KIRK: So it’s back to the desert for the Minutemen, perhaps for another forty years. Of course, by then, I’ll be seventy years old. A lot of the rest of you will probably be dead. Taylor, you’ll be dead. Babette, Miss Patty . . . that man there in the hat.
From this we learn that Kirk is thirty years old, and born in either 1972 or 1973, depending on whether he has already had his birthday for 2003, or will be turning 31 later in the year. Sean Gunn who plays Kirk was born in 1974.
Kirk’s prediction that many of the older people of Stars Hollow will probably by dead in forty years seems like a slight echo of the story of the Israelites, where an entire generation had to pass away before they could reach the Promised Land.
LORELAI: Most of us had first boyfriends like Brian Hutchins … Seventh grade, I’m sitting in the library, walks up, asks me to go steady. I say yes. He walks away and I don’t see him again until the tenth grade when he tries to sell me a dimebag at the Sadie Hawkins Day dance. And he was way overcharging for it, too.
In North America, a Sadie Hawkins Day Dance is one held, usually by schools and colleges, where girls invite boys, rather than the usual convention of boys inviting girls to a dance.
It comes from Sadie Hawkins Day in the Li’l Abner comic strip by Al Capp, an unspecified day in November when unmarried women could chase bachelors, and marry the one they caught. First introduced in a strip in 1937, by 1939 there had been Sadie Hawkins events held at over 200 colleges.
A dimebag is a small bag containing $10 worth (usually 1 gram) of marijuana. Lorelai’s forgetful admirer seems to have either charged more than $10 for it, or put very little product in the bag. Although Lorelai didn’t buy the marijuana from Brian, she knew enough about buying drugs to know he was trying to rip her off, suggesting some level of familiarity with the subject.
TAYLOR: My dear, do you realize that this is the first time we’ve been in the regional semifinals in forty-three years?
The Stars Hollow High School hockey team were last in the semifinals in 1960, when Taylor was the goalkeeper for the team. Supposing that Taylor was about seventeen when he was on the high school team, he is now aged around sixty years old, and born in 1943. Michael Winters, who portrays Taylor, was born in 1945.
LANE: At 3:40, my mom will be on her way to the yarn store for her bimonthly sew-a-thon with Lacey Schwartz and Bich Ho. DAVE: The yarn store’s on Peach. LANE: Plum. DAVE: That cuts us off from our usual route to the interstate. LANE: There’s a back road that circles around it, but it’s gonna be muddy from the rains. DAVE: How about I have the guys take the usual route, I’ll go by foot on Peach, down the alley behind Al’s, over the fence, and they can pick me up a half a mile down by the Shell station. LANE: Perfect. Uh, what, that’s not complicated.
Lane and Dave have come up with some ingenious plan to avoid seeing Mrs Kim, so that she doesn’t realise Dave is in (gasp) a band. And even worse, that Lane is too. Lane confessed her feelings about Dave to her mother at the family wedding, and we don’t know any more since then. Presumably Mrs Kim is still unable to move on from Dave not being Korean.
We learn a little bit of back story during this scene. Mrs Kim’s life apparently doesn’t revolve entirely around work, church, and family – she also attends a sewing circle (?) once a fortnight at the local yarn store with two women named Lacey Schwartz and Bich Ho (Ho is a common Vietnamese surname, and Bich is a Vietnamese girl’s name meaning “jade”).
The yarn store is on Plum Street, one street over from Peach Street, which is where Dean and his family live. Lorelai described this area to Jess as a desirable residential neighbourhood, so it’s slightly surprising to learn it has shops around it as well – and also leads to the alley behind Al’s, which is always implied to be in the centre of town. Maybe Peach is a very long street? Incidentally, I wonder if this alley is the one Lorelai and Rory were shown walking down in “The Break Up, Part 2”?
Unlike Henry, Dave readily fits in with all of Lane’s zany schemes to keep secrets from her mother, and even comes up with own solutions. They are clearly made for each other.
RORY: The woman taught me everything I’ve already forgotten about dancing, baton twirling and gymnastics.
We learned in “Rory’s Birthday Parties” that Miss Patty is Rory’s former ballet teacher. Apparently she also learned gymnastics and baton twirling from her. Rory is physically awkward and slightly clumsy – I can’t imagine she did well in any of these classes. It’s also amazing she managed to learn ballet and gymnastics, and still be that physically awkward!
