Tag: Character Insight

Xerox and Fax

LORELAI: What are you doing?
RORY: Xeroxing … Sherry had some status reports she promised to fax to people by tomorrow but she didn’t bring enough, and so I’ve been trying to find a Xerox machine. I finally conned someone in ICU into letting me use theirs. I haven’t found a fax machine yet, but –

Xerox, previously discussed.

Fax [pictured], short for facsimile, is the telephonic transmission of scanned printed material (both text and images), normally to a telephone number connected to a printer or other output device. The original document is scanned with a fax machine, which processes the contents (text or images) as a single fixed graphic image, converting it into a bitmap, and then transmitting it through the telephone system in the form of audio-frequency tones. The receiving fax machine interprets the tones and reconstructs the image, printing a paper copy. First in use in 1865, before the invention of the telephone (it used telegraph), fax machines were ubiquitous in offices in the 1980s and 1990s, but have gradually been rendered almost obsolete by email and the internet.

This particular winning anecdote is a complete nonsense – Rory wouldn’t need to make multiple copies of the document in order to fax it to multiple people. The fax machine would only need one document, and she just needs to find one of those. They are commonly used in hospitals, even today.

However, in true overly entitled Gilmore style, Rory has no compunction about going into the intensive care unit to demand use of their Xerox machine. At night! The Emily is strong in this one.

Lorelai Arrives at the Hospital

When Rory phones Lorelai in distress, Lorelai is still eating dinner with Emily, as if it’s 7.30-8 pm. Impossible! It must have been around 10 pm by then. Gilmore Girls rarely seemed able to get a plausible timeline in place.

It is a two hour drive to Boston from Hartford, meaning it would be around midnight before Lorelai got there, and Rory would have been left alone for hours. The show always made it seem as if Boston was about 40 minutes away.

However ridiculously this occurs, Rory is naturally overjoyed to see her mother, who immediately takes charge of the situation, and stops Sherry from exploiting Rory. Lorelai’s protective mothering really gets a chance to shine here.

Rory Phones Lorelai in a Panic

RORY: I’m here all by myself and I’m trying very hard to be calm but I’m starting to feel nauseous, and the hospital has a smell, and there are noises, and those gowns do not stay closed and I’ve seen a lot of butts today! And –
LORELAI: Okay, sweetie, calm down.
RORY: I need you … I need you, I need you here, I need you now. I cannot do this alone. I need my Mommy, and dammit, I don’t care who knows it!

Rory has been consistently shown as needing Lorelai’s help to handle even small personal crises, but this time, surely no one can blame her for desperately calling her mother for help. She’s a young adult thrown in the deep end, and must be both hungry and exhausted by now.

Even now, she probably wouldn’t have called Lorelai, except that that she was told that she might well be accompanying Sherry, a woman she barely knows, in order to help her through the birth itself. Rory notoriously doesn’t cope well with “icky” things – even planting bulbs in the garden is gross for her – so you can imagine the trauma witnessing a birth would cause.

Sheldon Harnick

RORY: [on phone] So, we’ll see you next Friday at three. And once again, sorry for the short notice. Okay, bye. [hangs up]
SHERRY: Great, who’s next?
RORY: Um, Sheldon Harnick.

Sheldon Harnick (born 1924), award-winning lyricist and songwriter best known for his collaborations with composer Jerry Bock on musicals such as Fiddler on the Roof. His musical Dragons was performed in New Jersey in late 2003, and this is possibly what Sherry is working on promoting.

Sherry says that Sheldon Harnick “hates pregnancy”, so Rory suggests they tell him Sherry has a plumbing issue instead. In real life, Sheldon Harnick is married to actress Margery Gray and is a father, so it doesn’t seem likely he’s really that panicked by pregnancy. In 2011, he was a special guest to a performance of his songs by Kate Baldwin who was seven months pregnant at the time, and they sang a duet together.

Sherry now has Rory handling her business calls at the hospital! Yes, at night! Rory is a people pleaser, specifically an adult pleaser, who genuinely likes to help, so she complies with this obviously terrible treatment.

Flashback 3

In this flashback, Lorelai’s pregnancy has become known to her parents, and Emily and Richard meet with Christopher’s parents, Straub and Francine to discuss it. Straub and Francine are both angry and upset – Francine cries and says she feels sick, while Straub says that everything has been ruined.

The Haydens can only see Lorelai and the baby as a problem to be got rid of. Straub suggests an abortion, and Francine that Lorelai be “sent away” – meaning to a home for unwed mothers, where her baby will taken away and adopted out. Francine’s ideas for handling teen pregnancy are very much outdated, as her plan sounds like something from the 1960s. By the early 1980s, such homes had been closed down and replaced with teen parenthood centres, for young parents to get help.

