BRAD: I’m Brad. From the third period Shakespeare. LOUISE: He’s the answer to our lack of boys problem. Isn’t that swell?
This is the first time we meet Rory’s schoolmate Brad Langford, played by Adam Wylie. Although uncredited for this episode, Wylie was already an experienced actor with a lengthy CV. Brad was a gentle soul who lived in terror of Paris, and seemed to get along fairly well with Rory.
Brad is roped in to provide a male character for their group project, even though he tends to throw up from nerves when speaking in public. This leaves the role of Romeo open for Tristan.
RORY: I wonder if Grandpa’s still in Akron? LORELAI: Well for Akron’s sake, I hope he’s moved on to Boise.
Boise is the capital of Idaho, a city with a population of around 240 000. It’s more than two thousand miles from Akron, so not a natural place to “move on to” from there.
David Lynch, previously discussed, grew up in Boise. As he’s Amy Sherman-Palladino’s favourite director, I expect that’s why it rates a mention.
LORELAI: I heard [Jess] controls the weather and wrote the screenplay to Glitter.
Glitter is a 2001 romantic drama musical film directed by Vondie Curtis Hall, and starring Mariah Carey, previously discussed. The screenplay was written by Kate Lanier. The film is about a club dancer who aspires to be a professional singer, and falls in love with a nightclub DJ who helps her in her career.
The film came out on September 21, so Lorelai would have seen it in the cinema only recently. It was heavily panned by critics, with Mariah Carey’s acting efforts considered amateurish, and it failed at the box office. It has been called the worst film ever made. Even before the film was released, Mariah Carey was hospitalised with a breakdown, much later revealed to be bipolar disorder. Carey herself expressed a lot of regret over, and disappointment in, the film.
Amy Sherman-Palladino was one of the many people who hated Glitter, which is probably why it gets mentioned here as Lorelai’s joke about the “evil crimes” of Jess. Lorelai doesn’t like Jess, but even she thinks the town is going too far in their treatment of him. She has the good sense not to offer her own issues with Jess (stole beer, talked back to her, prowled around her daughter), as grist for the mill at the meeting.
LORELAI: So, Mia, how’s living in Santa Barbara? MIA: Horrible. Did you know the damn sun shines all the time out there? RORY: They’ve written songs about that.
Santa Barbara is a coastal city in California about ninety miles north of Los Angeles. Situated on the Pacific Ocean with a dry sunny Mediterranean climate, it is promoted as “The American Riviera”. Due to its geographic positioning, it has both cooler summers and warmer winters than surrounding areas, and despite what Mia says, it tends to be wetter in winter than its surrounds too, although rainfall is very variable.
It’s the sort of expensive place that wealthy people retire to, suggesting that Mia has done very well out of the hotel industry. Is it really possible she got that rich just from the Independence Inn? Surely she has other properties or investments as well? Maybe she’s a wealthy widow?
People in Stars Hollow seem to be strangely attracted to distant California. Christopher and Liz ran away to California to start new lives, Fran went on holiday there, Mia retired there. The writers live there, the show’s filmed there …
I’m not aware of any famous songs about the sunshine of Santa Barbara specifically that Rory might be thinking of, but there’s several songs about California.
In this episode, we meet Mia Halloway, the never-before-seen-or-heard-about owner of the Independence Inn, and therefore Lorelai, Sookie, and Michel’s boss. Her unannounced appearance leads to a certain amount of flustered rushing about, but Mia hasn’t come to inspect them – this is more of a social visit.
Mia is cast in the role of fairy godmother and kindly innkeeper, the woman who rescued Lorelai and Rory when they ran away from Richard and Emily’s house. It is clear that the Gilmore girls love her, and see her as a substitute mother/grandmother. They seem much closer to her than they are to Emily, their actual mother/grandmother, and feel freer in the way they express themselves and joke around. Mia conveniently faded out of the picture before Lorelai and Rory became a regular part of Emily’s life again … there would probably have been some friction otherwise.
We’re meant to see Mia as a sort of fantasy mother figure (Mama Mia!), with all the loving fun stuff, and none of the difficult painful stuff attached. The trouble is, I can’t help thinking that this is the woman who put teenaged Lorelai and her baby to live in the potting shed, when we now know they arrived in the depths of autumn, already very cold in Connecticut!
I think the issue is that the scriptwriters (including Amy Sherman-Palladino) wrote the potting shed as some quaint, adorable little wooden cottage with rosebud wallpaper and curtains at the window, and the scenery people produced … well, a pretty standard corrugated metal garden shed, not possible to put wallpaper on, and obviously utterly freezing in winter, particularly at night (and very hot in summer).
