LORELAI: Man, that was some stealthy little maneuver she pulled there, huh? Applying the guilt over not knowing about the Dean breakup and making you all weak, and then using that to get Jess to come to dinner on Friday. She’s like Lyndon Johnson with the Senate, effortless.
Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973), often referred to by his initials LBJ, the 36th president of the US from 1963 to 1969. Elected to the US Senate in 1948, he was appointed Senate Majority Whip in 1951, and Majority Leader of the Senate in 1954.
Lyndon Johnson is considered the most effective Senate majority leader in history. He was unusually proficient at gathering information, discovering exactly where every senator stood on issues, his philosophy and prejudices, his strengths and weaknesses and what it took to get his vote.
Central to his control of the Senate was what was called “The Treatment”, his way of emotionally manipulating, intimidating, or bullying people into doing what he wanted. Lorelai is suggesting that Emily uses similar techniques to get her own way.
LORELAI: No, Jim is coming here to fix the garbage disposal. RORY: Jim Dunning, got it.
In an earlier episode, Jim Dunning is mentioned as the auto mechanic who used to run the Hewes Brothers garage – before Gypsy became the mechanic there (although there may have been someone named Musky in between them, it’s not made explicit).
Either Jim Dunning (who Lorelai couldn’t remember before, not even whether he was tall and thin or short and stocky) is now fixing garbage disposals, or Rory is joking, as if “Jim Dunning” has become their name for any random guy who fixes stuff.
EMILY: A mutual friend or something. LORELAI: You and Dean have mutual friends in common that Rory and I don’t? Who would that be, the Talbotts or that senior partner at Deloitte & Touche?
Talbotts
Possibly referencing Nelson “Strobe” Talbott III (born 1946) [pictured], foreign policy analyst and diplomat from a distinguished family who served as the Deputy Secretary of State from 1994 to 2001, during the Clinton Administration. A Yale alumnus, after leaving government he was briefly the Director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. Notice that his nickname is said the same way as the name of Rory’s paternal grandfather, Straub Hayden.
Deloitte & Touche
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, commonly referred to as Deloitte, is an international professional services network headquartered in London, England. Deloitte is the largest professional services network by revenue and number of professionals in the world and is considered one of the Big Four accounting firms.
LORELAI: It’s like a Dean Martin Roast. RORY: Those are never funny to me. LORELAI: Yeah, they’re mean.
The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast is a series of television specials hosted by entertainer Dean Martin, airing from 1974 to 1984. For a series of 54 specials and shows, Martin and his friends would “roast” a celebrity. Roasting means to joke about and insult a celebrity, while also honouring them. The roasts were patterned after the roasts held at the New York Friars’ Club.
The specials were released on DVD, which is presumably how Rory was able to watch them. I find it unbelievable they would buy DVDs they didn’t find funny, or that they dislike “mean jokes” – Lorelai and Rory are both pretty cruel when it comes to humour. I can only think this is a little act they are putting on for Emily.
EMILY: And then she just brushed me off with a wave of her regal hand. Not even a word, just a . . . like I’m her cabana boy. Next thing you know, instead of just walking out of the room, she’ll make me bow and back out. Imperious attitude, she never gives it a rest. I schlepped her to the doctor the other day – by command, not request – and the elevator operator there greeted us nice and friendly. Her doctor’s on the second floor and by the time we got there, that operator was in tears.
In North America, a cabana is a hut, cabin, or shelter at beach or swimming pool, often part of a resort. They can be quite elaborate or luxurious. The word comes from the Spanish for “hut, cabin”. A cabana boy [pictured] is a young male attendant who serves guests from the cabana – typically, these young men are treated like servants by the wealthy, and will be willing to do many little tasks for them in the hopes of receiving tips or favours in return.
Schlepped: Informal American English, meaning “walked or proceeded somewhere in a reluctant manner, typically in the fulfilment of some unwanted burden or duty”. It is from the Yiddish shlepn, meaning “pull, drag”.
Trix moved back to her house in Hartford in January 2003, citing health concerns. It’s only early February, and she is already driving Emily up the wall, treating her like a servant.
Note that Trix had a doctor’s appointment, as a reminder that her health needs monitoring. By the way, Trix previously said that she couldn’t abide women driving, so how did Emily transport her to the doctor’s office?
In the final flashback, we see Emily and Richard coming downstairs, ready to go out. Emily comments that for the first time in a year, she hasn’t tripped over Rory’s baby stroller, which Lorelai never puts away. Emily finds a note on the hall table and begins to cry – it is obviously the note that Lorelai wrote when she left home, taking Rory with her.
