Footnotes to the TV series
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.
RORY: I’m just saying I’m no stranger to the Big Apple.
JESS: You are if you’re calling it the Big Apple.
The Big Apple is a nickname for New York City, first popularised in the 1920s by John FitzGerald, a sports writer for The New York Morning Telegraph. Its popularity since the 1970s is mostly due to a promotional campaign by the city’s tourism authorities to boost the city during a fiscal crisis.
Although Rory says she’s been to New York a few times, she only mentions The Bangles concert in 2001 and a 2000 shopping trip where she didn’t even get out of the car. This could very well be her third trip to New York (and the second where her feet touched the ground!).
LORELAI (referring to the double twin wedding): It’s like a really snooty Doublemint commercial.
Doublemint is a peppermint-flavoured chewing gum made by Wrigley. For a long time, their advertising used identical twin sisters as models in their advertisements. The longest-running Doublemint Twins were Linda Ryan Puffer and Lisa Winters Cox, who appeared in six commercials together between 1985 and 1995.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 