It seems more like something the wicked stepmother would have come up with for Cinderella, not the fairy godmother. Another issue is that Gilmore Girls appears to be set in a fantasy TV Connecticut where it never gets any colder than southern California.
We only learn that Mia’s surname is Halloway from the credits. Given the time of year Lorelai and Rory first arrived in Stars Hollow, the connection with Halloween is made very clear, as if Mia herself is the embodiment of supernatural forces bringing them to their correct destination.
A fun connection is that actress Elizabeth Franz was born in Akron, Ohio, the same place Richard Gilmore is sent to for work in this episode.
The episode ends with Rory back in the dining hall at Chilton, peacefully reading and listening to her Walkman. She hasn’t been made to socialise after all, and the headmaster has been forced to back down and realise that Gilmore girls have to follow their own rules.
Another girl asks if she can sit with Rory, and she takes her own book out and starts reading in silence. Rory smiles at this confirmation she is not the only person at Chilton who likes to read at lunchtime, and now she isn’t a weird loner any more. She has a lunch friend, just as Mrs Verdinas insisted she find.
According to the credits, this girl is named Lisa. She’s played by Connecticut actress Madeline Zima, who already had quite a lengthy CV at this stage, and was most famous for playing Grace Sheffield in The Nanny.
Lisa was one of the other girls who was going to be inducted by the Puffs at the same time as Rory and Paris, although she is never introduced to the viewer and never speaks to Rory that we see (they might have spoken off-screen). She is the girl wearing blue and yellow checked pyjama pants with a grey tee shirt and a blue cardigan.
Possibly Lisa was also told to find some friends, rather than sit and read at lunchtime – although if so, couldn’t Headmaster Charleston or Mrs Verdinas have simply introduced Rory and Lisa to each other, suggesting that they have something in common? You know, like a normal school? Lisa was never shown eating lunch with the Puffs, so presumably she was recruited some other way, or that occurred after Rory and Paris joined the table, and was therefore offscreen.
Do not expect to ever see Lisa again, or hear her mentioned. Did she and Rory ever speak to each other and become real friends? Did they show each other the books they were reading? Did they have anything else in common? These questions are never answered.
In an episode that doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, it finishes with a character that remains an enigma.
EDIT: This article was heavily edited with the kind assistance of Sarah M, who was able to identify Lisa as one of the girls at the Puffs induction ceremony, something I was unable to do.
PARIS: So, that’s how you look when you’ve just woken up? RORY: Um, yeah. PARIS: Nothing in my life is fair.
Of course, the viewer knows that this isn’t how Rory looks when she first wakes up. Lorelai warned her the Puffs would be coming over, and told her to put on cute pyjamas, brush her hair, and wear lip gloss. Instead of going to bed, she stays up reading, then quickly jumps into bed when she hears the Puffs at the door, so she hasn’t even been asleep, let alone woken up.
Liza Weil is attractive, so they had to work quite hard to make her look frumpy for these scenes, including putting on a skin treatment which she obviously didn’t need. She still ends up looking pretty cute.
RORY: Lorelai Gilmore. Nope, doesn’t sound model-y enough. You need something that stands out more. How about Waffle? We could call you Waffle and say you’re from Belgium?
Rory is referring to the way many models have unusual or exotic-sounding names, sometimes the one they were given at birth, and sometimes self-chosen. (Alexis Bledel began her career as a model, so presumably would know of many examples).
Waffle is from Belgium because they are famous for this foodstuff. American love “Belgian waffles”, which were introduced to North America in 1962, and popularised in 1964 at the New York World’s Fair – a variant of the Brussels waffle, served with strawberries and whipped cream (the Belgian cook who brought them over didn’t think North Americans would recognise Brussels as the name of a Belgian city).
There are several different types of waffle in Belgium, and none of them are called Belgian waffle. They tend to be larger and lighter than Belgian waffles in North America, with larger squares and a deeper grid pattern. Unlike in North America, they are not served as a breakfast food, but more often as a dessert or afternoon snack with coffee. [picture is the American version of Belgian waffles].
Shecky Greene (born Fred Sheldon Greenfield in 1926) is an American comedian, known for his headline performances in Las Vegas during the 1950s and ’60s. He also appeared in films and on TV, and made appearances at Carnegie Hall and on The Ed Sullivan Show.
Amy Sherman-Palladino became a fan of classic Jewish comedians as a young teenager from listening to her father’s old records. How Lorelai has also gained such knowledge of them is left to the viewer’s imagination.
RORY: Wow, this place is huge. Do I have to walk down those stairs?
The scenes at the ballroom for the debutante ball were filmed at the Wilshire Ebell Women’s Club in Los Angeles; the same filming location was used for the Chilton dance Rory and Dean attended.
In the show, it is clearly meant to be a separate venue from the ballroom in Season 1, as Rory has never been there before.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 