Footnotes to the TV series
LORELAI: Really, the couch is comfortable, and there’s pillows and blankets, and the bathroom’s through there.
Apparently the couch on the set of Gilmore Girls was very uncomfortable. So although the fictional couch was wonderful to sleep on and Max Medina had a good night’s sleep, in real life Scott Cohen would have woken up very stiff and sore if he’d slept on the set all night.
Rory, Richard and Emily look at photos. Among them is one of Emily’s younger sister “Hopie”, presumably a pet name for Hope. She lives in Paris, so Rory has never met her; what she does in Paris remains a mystery. She is described as the family’s “great expatriate”, although we later find Richard mother lives in London.
Hopie is never mentioned again; even though Richard and Emily travel to Europe later, and so does Emily and Rory, nobody ever talks about visiting Hopie. The photo of Hopie shown is Kelly Bishop, who plays Emily.
LORELAI: Wait, close your eyes and breathe. [Rory does] I smell snow … Can’t you smell it?
RORY: You know, it’s like dogs and high-pitched noises. I think it’s something only you can smell.
In fact plenty of people can “smell” snow coming, so Lorelai is by no means unusual. Most scientists believe that we can’t literally smell snow as cold weakens our sense of smell, but interpret changes in air pressure etc as an odour. Others think maybe some people can actually smell the unique chemical composition of snow. Either way, Lorelai can definitely sense the approach of snow.
This is when we first learn of Lorelai’s life-long love of snow. Of course in reality it’s always fake snow as they are filming in California.
This is the first episode in which we see a town meeting, and we learn that they are held on Thursday nights (somehow Lorelai gets back from business class in time for the meetings). We also discover that they are held in Miss Patty’s dance studio rather than a town hall, and never find out why, but can assume it’s for some suitably eccentric and quirky reason.
In real life, even a much smaller town than Stars Hollow would have a town hall. Washington Depot, the original inspiration for Stars Hollow, is about a third the size and still has its own town hall. The practical reason not to have a town hall on the show is that it would mean building a new set for it that would be rarely used. A town hall would also require a much larger cast to fill it to capacity.
LORELAI: Okay, let’s get back to the point. What do you think about the whole Liz/Lucky kissing thing?
RORY: I think they’re actors being paid to play a part so it’s nice that they’re living up to their obligations.
A sly meta-comment – a reminder Alexis Bledel and Jared Padalecki are paid actors, and their kissing scenes in this episode are something they are contractually obliged to do.
Early in the episode it becomes apparent that the town of Stars Hollow is about to celebrate its annual Autumn Festival. This is the first major celebration we see in the town, and like the other town festivals, it demonstrates the change of seasons and the turn of the year, just as the Friday Night Dinners wrap up each week for the Gilmores.
The flow of time is one of the primary themes of Gilmore Girls – take notice of how often clocks, watches, calendars, running late, and being short of time are mentioned. Already Rory has had a late acceptance to Chilton, Lorelai has woken up late for Rory’s first day at school, Rory has missed an important test because she arrived too late, Lorelai has fumbled her first date with Max because of time management problems, and missed a relative’s funeral because of the day of the week, and Jackson has felt a shift in the spacetime continuum (suggesting that time in the show is cosmic in its scale).
It is not possible to tell from this episode when the Autumn Festival is held: just that it is in November before Thanksgiving. However in A Year in the Life, it is confirmed that the Autumn Festival is the first weekend in November. We can feel fairly confident that the main events of the episode occur around that time.
(The pumpkins used to decorate the set for the Autumn Festival scenes ended up rotting and emitting a putrid smell. After that, fake pumpkins were used for any autumnal celebrations in Gilmore Girls).
The adult guests at Rory’s birthday party swap stories of Rory as a child. Babette and Morey remember her thinking a toadstool ring was a fairy ring, and waiting for the fairy to arrive. Lorelai says that Rory was “about ten” at the time, but later we learn that Lorelai and Rory didn’t move next door to Babette and Morey until Rory was eleven.
Although eleven is about ten, it’s pretty old to still believe in fairies. This charmingly naive fairy-lover is hard to tally with the intellectually precocious child-Rory we keep hearing about, but does show that the brainy Rory has an imaginative side.
We also learn that Rory took ballet lessons from Miss Patty, and that although she worked hard at her dancing, she wasn’t very good. Only Miss Patty seems to think she had any talent and is disappointed that she stopped. This reminds us of Amy Sherman-Palladino, who trained in ballet. Unlike Rory, she could have turned professional, and Miss Patty’s sadness is a parallel to Amy’s mother’s disappointment when she decided to pursue writing rather than ballet as a career.
LORELAI: And while some have called it [giving birth] the most meaningful experience of your life, to me it was something more akin to doing the splits on a crate of dynamite.
RORY: I wonder if the Waltons ever did this.
The Waltons (1972-1981) was a wholesome family drama TV series about the Walton family in rural Virginia, and their experiences living through the Great Depression and World War II. It was based on the film Spencer’s Mountain, from a novel of the same name by Earl Hamner Jr., who would go on to be an executive producer on the TV series. Extremely popular, the Waltons won several Emmy Awards.
The Waltons had a couple of things in common with Gilmore Girls. Both shows were set in small towns with quirky townsfolk, and the protagonist of The Waltons, John-Boy Walton (based on Earl Hamner Jr.) went to university in a nearby town and became a journalist, just like Rory Gilmore. Both shows were filmed at Warner Brothers studio, and the set for the Waltons’ house was used for The Dragonfly inn in Gilmore Girls.
EMILY: Well good. I’ll meet you at Damien’s tomorrow at three o’clock.
A fictional department store, perhaps an equivalent to the real life Filene’s department store in Hartford (originally G. Fox and Co.), which was sold to Macy’s in 2006. The scenes in Damien’s were filmed at the Burbank Town Center shopping mall in Burbank, California.
This song plays during the scene when Dean apologises to Rory for annoying her, and she tells him that she is interested in him, before running off. It was a single from the 1998 album Jubilee by American rock band Grant Lee Buffalo, and reached #11 on the alternative music charts. The song was written by Grant-Lee Phillips, who went on to have a solo career, and played the town troubadour in Gilmore Girls. He isn’t related to Sam Phillips, who wrote the score for the show.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 