C&H Pure Cane Sugar Dancers

LORELAI: The C&H Pure Cane Sugar dancers?
EMILY: Lorelai, please, we don’t have a buffer here tonight.

Lorelai refers to the popular television commercials for the California and Hawaiian Sugar Company (C&H Sugar), which processed sugar cane from Hawaii at their plant in San Francisco until 2016.

In the 1960s, the commercial depicted happy Hawaiian children singing and dancing to the company’s jingle in a very cute and innocent way while they suck on big sticks of sugar.

Honolulu

LORELAI: Leilani, huh? Very exotic name.
EMILY: She’s from Honolulu.

Honolulu, the capital and largest city of the state of Hawaii. Honolulu’s tropical climate, natural scenery, and extensive beaches make it a popular destination for tourists.

Leilani is a popular Hawaiian name (technically unisex, but nearly always given to girls) which can be translated as either “heavenly flowers” or “royal child”.

Lauren Graham was born in Honolulu, and this is yet another reference to her home state on Gilmore Girls.

Sherry at the Hospital

SHERRY: I’m lying in a bed. God knows what’s gonna happen … And she goes back to work. I would love to go back to work, but I can’t because I have to stay here … She’s not here. None of my friends are here. Christopher isn’t here. No one is here. No one but you. Thank God you’re here, Rory. I don’t think that I could do this by myself because this wasn’t supposed to happen until next week. I wrote it down. I wrote it down. I wrote it down!

Sherry is frightened and worried at being left alone to give birth, and seizes on Rory as the one person who can help, in the most inappropriate way possible. Rory is barely eighteen and still at school, with minimal practical skills of any sort, having travelled alone by public transport in midwinter at night for more than four hours! Yet somehow she is now the designated assistant to Sherry.

For someone who was so gung-ho to have kids, Sherry’s suddenly got very cold feet on the idea, and says she would prefer to be at work. (Yes, at night. Everyone works at night, apparently).

Rory Arrives at the Hospital

RORY: Where’s everyone else? …
MAUREEN: Well, we had all planned on next week, but Sherry screwed up, so what can you do? Thank God you’re here. She’ll be thrilled. She’s feeling a little abandoned. Now, she’s right in there. Do not mention how fat she is. For some reason, she’s extremely sensitive about that today. Okay, kiss. I’ll call you later to find out how everything’s going.

To Rory’s dismay, when she finally arrives at the hospital in Boston, only Maureen is there – and she’s just about to leave. She says that “Sherry is feeling a little abandoned” by their defection – Rory also feels that she’s been completely abandoned, and left in sole charge of the pregnant Sherry, as Christopher is out of town.

Once again, being pregnant and “fatness” becomes mysteriously conflated. Sometimes you get the feeling the writers of the show don’t quite understand how pregnancy works.

Nicole Arrives For Her Date with Luke

Lorelai is at Luke’s diner to get a coffee before she drives to Hartford to have dinner with her mother. Luke isn’t there when she gets in, and when he does appear, he’s clean-shaven and dressed up – even wearing clothes that Lorelai picked out for him.

Then Nicole arrives, and Lorelai realises Luke is going on a date. Even though she’s dating Alex, she doesn’t seem pleased by this discovery, and rather childishly “tells on” Nicole for using a cell phone in the diner, when Luke doesn’t allow it. Busy career women get a bit of a bashing in this episode.

Flashback 2

The second flashback shows teenaged Lorelai preparing for her debutante ball. She is about three or four months pregnant, so it is perhaps April or May, and can no longer do up the zip on her debutante dress, which she was fitted for three months previously.

Lorelai hasn’t told her parents about her condition, and earlier told Rory that she still hadn’t told them on her sixteenth birthday, which is around April. This seems to be the moment leading up to Emily finding out about the pregnancy, although at first she blames the dressmaker for sending Lorelai a dress that is too small.

We know that Lorelai never got to go to debutante ball because she got pregnant, and this scene shows how it happened. Rory got to fulfil her mother’s role by making her debut, even wearing the same dress to her ball. The dresses don’t look the same – Lorelai’s has butterfly sleeves and Rory’s is sleeveless – but perhaps the dress was altered for Rory.

If Rory was born in October, she was most likely conceived in mid-to-late January, even though Lorelai and Christopher are shown kissing in December. It can perhaps be assumed that they continued having sex for a few weeks before conceiving Rory.