LORELAI: I recognized you from your Christmas card. CHRISTOPHER: Which I’m sure you mocked mercilessly. LORELAI: Did not. Others, yes, but not yours. You guys were cute, and the puppy was cute.
Lorelai didn’t mock their card nearly as much as others, although she did say that Sherry looked like Tammy Faye Bakker. She so clearly doesn’t resemble Tammy Faye that I wonder if they had even cast an actress for the role at that point? Perhaps Sherry had a make-over for the photo shoot with a touch of Tammy Faye glamour to it.
The puppy is never seen or referred to again. Did they even have a puppy? Maybe they rented one for the photo shoot. Hopefully they didn’t get a puppy for Christmas and give it away in the New Year.
SOOKIE: Plus she’s been sitting for an hour and her dress is perfect. Not a wrinkle? How does she do that? LORELAI: She must be a witch.
Mädchen Amick went on to play a witch named Wendy Beaumont in the 2013 television series, The Witches of East End.
Sookie mentions to Sherry how smooth her dress looks, and Sherry says it’s the fabric. Sookie responds with scepticism, as if she’s convinced that Lorelai is right, and Sherry actually is a witch.
In this episode, we finally meet Christopher’s girlfriend, Sherry Tinsdale, that we first learned about in “Presenting Lorelai Gilmore”.
Gilmore Girls is something of a homage to the television show Twin Peaks, so it’s no surprise that Mädchen Amick had a major role in that, playing Shelly Johnson. Shelly and Sherry even sound alike.
PARIS: I was listening to the CD I burned of the cassettes I made of our mock debates against the make-believe team and I realized that you were not talking fast enough.
Presumably a meta comment about the show, which required the actors to speak their lines very quickly. Scripts were about twenty pages longer than the average hour-long series, which meant the actors had to talk faster than usual to get it all in.
The show hired a dialogue coach named George Bell to help actors adjust to the breakneck pace, just as Paris is coaching Rory to up her word per minute speed.
LORELAI: Schmitty’s over the hill, he’s washed up, put him in Cooperstown.
Cooperstown is a historic village in New York state of less than 2000 people. It is best known as the home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, which opened in 1944 on farmland which had once belonged to James Fenimore Cooper (his father William Cooper was the town’s founder). The name Cooperstown is now synonymous with the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Cooperstown once laid claim to being the birthplace of baseball, but this was universally discounted by baseball historians. Nevertheless, it is a twin town of Windsor in Canada, which lays claim to being the birthplace of ice hockey.
Mike Schmidt (“Schmitty”) did get elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, several years after his career ended.
Even though Lorelai was playing bagel hockey and choosing a goalie, she has switched metaphors as if playing baseball. This is no doubt because Scott Patterson, who plays Luke, is a former baseball player.
RORY: On the bridge, that’s where we’re gonna eat? JESS: Yup.
Jess tells Rory that they will be having sharing their picnic on the bridge over the lake, a place in Stars Hollow that he has grown fond of. Later it will become a special place for he and Rory.
The scene of them having a picnic is a homage to the 1958 Southern Gothic comedy-drama film The Long Hot Summer, directed by Martin Ritter. The screenplay is partially based on the 1955 Tennessee William’s play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and three works of William Faulkner, one of Rory’s favourite authors (she can’t resist Southern Gothic).
In the film, Paul Newman plays Ben Quick, a crude, magnetic young man with a bad reputation for burning down barns who is expelled from his town and forced to go elsewhere. Joanne Woodward plays his love interest, rich girl Clara Varner, who fights their sexual tension all the way, but eventually falls in love with him. It turns out the enigmatic drifter’s bad reputation is undeserved, and he is actually very ambitious.
The Long Hot Summer received excellent reviews from critics, but didn’t do well at the box office. Paul Newman won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival for his role as Ben. It’s been turned into a television series twice, once in the 1960s, then again in the 1980s.
This is another film with a bidding war over a picnic basket, which the masterful Ben wins, itself a homage to the auction in Oklahoma! There is a scene of Ben and Clara sharing their picnic near a bridge, similar to Jess and Rory on the bridge. In the scene, the icy Clara begins to thaw out to Ben, and reveal some of her true self. In the same way, this is the first time that Rory really begins to open up to Jess. Bridges are symbols of transition, showing that Rory and Jess are moving into a new stage of their relationship.
There is a strong hint from the film that Jess is not as black as he has been painted, and there is a foreshadowing of his hidden ambitious streak.
Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward fell for each other on set, and married shortly after the film. Alexis Bledel and Milo Ventimiglia also dated in real life while filming Gilmore Girls.
LORELAI: Oh, hey, one of them’s seen Ghostbusters 124 times.
Ghostbusters is a 1984 supernatural comedy directed by Ivan Reitman, and written by Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis. It stars Akroyd, Ramis, and Bill Murray as a trio of eccentric parapsychologists who start a ghost-catching business in New York City.
