Taylor Doose (Michael Winters)

Although he was mentioned as far back as The Pilot, Taylor Doose makes his entrance in this episode. Taylor owns and manages Doose’s Market, the grocery store in Stars Hollow where Dean is employed as a bag boy. We discover immediately that he is the driving force behind the festivals and celebrations in town, organising them and drumming up support for them from the townspeople. This also sets up the dynamic between Taylor and Luke, where Taylor tries to encourage Luke to join in a particular town event, while Luke resists him.

“How long have you been seeing him?”

Emily immediately picks up on the attraction between Lorelai and Luke, and is the first person in the show to openly verbalise it. Lorelai doesn’t think her mother knows her, but Emily at least recognises when a man is attracted to her daughter. That Emily knows all about lap dances and can talk about her daughter giving one shows a raunchy side to her character we have not seen before – it’s eyebrow-raising.

Rory’s Childhood

The adult guests at Rory’s birthday party swap stories of Rory as a child. Babette and Morey remember her thinking a toadstool ring was a fairy ring, and waiting for the fairy to arrive. Lorelai says that Rory was “about ten” at the time, but later we learn that Lorelai and Rory didn’t move next door to Babette and Morey until Rory was eleven.

Although eleven is about ten, it’s pretty old to still believe in fairies. This charmingly naive fairy-lover is hard to tally with the intellectually precocious child-Rory we keep hearing about, but does show that the brainy Rory has an imaginative side.

We also learn that Rory took ballet lessons from Miss Patty, and that although she worked hard at her dancing, she wasn’t very good. Only Miss Patty seems to think she had any talent and is disappointed that she stopped. This reminds us of Amy Sherman-Palladino, who trained in ballet. Unlike Rory, she could have turned professional, and Miss Patty’s sadness is a parallel to Amy’s mother’s disappointment when she decided to pursue writing rather than ballet as a career.

Rory’s Present

Lorelai’s birthday present to Rory is an indigo iBook Apple Macintosh laptop. The iBook line of laptops first came out in 1999, and were discontinued in 2006. The model Rory has was released in September 2000, and cost about $1500 at the time. Lorelai most likely bought it from the Apple store in Hartford, located in the mall. Throughout the show, Rory was shown to have remained loyal to Apple products.

So Lorelai bought Rory a hip $1500 Apple Mac laptop that would be helpful for school for her birthday, and somehow convinced her wealthy, generous mother Emily that it would be a great idea to buy Rory a junky useless $12 bracelet for her birthday. Well played Lorelai, well played.

Brandeis

PARIS: You can go somewhere else. Go to Brandeis. Brandeis is nice.

Brandeis University is a private university in the city of Waltham, Massachussetts, just outside Boston. It was founded in 1948 as a secular, non-sectarian, co-educational university, sponsored by the Jewish community.

It has a strong focus on the liberal arts, and promotes tolerance on its campus. About half the student population is Jewish, and Jewish culture is strongly in evidence. It has a reputation (I don’t know how earned or how accurate) for being slightly quirky and accepting of social misfits.

It is amusing that Paris suggests Rory attend a Jewish-sponsored university near Boston while she strives to get into a Christian-sponsored university near Boston. Perhaps Brandeis is a “nice” (i.e. liberal, tolerant, accepting) school that others (staff at Chilton?) have suggested Paris might like to attend if she doesn’t get into Harvard, or even prefer to Harvard, (since she’s a Jewish social misfit), so she turns it back on someone else.

Lorelai’s Teenage Posters

There are four Duran Duran posters on the wall in Lorelai’s childhood bedroom, in the scene where Lorelai and Rory talk. Duran Duran are an English new wave band formed in 1978, with their classic line up being Nick Rhodes, John Taylor, Roger Taylor, Andy Taylor, and Simon le Bon. Their first album came out in 1981, and they found mainstream success by 1984. They are most famous for their 1980s hits such as Hungry Like The Wolf, Rio, and The Reflex.

There is a large Echo & The Bunnymen poster over the bed. Echo & The Bunnymen [pictured] are an English post-punk rock band founded in 1978, with the original line-up being Ian McCulloch, Will Sergeant, and Les Pattinson. Their first album came out in 1980 to critical acclaim, and they found mainstream success by 1983. Although a hit in the UK, they were not so well known in the US in the 1980s, perhaps suggesting that despite her Duran Duran mania, teenage Lorelai’s musical knowledge was a cut above her peers.

One wonders why Emily has left the posters up, or why Lorelai has asked that they be left up – her comment that time has stood still in the room makes it sound as if she hasn’t up here since she left home, which seems a bit unlikely. It is almost as if Emily has kept Lorelai’s (eerily untouched) room like a shrine, as if she died rather than ran away as a teenager.

Christopher

LORELAI: He calls like once a week and we see him at Christmas, sometimes Easter. It’s all very civil.

This is the point where we discover that Rory has had some contact with her father throughout her life, seeing him at least once a year and sometimes twice a year. The weekly phone call, like the one to Emily, seems something of a polite fiction – it seems greatly out of character for Christopher to phone so regularly. Most likely he phoned whenever he thought of it, which probably wasn’t that often.

Edith Wharton

EMILY: Well I wanted everything to be perfect. What do you think?
LORELAI: I think Edith Wharton would have been proud, and busy taking notes.

Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author whose work centres on the lives on the American upper classes in the late 19^th century. Her novels and stories are noted for their ironic tone, and the critical eye she turns on a world which was fading away. Most of the wealthy people in Wharton’s works lead quietly miserable, empty lives, which is probably a dig from Lorelai at Emily.

Rory’s Birthday Present from Emily

Lorelai claims that she’s helping Emily pick out the “perfect present” for Rory during their joint shopping trip. Given how expensive her own gift to Rory is, does anyone else think that Lorelai is actually (consciously or unconsciously) sabotaging Emily’s gift-buying so that she can’t compete with Lorelai? Instead of something valuable, she ends up with a cheap, tacky name bracelet that doesn’t really seem like something Rory would appreciate.

On the other hand, the bracelet does seem like something Lorelai would have liked as a teenager. The shopping trip becomes the kind of outing that she and her mother might have learned to enjoy together if Lorelai hadn’t got pregnant. Through it she can vicariously experience what it would have been like to have her mother buy her the things that she valued, such as junk jewellery and celebrity tee-shirts, instead of the pearls and cashmere that Emily would have given her as suitable gifts for a young girl of good family.

It is another sign of Lorelai’s immaturity and ego, and also how deep down she still longs for a relationship with her mother. If not deliberate sabotage, it’s a hint that she may not know Rory as well as she thinks she does.

Lorelai Leigh

We learn in this episode that Rory’s full name is Lorelai Leigh Gilmore. This seems like an homage to the character Lorelei Lee (played by Marilyn Monroe), from the 1953 musical comedy film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, directed by Howard Hawks. It is based on the 1949 musical, which in turn was based on the best-selling 1925 novel of the same name by Anita Loos. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was the #9 movie of 1953, and both the film and Monroe’s performance were praised by critics.

In the film, Lorelei Lee loves wealthy men and the high life, and is also accused in court of theft. This may help prepare us for Rory’s own character arc.