Footnotes to the TV series
PARIS: You have a problem with it?
FRANCIE: No, I’m just surprised. You seem so attached to those meetings.
PARIS: Well, I finally got a blankie. It’s much better.
Blankie, the baby-talk word for the security blankets that toddlers sometimes like to carry around for self-soothing. A famous example is the character of Linus in the Peanuts comic strip.
PARIS: Well, if there’s nothing really to talk about, what’s the point, right?
LOUISE: You said that one student council meeting a week was not enough.
MADELINE: Yeah, you said that was no way to govern, that meeting once a week was lazy, ineffectual, and if we were going to do it like that, we might as well just buy ourselves a ranch in Texas.
Paris referred in her comment to Prairie Chapel Ranch near the town of Crawford in Texas. It was acquired by former president George W. Bush in 1999, and was known as the Western White House. It was used both as a vacation house, a meeting place, and as a place to host visiting dignitaries.
George W. Bush was considered a lazy president, with some wits remarking that he worked “24/7 – 24 hours a week, 7 months a year”.
RORY: I don’t think I’ll have the prom bids ready for the supplemental student council meeting this week … They need a little more time to get the details together, so that leaves a little hole in our agenda.
Prom bids are, as far as I can work out, just another name for tickets to the school prom, a formal dance held at the end of the academic year.
PARIS: What did he talk about? … I didn’t take notes. I didn’t pay attention. I’m going to. . .
RORY: Borrow my notes and be just fine. [hands her notes to Paris] …
PARIS: I can’t believe I zoned out for the entire class.
This is continuing the theme of Paris not being able to pay attention to her schoolwork because she has a boyfriend. Unlike Rory, who is on her second boyfriend, and still going strong academically. She is even carrying Paris by giving her notes for the class.
TEACHER: To evaluate the value of a function of X when X equals Pi. You want to start by splitting the intregal into two separate intregals. Now, since the left intregal is a variable of a constant exponent, remember C is a constant, add one and divide by the new power … The right intregal, however, is more complex. You have to use U substitution with U equals 3 feet.
During the credits, Rory and Paris are shown in their AP Calculus class, which covers both Algebra and Geometry.
At the end of last season, Paris insisted on taking AP Calculus with Mr Branch, who is a MIT graduate, so I presume that the teacher in this episode is Branch.
RORY: Man, it’s winter carnival time again already … Are you going?
LANE: I have to. We are raising money for the marching band this year, mandatory booth manning is involved … It’s for letters so we can finally have letter carriers. For some reason, the powers that be think that the reason we never win at competitions is because no one knows who we are. The fact that we suck has never occurred to them. What’s wrong with our uniforms?
Another festival – the Stars Hollow High School Winter Carnival, which is held around mid-January. It is always a fundraiser, and this year it’s raising money for the school marching band to have letters spelling out their name at interschool competitions.
[Rory, Lane and Lorelai are walking through Stars Hollow. They cross a street]
LANE: Are you serious? …We can really rehearse in your garage?
LORELAI: In exchange for the promise that you never pose naked on the cover of Rolling Stone no matter how much trouble your career is in.
Rolling Stone magazine has quite a tradition of musicians and actors posing nude or semi-clad on their cover. A few examples are John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1968, Madonna in 1991, The Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1992, and Blind Melon in 1993. Most recently from the perspective of this episode, Christina Aguilera had appeared nude on the cover in November 2002.
In this episode, Lane’s problems finding a rehearsal space for the band are solved when Lorelai generously allows them to rehearse in her garage. Given how noisy bands can be while rehearsing, this is an extremely kind offer on Lorelai’s part.
RORY: No, or the taffy binge of ’97.
Taffy is a type of candy from the US, made by stretching or/and pulling a sticky mass of soft candy base, made of boiled sugar, butter, vegetable oil, flavorings, and colorings, until tiny bubbles form, resulting in a light, fluffy and chewy candy. The word dates to 1817, and the origin is not known. In the UK, this kind of candy is known as “chewy sweets”.
Lorelai and Rory may have binged on taffy they bought at a candy store, possibly on one of their road trips, as it is a specialty of New England. It isn’t difficult to make at home, and if they ate home made taffy, I’d think Sookie would have made it for them. This sickly binge occurred in 1997, when Rory was 12-13.
LUKE: So, how did the four dinners work out? You guys must feel more stuffed than you’ve ever been.
LORELAI: I don’t know. Is this more stuffed than the great Six Flags hot dog consumption of ’99?
Six Flags is an amusement park corporation founded in the 1960s in Arlington, Texas, and headquartered in Manhattan. It has 27 theme parks in the US, Canada, and Mexico, more than any other amusement park company, and has more than 30 million guests each year. The name Six Flags refers to the flags of the six nations which have governed Texas over the years – Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the USA, and the Confederate States of America.
The nearest Six Flags to Lorelai and Rory is Six Flags New England, in Agawam, Massachusetts. It is just north of the Connecticut border, about an hour’s drive away. They went to the theme park in 1999, possibly during the summer vacation, when Rory was nearly 15.
DEAN: This is my town, I’m not hiding. And I don’t have be remotely calm around you anymore, and I like that feeling. I like it a lot. Happy Thanksgiving, Jess.
Dean arrived in Stars Hollow only a year before Jess did, and Jess has family connections in the town, yet Dean now takes possession of the town – it’s his town, and Jess is the interloper. He warns Jess in no uncertain terms that he is not going to gracefully step aside and give Rory and Jess the space they need to form a good relationship.
I don’t think Jess did have a good Thanksgiving, really. He only saw his girlfriend for a short time, and she was too shy to give him more than a peck. When she came back, it was just to kiss him and say, “Later”. Both his girlfriend’s mother and his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend have let him know he’s been watched by them. And he gets stuck with garbage duty.
Dean’s Thanksgiving wasn’t great either. He has no girlfriend, he had to work on Thanksgiving, and may have taken the shift to avoid his family, because he either hasn’t told them about Rory yet, or doesn’t want their pity.
Rory and Lorelai have a pretty rotten Thanksgiving as well, and Sookie’s is a nightmare. Only Lane and Dave have a happy Thanksgiving in this episode, and it’s about time Lane gets a happy story line!
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 