The film was released to critical acclaim, becoming a cultural phenomenon. It was the #2 film of 1984, one of the most successful comedy films of the 1980s, and the highest-grossing comedy ever at the time. It’s theme song, “Ghostbusters” by Ray Parker Jr, was also a #1 hit. It is considered to be an iconic 1980s movie, and one of the most important comedy films ever made.
With its dedicated fan following, it launched a multibillion dollar multimedia franchise, including an animated television series and its sequel, video games, board games, books, comics, clothing, music, and haunted attractions.
The 1989 sequel Ghostbusters II was less successful. It was rebooted in 2016 with an all-female main cast, and amusingly, Melissa McCarthy, who plays Sookie, was chosen as one of the stars of the film; it was a commercial failure and received mixed reviews. A second sequel to the 1984 film, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, was released in 2021.
Watching the film 124 times between 1984 and 2002 doesn’t even seem that out there – it’s less than once a month. As usual, Lorelai’s obsessions with films are seen as cool and quirky, while anyone else’s are sad and pathetic!
LORELAI: So I’ve decided I’m saving myself for William Holden … Sunset Boulevard was on last night, and I don’t know…I’ve known him for years – Sabrina, Stalag 17 – and yet last night something snapped.
William Holden, born William Beedle (1918-1981), actor who was one of the biggest box-office draws of the 1950s. Winner of an Academy Award and an Emmy for Best Actor, he starred in some of Hollywood’s most popular and highly-acclaimed films. He was named as one of the biggest stars of the year six times between 1954 and 1961, and is considered one of the greatest male stars of Classic Hollywood Cinema.
Sunset Boulevard, 1950 black comedy film noir directed by Billy Wilder, starring William Holden as a screenwriter and Gloria Swanson as a former silent film star, who draws him into her demented fantasy world where she dreams of making a triumphant return to the screen. A commercial success, the film was praised by critics and won three Academy Awards. It is regarded as one of the greatest films ever made. William Holden wears a swimsuit in the film [pictured] which has made many others interested in him – it’s not just Lorelai!
Sabrina, 1954 romantic-comedy drama directed by Billy Wilder, starring William Holden as a thrice-married playboy who is the lifelong crush of a young woman named Sabrina, played by Audrey Hepburn. She finds love with his brother, played by Humphrey Bogart. Backstage, it was Holden and Hepburn who got hot and heavy. Sabrina was a box-office success, and won an Academy Award for Best Costumes.
When Rory shows Richard her bedroom, he checks out her bookshelf. Here are some of the books we can see:
Summer of Fear
A 1993 serial killer novel by T. Jefferson Parker, who writes bestselling police procedural novels set in California. Parker is a journalist who turned novelist – perhaps a tiny hint of where Rory’s career is eventually headed.
The Scarecrow of Oz
A 1915 children’s book by L. Frank Baum, the ninth in his series of Oz books. The Wizard of Oz is a touchstone for Gilmore Girls, and this seems to be a little nod to the land of Oz. The Scarecrow from the original story is the magical helper (the one who didn’t have a brain, but was actually quite smart), and the human protagonists are a man and a little girl from California.
Contact
A 1985 science novel by scientist Carl Sagan. The heroine is a scientist named Ellie who showed a strong aptitude for science and mathematics from a young age, and has been left emotionally bereft by the loss of her father, with a problematic relationship with her mother. Contact with an alien civilisation allows Ellie a strange chance to reconnect with her memories of her father. It feels like something that would resonate with Rory. Ellie is also from California. The novel was a bestseller, and made into a film in 1997, starring Jodie Foster. The film might have given Rory an interest in reading the novel.
The Apocalyptics: Cancer and the Big Lie
Edith Efron was a journalist who began her career at the New York Times Magazine, became a member of Ayn Rand’s circle and wrote for her magazine, and then became editor of TV Guide at the height of its popularity. She was critical of what she perceived as “liberal bias in the media”, but provided a strong voice on race relations (Efron had a biracial son during 1950s segregation). She later wrote for the libertarian publication, Reason. The Apocalyptics is a 1984 exposé of the cancer industry and a criticism of environmental policy which Efron saw as being based on “bad science” (basically saying Rachel Carson etc were all a bunch of doom-merchants). It’s an obscure, controversial, and extremely heavy-going work. An intriguing insight into Rory’s interests.
Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do
A 1974 non-fiction book by oral historian and radio broadcaster Louis “Studs” Terkel. An exploration of what makes work meaningful for people, based on interviews with people from all walks of life. It was a bestseller, and turned into a Broadway musical in 1977, and a graphic novel in 2009.
A book by “Tobias Allcot”
This seems to be a fictional book which would have been created by the props department as a slightly odd joke. Tobias Allcot is the name of a Pulitzer Prize-winning author in the film The Man from Elysian Fields, directed by George Hinkenlooper; James Coburn portrays Allcot. The film wasn’t released until September 2002, but had been shown at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2001.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 