Footnotes to the TV series
This popular 1954 song is on in the background at the start of Rory’s second birthday party as she opens her presents surrounded by friends and neighbours. Written by Stuart Hamblen, it was a hit for Rosemary Clooney that year.
The version played on the show is from 1998 by the Brian Setzer Orchestra, from their successful album The Dirty Boogie. Brian Setzer was in the rockabilly band Stray Cats in the early 1980s, and his orchestra revived swing in the 1990s.
PARIS: You can go somewhere else. Go to Brandeis. Brandeis is nice.
Brandeis University is a private university in the city of Waltham, Massachussetts, just outside Boston. It was founded in 1948 as a secular, non-sectarian, co-educational university, sponsored by the Jewish community.
It has a strong focus on the liberal arts, and promotes tolerance on its campus. About half the student population is Jewish, and Jewish culture is strongly in evidence. It has a reputation (I don’t know how earned or how accurate) for being slightly quirky and accepting of social misfits.
It is amusing that Paris suggests Rory attend a Jewish-sponsored university near Boston while she strives to get into a Christian-sponsored university near Boston. Perhaps Brandeis is a “nice” (i.e. liberal, tolerant, accepting) school that others (staff at Chilton?) have suggested Paris might like to attend if she doesn’t get into Harvard, or even prefer to Harvard, (since she’s a Jewish social misfit), so she turns it back on someone else.
PARIS: Ten generations of Gellers have gone to Harvard. I have to go to Harvard.
According to Paris, the Geller family have been attending Harvard University since the 18th century. This doesn’t seem possible, as the Gellers are Jewish, and at that time Jews weren’t permitted to attend Harvard (and tended to be excluded from higher education, and many other institutions). The first Jewish student at Harvard in 1720 had to convert to Christianity, and still wasn’t really accepted. Even in the twentieth century, there were heavy restrictions on Jews attending Harvard.
It is possible that Paris is lying in a desperate attempt to persuade Rory that she “deserves” to go to Harvard more than Rory does. Of course later on Paris and Rory do attend the same university together.
The day after her birthday, Rory takes the bus into Hartford to attend a college fair. College fairs are events held by schools and communities where representatives of colleges and universities can meet one-on-one with high school students and their parents to talk about their college, and answer questions. Representatives will have a booth or table where they can hand out brochures about the campus and academic programs. It seems that for some time Rory has been collecting the brochures from Harvard University.
LORELAI: So I guess the whole pudding thing was just a fluke, huh? Trying to get to know us, easing up on the rules, smudging that bottom line of yours. It was just some weird phase. What, you were on cold medicine last week or something?
In the US, many over the counter cold and flu medications contain dextromethorphan, a psychoactive substance which can produce euphoria or hallucinations when abused; they can also contain the opioid codeine which acts as a sedative. This isn’t the case in some other countries, where cold and flu medicines treat symptoms in a far less interesting manner.
LORELAI: You know what they say when people assume things.
EMILY: No, what do they say?
LORELAI: That – you shouldn’t.
Lorelai is referring to the phrase: “Never ASSUME, because when you ASSUME you make an ASS out of U and ME”. It became a popular catchphrase after being used in the episode, “My Strife in Court”, from the 1970s TV series, The Odd Couple. The writer on that episode, Jerry Belson, had heard a teacher say it many years before. Lorelai can’t bring herself to complete the saying to her already irritable mother.
LORELAI: And I said something at the table about the pâté smelling like Clorox and one thing led to another and I wound up here. I hadn’t told anybody yet about me. And you.
Clorox is an American brand of household cleaning bleach, made by the Clorox Company, founded in 1913.
The pate would have smelled unpalatably bleach-y to Lorelai because she was pregnant; pregnancy can change the way you perceive odours and flavours. As Emily and Richard didn’t know she was pregnant, they probably thought Lorelai was being a rude brat, and sent her upstairs. Could this help explain Lorelai’s disdain for pâté?
Rory asks Lorelai if she remembers her last birthday in Richard and Emily’s house, and Lorelai says it was when she was pregnant with Rory, so April 1984. Later we find out that Lorelai didn’t leave home until Rory was almost two years old, so she would have had two more birthdays at her parents’ house.
Maybe she means that it was the last birthday party her parents threw for her, which is rather sad, but understandable – as a teenage mother she would have lost touch with old friends, and not had many opportunities to make new ones yet, quite apart from her parents wanting to keep their situation private. More likely the scriptwriter (Amy Sherman-Palladino) originally imagined that Lorelai left home at sixteen when Rory was a few months old before realising that wasn’t very realistic.
There are four Duran Duran posters on the wall in Lorelai’s childhood bedroom, in the scene where Lorelai and Rory talk. Duran Duran are an English new wave band formed in 1978, with their classic line up being Nick Rhodes, John Taylor, Roger Taylor, Andy Taylor, and Simon le Bon. Their first album came out in 1981, and they found mainstream success by 1984. They are most famous for their 1980s hits such as Hungry Like The Wolf, Rio, and The Reflex.
There is a large Echo & The Bunnymen poster over the bed. Echo & The Bunnymen [pictured] are an English post-punk rock band founded in 1978, with the original line-up being Ian McCulloch, Will Sergeant, and Les Pattinson. Their first album came out in 1980 to critical acclaim, and they found mainstream success by 1983. Although a hit in the UK, they were not so well known in the US in the 1980s, perhaps suggesting that despite her Duran Duran mania, teenage Lorelai’s musical knowledge was a cut above her peers.
One wonders why Emily has left the posters up, or why Lorelai has asked that they be left up – her comment that time has stood still in the room makes it sound as if she hasn’t up here since she left home, which seems a bit unlikely. It is almost as if Emily has kept Lorelai’s (eerily untouched) room like a shrine, as if she died rather than ran away as a teenager.
RORY: I’m sorry I snapped at Grandma.
LORELAI: Yeah, huh? That was a pretty Freaky Friday moment we had back there.
Freaky Friday is a 1976 fantasy-comedy Walt Disney film about a mother and teenage daughter who switch bodies after wishing that they could trade places; the mother and daughter are played by Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster respectively. The film is based on the 1972 novel of the same name by Mary Rodgers, who wrote the screenplay for the movie.
In the movie, the daughter Annabel gains a new understanding of her mother’s life which brings them closer together, just as in this episode Rory gets an insight into Lorelai’s life growing up with Emily, and how difficult that must have been at times.
Lorelai would have been eight years old when Freaky Friday came out. Walt Disney did a made-for-television remake of the film in 1995 when Rory was eleven, so the movie could easily have been part of both their childhoods.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 