It’s interesting to speculate as to where this flashback comes from. It can’t be Lorelai’s memory, because she never saw this happen. Is it Emily’s memory? Or is it Lorelai’s imagining what must have happened, based on what she knows? Or is it somehow an objective picture from the past of that moment?
The seven flashbacks in this episode encapsulate the central conflict in Gilmore Girls – that Lorelai got pregnant as a teenager, and then left home with her baby, leaving only a note.
It seems clear during the episode that Lorelai, through Sherry’s birthing of Georgia, gets to relive and re-examine some of her past behaviour and choices. We get to see that Richard and Emily may not have been perfect parents, but they are by no means monsters who deserved to be abandoned and shunned by their daughter.
Emily was a staunch advocate for Lorelai when she discovered she was pregnant, and stood up for her against the cruel insults of Christopher’s parents. Richard and Emily never rejected Lorelai, or kicked her out. She still had a home with them, and they continued supporting her and baby Rory.
Obviously Lorelai was very unhappy, and wanted to make a life for herself, but in retrospect, some of her decisions seem cruel – I think even to herself. She left for the hospital to give birth by herself, not allowing her parents any role in that, and she left home the same way, leaving only a note.
We already know that Emily was so devastated by Lorelai’s leaving that she was confined to bed for a month, and much of the coldness and harshness that we see from Emily and Richard in the present stem from this rejection by their daughter, which they have never really got over.
I think Lorelai’s generous and thoughtful gift of the DVD player and nine musicals on DVD that are a combination of Emily’s favourites and hers is her way of trying to … not to erase the past, but to make a kind gesture to her mother and to try to connect with her by sharing something they both enjoy, in recognition that Emily’s life is far lonelier than Lorelai’s.
Christopher takes Lorelai to see the newborn Georgia in the nursery (Rory is understandably asleep). He is still on a high from watching the birth of his second daughter, saying that it was amazing, and he’d never seen anything like it.
Lorelai, with devastatingly understatement, agrees that she does know how amazing it is, and that Christopher hasn’t seen anything like it before. Her expression says that she is reliving her own nursery moment, which we see in the upcoming flashback.
Due to the fact that we don’t know what happened, it isn’t possible to know for sure whether Lorelai feels resentful that Christopher wasn’t there for Rory’s birth, or whether she feels a b it guilty for shutting him out and denying him the chance to see his daughter being born.
We see a nurse wheeling Lorelai into the delivery room to give birth, when Emily and Richard arrive. Emily is furious that Lorelai simply left for the hospital (in a taxi?), leaving a note reading: “Dear Mom and Dad, I’m in labor. See you later, Lorelai”. Richard is only annoyed that he is wearing the “wrong shoes” for the occasion, which are apparently uncomfortable.
Emily begins scolding Lorelai, even as she is being wheeled into the delivery room, for not asking them for a lift to the hospital. Lorelai receives no comfort, no support, not even a kind word from her parents as she prepares to give birth.
The contrast with Sherry is clear – Sherry is a woman in her thirties, accompanied into the delivery room by Christopher, her fiancé and the father of her baby. She also has Lorelai and Rory to give support, waiting outside. Lorelai was a sixteen-year-old girl who got herself to hospital and gave birth alone, without Christopher, and with two angry and uncomfortable parents waiting for her.
SHERRY: Christopher, you’re here! I can’t believe you’re here. I didn’t think you’d make it. CHRISTOPHER: Are you kidding? You think I’d miss this?
Sherry is being wheeled into the delivery room when Christopher rushes to join her at the last moment. Christopher says he wouldn ‘t miss this, but of course, he already did – he missed Rory’s birth. It must be difficult for Lorelai to witness Christopher showing up for his second daughter’s birth when he wasn’t there for the first. She’s certainly looking rather pouty about it.
Then again, we never see Christopher’s point of view. Did Lorelai tell him she was going into labour and needed to go to hospital, or did she just leave without telling him? Was he given the opportunity to accompany her, or did he simply not know? This is never made clear.
At the eleventh hour, Christopher arrives at the hospital, after being out of town for some mysterious reason, in an area where he couldn’t get cell phone reception for some mysterious reason. Where was he, the middle of the woods? Maybe cell phone coverage was a lot more patchy in the US during the early 2000s?
It is a relief for Rory and Lorelai to see him, because otherwise it would have been them going in with Sherry to watch the birth. It seems almost superhuman of Lorelai to offer to accompany Sherry into the delivery room, when she doesn’t like Sherry, and resents her for being the reason things didn’t work out between she and Christopher.
But as Lorelai told Emily – she wasn’t going to do it for Sherry, but for Rory. Luckily, she never has to do it, but it must bring Rory comfort to know her mother was ready to be there for her is she wanted her.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 