Richard then tells them his plan – Lorelai and Christopher will get married, they will live with he and Emily, and Christopher will be given a job at the same insurance company Richard works for.

Lorelai and Christopher are listening to the discussion from the stairs, like children – they aren’t invited to be part of it or make any contributions. Lorelai is angry at being left out of the decision-making process, but Christopher passively accepts Richard’s plan, saying that it doesn’t sound too bad, and they will need their parents’ help. Neither of them acknowledge the fact that Richard is essentially forcing them to get married.

While Lorelai still feels independent and rebellious, even though she is now pregnant with an unplanned baby, Christopher is ready to cave in to Richard. Lorelai demands to know what happened to their plan of backpacking around Europe after graduation, and she must already know that Christopher’s adventurous talk was just that – all talk. If Lorelai wants to forge an independent life for herself and her baby, she will have to do it alone.

A quick note that Christine Rose, who appears in this scene as Francine Hayden, went on to play Milo Ventigmiglia’s character’s mother in the TV show, Heroes.

Sherry at the Hospital

SHERRY: I’m lying in a bed. God knows what’s gonna happen … And she goes back to work. I would love to go back to work, but I can’t because I have to stay here … She’s not here. None of my friends are here. Christopher isn’t here. No one is here. No one but you. Thank God you’re here, Rory. I don’t think that I could do this by myself because this wasn’t supposed to happen until next week. I wrote it down. I wrote it down. I wrote it down!

Sherry is frightened and worried at being left alone to give birth, and seizes on Rory as the one person who can help, in the most inappropriate way possible. Rory is barely eighteen and still at school, with minimal practical skills of any sort, having travelled alone by public transport in midwinter at night for more than four hours! Yet somehow she is now the designated assistant to Sherry.

For someone who was so gung-ho to have kids, Sherry’s suddenly got very cold feet on the idea, and says she would prefer to be at work. (Yes, at night. Everyone works at night, apparently).

“She screwed up”

MAUREEN: Listen, I know the invitation said that we were all gathering at the C-section next week, but Sherry just went into labor … She screwed up, she’s in labor, and she wanted me to call all the girls and beg them to get down to the hospital ASAP.

Sherry’s best friend Maureen calls Rory while she’s in the middle of a meeting for the school newspaper. Rory is back to having a cell phone again, and is able to take the call. Maybe she used a pager in between these two calls because her phone was charging.

Maureen tells Rory that “Sherry screwed up” by going into labour a week before her C-section is scheduled, a phrase that gets repeated again and again. It’s meant to underline how hopelessly ignorant Sherry’s friends are about childbirth, that they don’t understand that babies don’t necessarily arrive on schedule. How they can not know this? It’s in movies and on TV shows (like this one!). You can see that Sherry will receive little or no support from her friends after having Georgia.

Because this is the week before February 7th, we know the main events of this episode take place on Friday 31st January 2003.

During the call, Maureen refers to Rory as a “child”, something which Rory never confirms nor denies. In fact, although she is still at school, she is 18 (turning 19 that year) and an adult now.

Flashback 1

This episode, one of the more complex in structure, has a series of flashbacks within it. In the first flashback, we see a teenaged Lorelai and Christopher coming to the Gilmore home after school. They are wearing the same uniform, although I don’t think the show ever mentions them attending the same school. We know it is December, because they have finished their midterm exams, and are discussing the upcoming Christmas vacation.

With no adult supervision (Richard and Emily are out, and the maid has been fired, of course), Christopher – naturally – heads straight to the liquor cabinet and pours them drinks. Getting Lorelai drunk seems to be part of his technique.

Christopher reveals that his plan (more of a dream, actually), is to take a year off after graduation and go backpacking around Europe. He asks Lorelai to come with him, and she agrees – just as she and Rory are planning to go backpacking around Europe as soon as Rory graduates. During the conversation, it is clear that Christopher and Lorelai are close friends, not boyfriend and girlfriend, and that Christopher would like something more. By the end of the scene, they are kissing, although it is unclear whether this is the first time or not.

The young Lorelai and Christopher are played by Chelsea Brummet and Phillip Van Dyke. Brummet would later become a regular on kid’s sketch comedy show, All That, and Van Dyke had previously been on several TV shows, including Hey Arnold, and The Amanda Show. His acting career finished in 2003.

“She’s sort of my sister”

RORY: Well, I don’t know. I mean, I know it’s weird, but I kind of wanna see Georgia. She’s sort of my sister.
LORELAI: She’s more than ‘sort of’ your sister.

Georgia is Rory’s half-sister, but she already doesn’t feel very close to her because she’s Christopher’s daughter, and she and Lorelai have been fairly distant from him since Sherry got pregnant and Christopher dumped them.