RORY: She’s [Sherry’s] very up on traffic flow and rush hour and all that.
LORELAI: She’s Rand McNally.
Rand McNally, publishing and technology company that provides mapping for both electronic gadgets, and for educational purposes, well known for producing school atlases and road maps. William Rand opened a printing shop in Chicago in 1956, and two years later hired Irish immigrant Andrew McNally; the two men founded Rand McNally & Co in 1868. The first Rand McNally map appeared in a 1872 railway guide, and their first road map was published in 1904.
Lorelai and Rory left Boston at 6 pm, on Sherry’s advice. That means it would be around 8 pm when they get back to Stars Hollow and egg Jess’ car.
JESS: I’ve been working there twelve hours a week for the past few months to get extra money for the car.
Walmart, previously discussed. There is a large Walmart Supercenter in Hartford, which might be where Jess has been working [pictured]. How he’s been getting there without a car for months is a mystery – if he was taking the bus back and forth, you’d think his path would have crossed with Rory’s at some point, or someone would have noticed him at the bus stop. Perhaps he’s been getting a lift with someone.
Luke really isn’t taking enough notice of Jess as a guardian. Jess has been working out of town for months, either getting lifts or catching the bus, and done a course in order to get certification to drive a forklift. Jess’ dedication and work ethic is commendable – Luke’s lack of interest in his life isn’t. What if Jess had been doing something dangerous or illegal all these months?
When Luke asks Jess what his Walmart discount is, he responds with 15%. In real life it is 10%.
It’s been shown several times over that Jess is Lorelai in teenage boy form, and here is another parallel between them – like Lorelai, Jess is beginning his working life while still in his teens, and isn’t afraid to work hard in a blue collar job to pay the bills, just as she did.
RABBI BARANS: Is the whole shellfish thing really serious? Because, I gotta tell you, some of these Red Lobster commercials . . .
Red Lobster is a chain of casual dining restaurants headquartered in Orlando, Florida. They have more than 700 locations worldwide. It first opened in Lakelands, Florida in 1968, and specialises in seafood, including lobster, crab, fish, molluscs, and shrimp.
The rabbi jokingly refers to the fact that shellfish are not kosher, and therefore forbidden in Judaism.
LORELAI: Uh, well, I guess, I could water your lawn, Dwight – sure.
DWIGHT: Boy, that is something. If I would have asked somebody back where I used to live to water my lawn, I would’ve gotten a much more HBO kind of answer.
Home Box Office (HBO), a pay television channel, owned by Warner Bros. Discovery (Gilmore Girls was on the Warner Bros. TV channel, the WB). First launched in 1972, it was the first pay TV network in the US, and the first in the world to begin transmitting via satellite.
HBO, as a channel available to subscribers, was able to broadcast programs without having to edit them to remove adult or objectionable material, and its sister channel Cinemax even broadcast softcore pornography until 2018. Dwight is saying that he would have received a much more adult-oriented answer in his previous neighbourhood (presumably in a city) if he asked someone to water his lawn for a few days.
Lorelai has always been shown to be pretty good at shutting down anyone who asks her to do anything for them she doesn’t want to, yet somehow, she is unable to resist Dwight’s plea. I guess she doesn’t want to get on the bad side of a new neighbour, or she doesn’t want him to think Stars Hollow isn’t a nice place, when he seems so excited to have moved there. Possibly her fight with Pete, which she later learned she’d been unreasonable about, has taken up all her energy. Or Dwight just has some mystical power over her. Maybe the same mind control that he used to get Beenie Morrison’s house!
EMILY: We have a couple of wonderful writing desks, and some French end tables, rocking chairs, picture frames, lamps, davenports.
Originally, davenport was the name given to sofas made by the furniture makers A.H. Davenport and Company, from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It sold luxury furniture through its showrooms in Boston and New York City in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and made furniture for the White House. They ceased business in 1974.
The word is now used for a rather confusing number of sofa types in the US. It may mean a boxy formal upholstered sofa, like the ones originally made by Davenport, or a sofa which converts into a bed, or a futon-style sofa with storage underneath it, or just a generic word for a large high-end sofa. I’m not actually sure in which sense Emily is using it, but I think either the first or the last is the most likely.
As an extra layer of confusion, a davenport is also a 19th century English word for a small writing desk, but as Emily already mentions writing desks as separate possibilities, I think this one can safely be ruled out.
LUKE: Sure, it’s been taken over by the J. Crew catalog.
[Several families with little kids are seated at the tables]
J. Crew Group Inc is a clothing retailer founded in 1947 by Mitchell Cinader and Saul Charles as Popular Merchandise Inc. They did business as Popular Club Plan, selling low-cost women’s clothing through in-home demonstrations. In 1983, the name was changed to J. Crew, and during the 1980s and 1990s, sales soared through their mail order catalogues, focusing on preppy leisurewear for the Ralph Lauren market, but at a much cheaper price. The catalogues didn’t just sell clothes, but an entire East Coast lifestyle that was affluent, yet fun and unpretentious.
LORELAI: No one asked for the Norton Critical Edition.
W.W. Norton & Company is a publishing company based in New York City. Established in 1923, it has been owned wholly by its employees since the early 1960s. The company is known for its Norton Anthologies (particularly The Norton Anthology of English Literature) and its texts in the Norton Critical Editions series, both of which are frequently assigned in university literature courses.
Norton Critical Editions provide reprints of classic literature and in some cases, classic non-fiction works. However, unlike most critical editions, all Norton Critical Editions are source books that provide a selection of contextual documents and critical essays along with an edited text. Annotations to the text are provided as footnotes, rather than as end notes.
A Kodak Picture Spot, or Kodak Photo Spot, is a location with a Kodak-sponsored sign indicating a recommended spot from which to take a photograph. They are found in areas popular with tourists, and are particularly common in Disney theme parks. This situation lasted until 2012, when Kodak filed for bankruptcy, after which they became Nikon Photo Spots.
“Margaritaville”, a 1977 song by Jimmy Buffett from his album, Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude. The song is written about the margarita cocktail, which Buffett had just discovered, and the first huge surge of tourists which descended on Key West, Florida, around that time. With lyrics reflecting a laid-back tropical lifestyle, it has come to define Buffett’s music and career. The song went to #8 in the US, #1 on the Easy Listening charts, and #13 on the Country Music charts. It was most popular in Canada, going to #1. It remains his highest-charting single, and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2016.
Jimmy Buffett owns the Margaritaville resort chain, named after the song.
DARREN: Do you know which French city famous for its water was the capital of collaborationist France?
LORELAI: Oh, me? Um, Evian, Perrier, uh, Le Crystal Geyser?
JENNIFER: Vichy.
Vichy is a city in central France on the river Allier, a spa town and resort famous for its warm mineral springs, the direct result of historical volcanic activity – although the volcanoes have been dormant for more than a century. During World War II, it was the seat of government for Vichy France from 1940 to 1942. Officially independent, Vichy France adopted a policy of collaboration with Nazi Germany.
Lorelai quickly says the first brands of mineral water she can think of. Evian has been bottling mineral water from Évian-les-Bains in the French Alps since 1829. Perrier bottles its carbonated mineral water from Vergèze in Southern France, beginning production in 1898. Crystal Geyser is actually an American company, founded in Calistoga, California in 1977.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 