The episode ends with a close up of the painting that holds pride of place in the Gilmore mansion – a family portrait over the mantlepiece. It is a young Lorelai with her parents, aged perhaps twelve or so, and it is a picture of the Gilmores before Lorelai became a rebellious teenager, and before their family was torn apart in circumstances that have never quite healed. It is a very poignant moment.
In the final flashback, we see Emily and Richard coming downstairs, ready to go out. Emily comments that for the first time in a year, she hasn’t tripped over Rory’s baby stroller, which Lorelai never puts away. Emily finds a note on the hall table and begins to cry – it is obviously the note that Lorelai wrote when she left home, taking Rory with her.
It’s interesting to speculate as to where this flashback comes from. It can’t be Lorelai’s memory, because she never saw this happen. Is it Emily’s memory? Or is it Lorelai’s imagining what must have happened, based on what she knows? Or is it somehow an objective picture from the past of that moment?
The seven flashbacks in this episode encapsulate the central conflict in Gilmore Girls – that Lorelai got pregnant as a teenager, and then left home with her baby, leaving only a note.
It seems clear during the episode that Lorelai, through Sherry’s birthing of Georgia, gets to relive and re-examine some of her past behaviour and choices. We get to see that Richard and Emily may not have been perfect parents, but they are by no means monsters who deserved to be abandoned and shunned by their daughter.
Emily was a staunch advocate for Lorelai when she discovered she was pregnant, and stood up for her against the cruel insults of Christopher’s parents. Richard and Emily never rejected Lorelai, or kicked her out. She still had a home with them, and they continued supporting her and baby Rory.
Obviously Lorelai was very unhappy, and wanted to make a life for herself, but in retrospect, some of her decisions seem cruel – I think even to herself. She left for the hospital to give birth by herself, not allowing her parents any role in that, and she left home the same way, leaving only a note.
We already know that Emily was so devastated by Lorelai’s leaving that she was confined to bed for a month, and much of the coldness and harshness that we see from Emily and Richard in the present stem from this rejection by their daughter, which they have never really got over.
I think Lorelai’s generous and thoughtful gift of the DVD player and nine musicals on DVD that are a combination of Emily’s favourites and hers is her way of trying to … not to erase the past, but to make a kind gesture to her mother and to try to connect with her by sharing something they both enjoy, in recognition that Emily’s life is far lonelier than Lorelai’s.
In the hospital, Lorelai shows Christopher his daughter Rory, who is a newborn in the nursery – a clear parallel with Christopher showing her Georgia in 2003. Christopher says that Rory is “pretty”, which Lorelai firmly corrects to “perfect”, in parallel to Christopher saying Georgia is perfect in the present day scene, with Lorelai saying she is “beautiful”, but a “solid second” to Rory.
Although slightly insulting, Georgia literally is Christopher’s second daughter after Rory – it’s as if Lorelai is keen to remind Christopher that Rory comes first.
We already know that Christopher proposed marriage to Lorelai, and she turned it down – a point of conflict between she and her parents, and something Christopher continued to feel aggrieved about well int adulthood. In this flashback, we actually see the proposal. Christopher uncertainly says, “So, I guess we should get married”, and then the scene ends.
We never see Lorelai turn this half-hearted non-proposal down, but can understand why she does so. It’s hardly the stuff of romance, and it’s clear that Christopher doesn’t really want to, and isn’t committed to the idea. Richard’s plan of Lorelai and Christopher marrying and living with the elder Gilmores comes to nothing.
Apparently Christopher was only going to be given a job at Richard’s company once he was married, as that never happens either. Richard feels resentful about his “plan” not working out, and continues to blame Lorelai for that right up to the present day.
We see a nurse wheeling Lorelai into the delivery room to give birth, when Emily and Richard arrive. Emily is furious that Lorelai simply left for the hospital (in a taxi?), leaving a note reading: “Dear Mom and Dad, I’m in labor. See you later, Lorelai”. Richard is only annoyed that he is wearing the “wrong shoes” for the occasion, which are apparently uncomfortable.
Emily begins scolding Lorelai, even as she is being wheeled into the delivery room, for not asking them for a lift to the hospital. Lorelai receives no comfort, no support, not even a kind word from her parents as she prepares to give birth.
The contrast with Sherry is clear – Sherry is a woman in her thirties, accompanied into the delivery room by Christopher, her fiancé and the father of her baby. She also has Lorelai and Rory to give support, waiting outside. Lorelai was a sixteen-year-old girl who got herself to hospital and gave birth alone, without Christopher, and with two angry and uncomfortable parents waiting for her.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 