Max’s Parents

While they are on a dinner date together in Hartford, Max tells Lorelai that he has told his parents about their engagement. They were absolutely thrilled, and insisted on paying a small amount toward the wedding, just so they could feel involved. (From Max’s description, it sounds as if his parents live fairly close).

Mrs Medina cried with happiness before saying Lorelai can call her “Mom” if she wants to, and offered her own wedding dress for Lorelai to wear. Apparently Max’s mother is quite large, because Max says it would take three Lorelais to fill her dress out.

All this is such a contrast to Emily’s frosty reception to her news that Lorelai becomes angry and upset. She and Max leave the restaurant (another meal out that Lorelai didn’t finish eating), and she forces him to take her to her parents’ house so she can confront her mother, ignoring Max’s pleas to be more reasonable, and to try to see things from Emily’s viewpoint

Eye candy

MAX: Is something wrong?
LORELAI: No.
MAX: You can tell me. That’s what I’m here for.
LORELAI: I thought it was just for eye candy.

Eye candy is slang for a person or object which is attractive and pleasing to look at; a treat for the eyes. Lorelai’s joke probably has some truth to it – that her attraction to Max is mostly physical.

“I will not be ignored”

RORY: Time is ticking.
LORELAI (imitating Dean): “Rory, I love you, Rory. Rory, I will not be ignored, Rory…”
RORY: Leave.

Lorelai is slightly misquoting from the 1987 thriller film Fatal Attraction, directed by Adrian Lyne, and written by James Dearden, based on his short film Diversion. The film is about a married man named Dan (Michael Douglas) who has a brief affair with a woman named Alex (Glenn Close). Alex becomes obsessed, and stalks Dan and his family.

At one point, Dan confronts Alex at her apartment, and they end up in a physical altercation. Alex says to him, “Well, what am I supposed to do? You won’t answer my calls, you change your number. I mean, I’m not gonna be ignored, Dan!”

Fatal Attraction was a massive box-office hit, the #2 film of 1987 in the US, and the #1 film world-wide, leading to more psychological thrillers being made in the 1980s and ’90s. It received fairly good reviews, and much discussion around feminist and mental health issues.

It is notable that Alex’s surname is Forrest – very similar to Dean’s surname of Forester, as yet another hint of Dean’s obsessive stalker tendencies.

Froot Loops

LORELAI: Okay, well, I’m not gonna be home late. And listen, I would reconsider calling Dean. It’s not his fault that you’re so fabulous he can’t think about anything else.
RORY: Bye Mom.
LORELAI: I mean, he just sits in his room, eating Froot Loops out of the box, saying your name over and over and over.

Froot Loops are a brand of breakfast cereal made by Kellogg’s since 1963, consisting of sugary, flavoured and coloured ring-shaped cereal pieces. They don’t actually have any fruit in them.

Sunnyside

RORY: I called the Sunnyside home. Do they need any volunteers? And believe it or not, they don’t, but they do need an accordion player for their Friday night polka party.

Sunnyside Nursing Centers are a chain of aged care nursing and rehabilitation homes in the United States. In real life, there is more than one Sunnyside nursing home in the Wallingford area, where Stars Hollow appears to be located, although none of them are actually called The Sunnyside Home (that may just be what people in Stars Hollow call it, rather than its actual name).

Apart from trying the Fireflies and Sunnyside, Rory also calls the Stars Hollow library, which apparently only has twelve books (surely an exaggeration), and the Chilton tutoring program, who are just taking names at present.

Rory seems to have amassed an enormous amount of brochures for various organisations within a few hours, late in the day. How she managed to do this is something of a mystery

Fireflies

RORY: I called the Fireflies. Do they need troop leaders? Yes. Good, I’ll be a troop leader. Great. The only catch is, it’s summer. Camping season. I need wilderness skills. Why did you never take me camping?
LORELAI: Camping? Are you kidding? I couldn’t get you to step on wet grass until you were three.

The Fireflies are a fictional organisation, perhaps based on the Camp Fire Girls, founded in 1910 as a sister organisation to the Boy Scouts of America. In 1975 it became for both boys and girls, and is now just called Camp Fire. It teaches camping and wilderness skills, just like the Fireflies, and Lauren Graham was a member when she was young. In real life, there are no Camp Fire groups in Connecticut.

