Footnotes to the TV series
BABETTE: Morey hates being the first anywhere. He thinks it hurts his street credibility.
MOREY: Charlie Parker was late to everything.
BABETTE: Charlie Parker had more drugs in him than a Rite-Aid.
Charlie Parker, previously discussed [pictured].
Rite-Aid is a chain of pharmacies or drugstores, founded in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1962 as the Thrift D Discount Center, changing its name in 1968. They have numerous stores in Connecticut, and other US states.
LUKE: You running around with that kid.
LORELAI: I wasn’t running, he’s not a kid. We had dinner. You say Chuck E. Cheese, I’ll break your nose.
Chuck E. Cheese is a family restaurant chain specialising in pizza and entertainment such as arcade games and animatronic stage shows, founded in 1977 by a co-founder of Atari. The first restaurant opened in San Jose, California, and the mascot is a rat named Chuck E. Cheese. They are popular places to hold children’s parties.
SOOKIE: A Musso Lussino 480!
LORELAI: Somebody sent me a Fascist ice cream maker?
The episode begins with Lorelai receiving a mysterious late wedding gift from someone who apparently doesn’t know her wedding with Max was cancelled. When Sookie and Rory persuade her to open it (in case there’s a card inside), it turns out to be a Lello Musso Lussino 480 ice cream maker.
This is a top-shelf ice cream maker, made in Italy, producing restaurant-quality ice cream in half an hour for the domestic market. It’s extremely expensive, costing almost $1000 today. Lorelai jokes that it’s a Fascist ice-cream maker, because its name sounds slightly like Mussolini, and of course Lorelai has to refer to it as Il Duce.
We never discover who sent Lorelai the ice cream maker. It seems reasonable to guess that it was Emily, trying to give Lorelai her gift anonymously. It’s certainly the kind of expensive gift she would pick out, and it’s thoughtful, because this ice cream maker is quick and easy to use – she knows Lorelai and Rory are not at home in the kitchen. It seems telling that just after she told Lorelai about the wedding gift she chose, refusing to say what it was, she asked them if they wanted ice cream.
MIA: You marched up to me, looked me right in the eye and said, ‘I’m here for a job. Any job.’
LORELAI: Well, IBM had turned me down for the CEO slot, so I was desperate.
IBM is an acronym for the International Business Machines Corporation, a tech company headquartered in Armonk, New York, founded in 1911 by businessman Charles Ranlett Flint as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, receiving its current name in 1924. It is nicknamed Big Blue.
One of the largest companies in the world, IBM produces and sells computer hardware and software, and provides hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. It’s also a major research organisation, which has invented such things as the automatic teller machine, the floppy disc, the hard drive, magnetic stripe cards, and barcodes. IBM employees have been awarded five Nobel Prizes, six Turing Awards, ten National Medals of Technology, and five National Medals of Science.
When Lorelai was job-hunting in 1986, the CEO of IBM was John Fellows Akers (1934-2014), a Yale alumnus who had only been in the role a year. In 2001, the CEO of IBM was businessman Lou Gertsner (born 1942), who took the role in 1993. He is largely credited with turning the company’s fortunes around, and was the first to be hired from outside the company.
SOOKIE: ‘Fran’s Old Place’! It’ll be like Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. People will be trying to figure out who Fran is.
Ruth’s Chris Steak House is a chain of over one hundred upscale steakhouses across the United States, Canada and Mexico. The original Chris Steakhouse was founded in New Orleans in 1927 by Chris Matulich. It was purchased in 1965 by divorced single mother Ruth Fertel, who needed money to send her sons to college.
The name was changed to Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse in 1976 after a fire forced Fertel to move the restaurant to a new property. It allowed her to to keep some continuity, as she was legally not able to use the name Chris Steakhouse for any other locations than the original restaurant. Fertel admitted she always hated the name.
Note the similarities between Ruth and Lorelai – both struggling single mothers who need money for their children’s education. Both will even suffer the setback of a fire!
AVA: Aubrey here works at Saks.
AUBREY: Uh, used to work at Saks.
Saks Fifth Avenue is a luxury department store chain which originated in Washington DC in 1827, and is now headquartered in New York. The closest store to Hartford is in Greenwich, Connecticut, about 90 minutes drive away [pictured].
Aubrey is quick to correct the assumption that she is still working after being married for a month, which would imply her husband couldn’t support her financially. Unlike Lorelai, the Booster Club mothers don’t have to work, underlining that it is much more of a sacrifice for Lorelai to participate.
[they walk out onto the patio, where a chef is cooking on the grill]
RORY: Hey, cool!
LORELAI: What’s up, Poppin’ Fresh?
Poppin’ Fresh, otherwise known as the Pillsbury Doughboy, is an advertising mascot for the Pillsbury Company’s refrigerated dough product line, created in 1965. His slogan is, “Say hello to poppin’ fresh dough!”. He’s a boy made of dough who wears a chef’s hat, hence Lorelai’s greeting to the chef.
Rory listens to music on her Walkman while she reads, a brand of portable media player made by Sony since 1979 (originally it played cassettes). A prestige model was released in 1999 for the anniversary of its release. The name Walkman is now often used to refer to any similar product, just like Kleenex.
LIBBY: You know, they say four out of five debs marry their escorts.
RORY: Kind of like the dentists with Trident.
Trident is a brand of sugar-free chewing gum. For many years it was advertised with the slogan, “Four out of five dentists surveyed recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum.” This is believed to have been based on a survey of practising dentists in the early 1960s, the results of which were approximately 80% in favour of sugarless gum.
In real life, it’s not true that 80% of debutantes marry their escorts. That’s preposterous, especially as most debutantes are matched up with some random guy. I’m not sure whether it’s meant to show Libby is a gullible fool, or whether the show actually expects us to believe this nonsense.
EMILY: Cotton tablecloths, folding chairs. It’s not supposed to be like this. In my day, people sat in real chairs … I wanted my granddaughter to be presented to society in a beautiful elegant ballroom, not a Shakey’s.
Shakey’s Pizza is a restaurant chain founded in 1954 which was extremely popular by the 1970s, but went into a decline during the 1990s. They are based in California, with restaurants on the west coast and overseas, and I find it hard to believe the genteel Emily has even heard of Shakey’s, let alone bandies its name about so casually.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 