Tag: Character Insight

On Ramp

RORY: And what are you worried about happening?
LORELAI: Well, what you guys were on the on-ramp for up at Luke’s the other day. Your basic boy/girl stuff. Especially with this new boy, you girl stuff.
RORY: Well, the boy is different, but I’m still me. That hasn’t changed.

On ramp, the short section of road which allows a driver to enter the highway. Lorelai has taken one look at Jess and Rory making out, and seen that as a short step to the highway of sexual intercourse.

She tries to give Rory the “cool mom” version of the sex talk, but Rory says she is too busy to be even thinking about sex, and says that if she were thinking about it, she would talk about it with Lorelai first.

Lorelai has to be content with that, even though she’s clearly not happy at the idea of leaving Rory alone in the house overnight. She never worried about it when Rory was with Dean, even though Dean made some overtures, and did come over even after being explicitly told not to by Rory.

Rory claims she tells her mother “everything”, but in fact she keeps an awful lot of her personal life close to her chest. As a result, Lorelai never realises that Dean was not the knight in shining armour she seems to think he is.

“Ten minutes”

LUKE: I go up there every ten minutes pretending to get something to keep them from doing something we don’t want … I got a good system, it works.
LORELAI: Every ten minutes?
LUKE: Like clockwork …
LORELAI: Ten minutes. Yeah, that’s pretty much the time it took to create Rory. And that included getting dressed and freshening my lipstick.

Luke was originally so concerned about Jess and Rory kissing in the apartment that he laid down the law and said they weren’t even allowed to sit on the sofa at the same time. Now he’s become so relaxed that he’s cool with them lying on the sofa in an embrace, making out for hours. He just checks on them every ten minutes.

Luke’s sudden change of attitude seems to have begun when he started dating Nicole, suggesting that his concern about Jess and Rory being together was at least partly fuelled by an unhappy awareness that he was without a partner, while his teenage nephew had a girlfriend.

Lorelai points out that ten minutes provides ample time to have sex, and says that conceiving Rory took her well under that time. (Yes, this is a slam to Christopher, but to be fair, he was a teenage boy). She doesn’t labour the point, but Luke immediately looks panicked.

Encyclopedia Brown

JESS: Got a lot of books here. Anything in particular?
LORELAI: It’s one of Luke’s.
JESS: Well, if it doesn’t have Encyclopedia Brown in the title, that narrows it down a lot.

Encyclopedia Brown, a series of 29 children’s books written by Donald J. Sobol; the first one was in 1963, and the last in 2012 (posthumous). The books follow the adventures of a boy detective, Leroy Brown, nicknamed “Encyclopedia” for his intelligence and range of knowledge.

Jess’ comments suggests that most of the books Luke has are his Encyclopedia Brown books from his childhood. Note the similarity with Lorelai reading all the Nancy Drew books when she was young.

SoHo

LUKE: Got a great book, it has walking tours of old historic Manhattan. You know, before Disney got a hold of it. The SoHo one’s pretty good.

SoHo, neighbourhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City. Since the 1970s, the neighborhood has been the location of many artists’ lofts and art galleries, and has also been known for its variety of shops ranging from trendy upscale boutiques to national and international chain store outlets.

The name “SoHo” derives from the area being “South of Houston Street”, and was coined in 1962 by urban planner Chester Rapkin. The name also recalls Soho, an area in London’s West End.

Note a few changes in Luke since he started dating Nicole – he readily discusses fashion, musicals, and historic walking tours with Lorelai. She is a little surprised at how authoritative he has become in these areas so quickly. I can’t help feeling Luke is slightly rubbing her face in it, since he has always resisted Lorelai’s attempts to get him interested in such things.

The book Luke has is possibly fictional, although there are plenty of books in real life with historic walking tours of New York.

Hairspray and The Producers

LORELAI: I cannot picture you watching Hairspray.
LUKE: It was okay. I liked The Producers better.

Hairspray, musical with music by Marc Shaiman and lyrics by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, with book by Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan, based on John Water’s 1988 film of the same name. Set in 1962 Baltimore, the story follows teenage Tracy Turnblad’s dream to dance on a local TV dance program. When Tracy wins a role on the show, she becomes a celebrity overnight, leading to social change as Tracy campaigns for the show’s racial integration.

The musical opened in Seattle in 2002 and moved to Broadway later that year. In 2003, Hairspray won eight Tony Awards, including one for Best Musical. It ran for 2,642 performances before closing in 2009. Hairspray has also had national tours, a West End production, numerous foreign productions, and was adapted as a 2007 musical film.

The Producers, previously discussed. Lorelai mentioned wanting to see this musical, but thought it was too hard to get tickets. Luke and Nicole don’t seem to have had any trouble – a sign of Luke leaving Lorelai behind a little bit through his relationships with Nicole.