The 1997 black comedy film Wag the Dog , with screenplay by Amy Sherman-Palladino’s favourite playwright, David Mamet, uses The Firefly Girls as a replacement for the Camp Fire Girls. This could be an homage (and a slightly naughty one, as in the film the young Firefly Girl receives inappropriate advances from the President in the Oval Office).

If Rory would not step on wet grass until she was three, no doubt that’s from Lorelai’s example – she notoriously hates nature and the great outdoors..

Rory’s Fight With Dean

DEAN: Wait a minute. I thought we were gonna spend some time together.
RORY: We are.
DEAN: When?
RORY: I don’t know. Tomorrow maybe?

Rory and Dean now enter their third serious fight together, in a relationship which has only lasted around six months.

You can definitely see Dean’s point of view. He wanted to spend the day with Rory, but she was busy (and didn’t tell him about that beforehand), so they agreed to spend the evening together instead. But when he turns up for that, Rory tells him that now she has to spend the evening alone, planning her future. When he asks when he can see her again, she’s not sure and says the next day – maybe.

Dean is right that Rory is dismissing him from her life as if he doesn’t matter, and he is also right that her behaviour is absurd. She can’t possibly catch up on all the volunteering she thinks she has to do in one night, and she can’t even organise volunteer work for herself on a Saturday night when everything is shut. She possibly has an hour or so to make calls, and then she could spend the evening with Dean.

On the other hand, Dean is clearly jealous of the time Rory spends away from him, and makes very little attempt to understand Rory or help her feel less stressed out. If Rory had perhaps been more honest with him from the start as to how much of her summer would be taken up with classes, homework, and volunteer work, rather than springing it on him as it happens, he might have taken the news better.

 

“I need to find a retarded kid”

DEAN: Well, Rory, it’s summer. I mean, summer’s the time to hang out and kick back.
RORY: I can’t hang out or kick back. I need to find a retarded kid and teach him how to play softball. Oh God, listen to me. I am horrible. I am under qualified and horrible.

This is the girl that Lorelai calls “the sweetest kid in the world”. Either Lorelai has rose-coloured glasses when it comes to her only child, or Rory has already been corrupted by her zeal to get into Harvard. Maybe both.

“I thought that was enough”

RORY: I’ve been studying my butt off my whole life and I really thought that that was enough, but then Paris tells me that everyone makes good grades and it’s the extras that put you over the top. And I thought that she was messing with me like she always does, but she’s right. I mean, it makes total sense.
DEAN: What does?
RORY: Good grades aren’t enough. I need to do things. I need to volunteer. I need to work for charity, I need to help the blind, the orphans, I don’t know. I just need to do something.

Rory has been truly naive in thinking that all she needed to do to get into Harvard is to study hard and get good grades. Her teachers should have given her far greater guidance on getting into college; it seems as if they are leaving it all until senior year. Both Rory’s grandparents went to university and could have given more help, but then again, their knowledge of college applications is out of date.

Rory herself has not given the reality of college much thought at all, so going to Harvard is almost purely a fantasy for her, where she strolls around historic buildings and gets to feel smart and important. At some point, surely when she started at a private school, she should have come to realise what would be needed to get into college.

Because of this gap in her knowledge, Rory believes Paris implicitly that she needs thousands of hours of volunteer work to apply to Harvard, and panics. She should have at least checked with her teacher and her mother’s boyfriend, Max Medina before freaking out, or done a bit of research on the subject.

Mother Teresa

RORY: I’m like ten years behind on my extracurriculars.
DEAN: What are you talking about?
RORY: Paris has been accumulating these things since she could walk. I mean, she has a list of good deeds that could bump Mother Teresa off the Harvard list.

Mother Teresa, born Anjezë Bojaxhiu (1910-1997) was an Albanian-born Roman Catholic nun and missionary who lived most of her life in India, caring for the poor. In 1950 she founded the Missionaries of Charity, which cares for the sick, and manages soup kitchens, orphanages, and schools.

Mother Teresa won numerous awards during her life, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. Sh was canonised as a saint in 2016, and in 2017 named one of the patrons of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Calcutta.