is, “Say hello to poppin’ fresh dough!”. He’s a boy made of dough who wears a chef’s hat, hence Lorelai’s greeting to the chef.

“Everyone else in your family can pull their face off”

RORY: It’s just so weird that the one table I sit down at is home to the secret society.
LORELAI: I know. It’s like waking up one day and realising that everyone else in your family can pull their face off.

Lorelai references the 1989 horror film Society, directed by Brian Yuzna and starring Billy Warlock. The film is about a teenage boy who lives in a Beverly Hills mansion, but doesn’t trust his high society family. After a series of disturbing and gruesome events, it is revealed that the boy’s family and their high society friends are from a different species. They pull their faces off and begin melding together to begin feeding from a human.

The film was a success in Europe, but wasn’t released in the US until 1992. The film is considered a brilliant satire in the UK, but pretentious and obnoxious in the US. The ending is unforgettable, whichever your opinion, and it is now a cult classic.

Note the tagline of the film, a comment on the theme of this episode.

Sandra Day O’Connor

PARIS: And the connection you make with the Puffs, they last the rest of your life. My cousin Maddie got her internship at the Supreme Court because of Sandra Day O’Connor.
RORY: Sandra Day O’Connor was a Puff?
PARIS: Yes. She was Puffed in 1946, became the president in ’47, and in ’48 she actually moved the group to the very table you sat at today.

Sandra Day O’Connor (born 1930) is a retired attorney and politician who served as the first female associate judge in the US Supreme Court from 1981 to 2006. Prior to that, she was a judge and elected Republican leader in the Arizona Senate, the first female majority leader in a state senate.

O’Connor most often voted with the conservative bloc of the Supreme Court, and was sometimes named as the most powerful woman in the world. She retired in 2005, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2009.

In real life, Sandra Day O’Connor could not have gone to Chilton or been a Puff. She was born in Texas and lived on a cattle ranch, attending a private girl’s school in El Paso. For her final year of schooling, she took a 32-mile bus trip every day to attend Stephen F. Austin High School in El Paso (rather like Rory going to Hartford).

In 1946, aged 16, she enrolled at Stanford University, where she gained a BA in Economics in 1950, so she was far beyond the world of high school sororities by that stage. And even at university, she didn’t join a sorority, as they didn’t exist at Stanford at that time.

I think she was just too tough and sensible to ever bother about table allocation in the dining hall, or gossiping about Homecoming. I presume the ludicrousness of the idea is what gave it appeal as a joke.

We also learn that Paris has an older cousin named Maddie who interned at the Supreme Court with the assistance of Sandra Day O’Connor. Maddie must have been a Puff as well, and possibly has a career in law. In real life, membership of sororities and fraternities can gain you coveted positions, although I doubt a high school one would actually be that influential.

The Puffs, the #1 Chilton Sorority

PARIS: No, they’re the Puffs, the most influential sorority at Chilton.
RORY: Chilton has sororities?

PARIS: Only ten worth mentioning, and the Puffs, they have been number one for at least the last fifty years.

A sorority is a women’s social organisation at a college or university, the female equivalent of a fraternity. They were once common in US high schools as well, but these days many schools ban them. However, they are still in existence, and some schools are willing to turn a blind eye to them while not recognising them officially.

We learn here that Chilton is the sort of school which tolerates this practice, and that it has at least ten major sororities! The Puffs have been the most powerful and exclusive of them since at least 1951.

The current Puffs seem to consist of Francine “Francie” Jarvis (President), Ivy, Dijur, Lily, Celine, Lana, Asia, Anna, and Lemon. The name Puffs could have been chosen in-universe because of powder puffs, suggesting a fashionable femininity, or even that they are delicious little morsels, as puffs are such a favourite food in Gilmore Girls. However, it suggests being filled with their own importance (“puffed up”, “puff piece”) and full of hot air.

There’s something insubstantial about the Puffs, as if a puff of wind could blow them away – remember that Rory even pretended a draft of air is what drove her to their table, taking her on a trip to another world just as weird and bizarre as Oz.

Cosa Nostra

RORY: I don’t know, I just sat down.
PARIS: Nobody just sits down with them, you have to be invited.
RORY: Paris, it’s not the Cosa Nostra.

Cosa Nostra is the name for the Sicilian Mafia. It literally means “our thing”. Rory would be familiar with it from the Godfather films. One of the “rules” of the Cosa Nostra is that you can never approach it without invitation; you must be introduced by a trusted member.

Pop Up Book

[Rory walks out of the dining hall and runs into Paris.]
RORY: God! You’re like a pop up book from hell.

A three-dimensional book, designed so that when it is opened, a scene or picture made from folded cardboard appears. They date to the Middle Ages, and were first made for adult readers – usually scholarly works, providing three-dimensional diagrams, for example. Not until the late 18th century did they begin to be made for children.