Another of Lane’s Zany Schemes

LANE: At 3:40, my mom will be on her way to the yarn store for her bimonthly sew-a-thon with Lacey Schwartz and Bich Ho.
DAVE: The yarn store’s on Peach.
LANE: Plum.
DAVE: That cuts us off from our usual route to the interstate.
LANE: There’s a back road that circles around it, but it’s gonna be muddy from the rains.
DAVE: How about I have the guys take the usual route, I’ll go by foot on Peach, down the alley behind Al’s, over the fence, and they can pick me up a half a mile down by the Shell station.
LANE: Perfect. Uh, what, that’s not complicated.

Lane and Dave have come up with some ingenious plan to avoid seeing Mrs Kim, so that she doesn’t realise Dave is in (gasp) a band. And even worse, that Lane is too. Lane confessed her feelings about Dave to her mother at the family wedding, and we don’t know any more since then. Presumably Mrs Kim is still unable to move on from Dave not being Korean.

We learn a little bit of back story during this scene. Mrs Kim’s life apparently doesn’t revolve entirely around work, church, and family – she also attends a sewing circle (?) once a fortnight at the local yarn store with two women named Lacey Schwartz and Bich Ho (Ho is a common Vietnamese surname, and Bich is a Vietnamese girl’s name meaning “jade”).

The yarn store is on Plum Street, one street over from Peach Street, which is where Dean and his family live. Lorelai described this area to Jess as a desirable residential neighbourhood, so it’s slightly surprising to learn it has shops around it as well – and also leads to the alley behind Al’s, which is always implied to be in the centre of town. Maybe Peach is a very long street? Incidentally, I wonder if this alley is the one Lorelai and Rory were shown walking down in “The Break Up, Part 2”?

Unlike Henry, Dave readily fits in with all of Lane’s zany schemes to keep secrets from her mother, and even comes up with own solutions. They are clearly made for each other.

“Were you hanging out there with Dean?”

JESS: Were you hanging out there with Dean?
RORY: I was not hanging out with Dean. We were both hauled in there to watch her try out material and we were sitting in the same area so we talked a little, and then we left at the same time. That was it. It was all by accident.

Jess confronts Rory with the knowledge that he knew she was with Dean, something she omitted when recounting the events of her day. Keeping this from him possibly reminded him of the all the times Rory omitted to tell Dean when she hung out with Jess.

Unfortunately, due to Dean’s temper and jealousy, Rory learned not to be transparent with her boyfriend – a legacy which Jess is inheriting (which he sort of deserves, since it’s because of him that Rory was most often lacking in candour with Dean).

Unlike Dean, Jess quickly recovers once he realises it was just by chance Rory and Dean spent some time together in public as part of a community event. He asks her to think about letting him know in future, because it’s a shock reading it off a flyer, and then he asks her to spill all the tea on Miss Patty’s show.

It’s seems like a much healthier relationship for Rory, from this perspective, as she no longer has to fear her boyfriend finding things out and putting a suspicious spin on them.

“The woman taught me everything”

RORY: The woman taught me everything I’ve already forgotten about dancing, baton twirling and gymnastics.

We learned in “Rory’s Birthday Parties” that Miss Patty is Rory’s former ballet teacher. Apparently she also learned gymnastics and baton twirling from her. Rory is physically awkward and slightly clumsy – I can’t imagine she did well in any of these classes. It’s also amazing she managed to learn ballet and gymnastics, and still be that physically awkward!

Lord of the Rings DVD, Footloose

RORY: Do you wanna watch more of the extra supplementary stuff on the Lord of the Rings DVD?
LORELAI: Well, it’s just the drawings and that fat guy talking.

RORY: Well, let’s watch Footloose again.

At this point, only the first film in the trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, previously discussed, had been released on DVD. An extended edition was released in November 2002, with 30 minutes of new material, added special effects and music, plus 19 minutes of fan-club credits. The DVD set included four commentaries and over three hours of supplementary material. The “fat guy” was the film’s director, New Zealander Sir Peter Jackson (he has since lost weight). You can tell this is a Daniel Palladino script, with someone’s weight being mentioned like this!

You might remember that Rory balked at watching The Fellowship of the Ring with Dean another time, even though he reminded her that she had earlier said she wanted to watch it “a hundred times”. Obviously it was Dean she was sick of, not the film, as she and Lorelai got it on DVD and are even watching the extra stuff on the disc together.

Footloose, previously discussed and frequently mentioned as a favourite film of Lorelai’s.

During this scene, Lorelai and Rory have to coordinate their schedules, because with both of them so busy, it’s getting harder for them to spend mother-and-daughter alone time. Each of them are getting more conscious of the fact that Rory will be going to college later in the year, and their time for having their “secret little club” is fast coming to a close.

Sunday is the only day they have to spend together now. As they immediately start getting ready to watch a movie together, it suggests that this scene takes place on Sunday 9th February.