“You can’t let Rory have even one piece of our lives”

EMILY: You can’t even let Rory have one piece of our lives, even if it’s her choice. You hate us that much.

[Lorelai doesn’t respond. Emily walks back into the house]

Emily and Richard see Rory every Friday evening for dinner, and pay for Rory to attend a private school that’s close enough to their home for Rory to visit after school if she wants to. Rory has her own bedroom at Richard and Emily’s, and they threw her a lavish party for her sixteenth birthday. They have given her generous gifts, and Rory played golf with her grandfather one weekend, while going to a debutante ball at her grandmother’s request.

Granted, this all happened in the last two years – before that, they only saw Rory a few times a year. Also granted, Lorelai has been fairly reluctant about most of this contact, and has often submitted to it with bad grace. However, I don’t think it’s fair for Emily to say that Lorelai hasn’t let Rory share even one piece of her grandparents’ lives. They have regular contact, and Rory is actually quite close to Richard and Emily.

Lorelai’s flair for over-dramatising her problems clearly comes from Emily.

Lorelai Throws a Tantrum

It’s very hard to defend Lorelai in this episode. Although she was clearly blindsided by the news about Rory applying to Yale, and it must have stung to find this out along with strangers and bare acquaintances, she behaves horribly by throwing a very public tantrum at her parents’ dinner table in front of guests – and at Thanksgiving, no less.

She’s thirty-four, but once again, behaves like a petulant teenager, and also tosses around some false accusations that Rory has somehow been brainwashed into applying to Yale. This comes across as paranoid, and is pretty insulting to her daughter – she’s eighteen, and capable of making her own decisions.

“Where else did you apply?”

LORELAI: Where else did you apply? ….

RORY: Princeton . . . um, Yale.

LORELAI: Yale?

In the early 2000s, it was free to apply to up to three colleges, but after that you had to pay a small application fee for each one. Because of this, it was common to only make three applications, and it looks as if Rory applied to three universities: Harvard, Princeton (where her paternal grandfather went), and Yale (where her maternal grandfather went). She probably didn’t want to ask Lorelai for the money for further applications, knowing that she’d be upset about it, nor did she want to go behind her mother’s back and ask her grandparents for the money.

Lorelai acts as if applying to Yale is a complete shock, even though she knows Rory had an interview there, and she herself read a brochure about it, as if she was trying to get used to the idea. Apparently she needed a lot more time for it to sink in.

“You can’t just apply to one place”

DOUGLAS: You can’t just apply to one place.

NATALIE: Chilton wouldn’t allow that.

LORELAI: Is that true?

RORY: Pretty much.

Chilton would certainly not permit Rory to only apply to Harvard. It is staggering that Lorelai wouldn’t already know this – she did attend a private school, even if she never ended up applying to university. And even if she somehow didn’t know this from her school or her parents (surely Richard and Emily would have talked to her about college?), it’s something which she should have educated herself about if she wanted to help Rory get into Harvard.

It also seems very telling that Rory has never talked this over with Lorelai, but kept her college applications a secret from her mother. It seems that she was so nervous about how Lorelai would react that she never discussed it with her. Lorelai’s overreaction at dinner shows that she was right to be wary about it, but then again, Lorelai probably wouldn’t have overreacted so badly in public if Rory had talked about it with her first.

Orlando

CLAUDE: I have a grandson who lives with his mother in Orlando, you know, he’s going through a very similar thing, poor boy.

EMILY: How do they like Orlando, Claude?

CLAUDE: Well, it’s all Mickey Mouse this and Mickey Mouse that, you know. They want to die.

Orlando, Florida, previously discussed. Claude refers to the fact that Walt Disney World is in the city, which apparently ruins it for Claude’s family (surely they knew this before they moved there?).

Because Claude says my grandson, rather than ours, I assume Monique is his second wife. I’m also assuming that his grandson’s mother is Claude’s daughter-in-law or former daughter-in-law, rather than his daughter, because otherwise he would say so. And I’m further assuming that Claude’s son is separated or divorced, because he doesn’t mention him as also living in Florida.

Lots of assumptions! But it’s letting us fill in quite a bit of back story for ourselves. We might also note that Claude is not spending Thanksgiving with his grandson, and never has – he says he has only seen Thanksgiving in American movies.

Stanford

DOUGLAS: We have a grandson your age, he’s going through hell.

NATALIE: He’s already been turned down for early admission to Stanford, his dream.

Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California, in the San Francisco Bay area, ranked among the top universities in the world. It was founded in 1885 by US Senator and former governor of California Leland Stanford and his wife Jane, in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr, and opened in 1891 as a coeducational institution.

After World War II, the university’s provost, Frederick Terman, supported faculty and graduates to build a self-sufficient local industry that would later become known as Silicon Valley. It also houses the conservative public policy think tank, the Hoover Institution, one of the most influential of its kind in the world.

85 Nobel laureates, 29 Turing Award laureates, and eight Fields Medallists have been affiliated with Stanford as students, alumni, faculty, or staff. Stanford alumni have founded numerous companies, which combined produce more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue and have created 5.4 million jobs as of 2011, roughly equivalent to the seventh largest economy in the world.

Stanford has won more College Athletics team championships than any other university, and Stanford students and alumni have won almost 300 Olympic medals.

Stanford is the alma mater of US President Herbert Hoover, 74 living billionaires, and 17 astronauts. Its alumni include the current presidents of Yale and MIT and the provosts of Harvard and Princeton. It is also one of the leading producers of Fulbright Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Rhodes Scholars, and members of the United States Congress.

Stanford is one of the hardest universities to get into, with an acceptance rate of less than 5% – that’s tougher than both Harvard and Yale, and indeed, all the Ivy League universities. It’s perfectly believable that Douglas and Natalie’s grandson didn’t get accepted.

In real life, the deadline for early admission to Stanford is November 1, and notifications aren’t sent out until mid-December, so Douglas and Natalie’s grandson couldn’t really know he’d been turned down by Thanksgiving. (Although, if it is just before Christmas, according to the show’s actual timeline, this would make sense!).