Lacrosse is a team sport played with a stick with a net on it and a ball; the stick is used to carry, pass, catch, and shoot the ball into goal. It is the oldest organised sport in North America, with its origins with the indigenous people of North America, going back as early as the twelfth century. The game was extensively modified by European colonisers to create the current game. It is commonly played in schools and colleges in the US, and there are professional leagues as well.
Lorelai jokingly refers to Rory as “the lacrosse kid” in acknowledgement of her quote from The Karate Kid – an example of something being referenced twice in one episode of Gilmore Girls, without the title of the work ever being used.
This song by alternative rock band Modest Mouse is playing in Rory’s bedroom during the opening scene. Only later do we discover Lane is in her bedroom, and it is she who is listening to it.
“Tiny Cities Made of Ashes” is a track from the band’s 2000 album, The Moon & Antarctica. The first to be released by the band on a major record label (Epic Records), it led to fans being worried that they would lose their unique sound. However, the album received positive reviews, with some critics feeling that it was actually the band’s “weirdest” album. It was ranked as one of the best albums of that year. The album went to #120 in the US, and has been certified gold, having sold almost half a million copies.
Knowing that Lane is in Rory’s bedroom the whole time in this scene, it seems a bit strange that Rory doesn’t share the big news of the Harvard application arriving with her best friend. I suppose it’s something Rory wants to experience with Lorelai first, and perhaps she doesn’t want to shove her academic opportunities in Lane’s face – and she also knows Lane is too busy concentrating on writing her band ad to listen. Still, it’s a slightly melancholy indication that their lives are going to continue in different directions.
RORY: Oh, geez. Let the record show that when my application to Harvard arrived, we were watching The Brady Bunch Variety Hour … Man, this morning I was reading Dead Souls – it couldn’t have come then?
Dead Souls, a 1842 novel by Russian author Nikolai Gogol, widely regarded as a classic of Russian literature. The novel chronicles the adventures of a mysterious traveller and the people he encounters, and was intended to represent a modern-dayInfernoof Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Gogol himself saw his work as an “epic poem in prose”, and within the book characterised it as a “novel in verse”. Gogol intended the novel to be the first part of a three-volume work, but burned the manuscript of the second part shortly before his death. Although the novel ends in mid-sentence, it is regarded by some as complete. It is very possible that Rory is reading Dead Souls for English Literature at school.
RORY: Oh my God … It’s here … My application to Harvard.
This episode is focused on Rory receiving her application for Harvard University, and the stress she goes through as a result. The US university application process is somewhat different to many other countries, so it’s necessary to understand a little bit of how it works.
It’s not the case that you simply send off your academic results to the university and if you make the cutoff point, you get in. You are also expected to tell the university about yourself, about your interests, goals, and contributions you’ve made to society, and supply letters of recommendation from teachers and community leaders to bolster your case.
Most importantly, you need to write a short essay, usually around 600 words or so, that somehow convinces them you’re more than academically gifted, you’re also a wonderful person who deserves a college education, but are far too modest to actually say that. As these essays tend to end up very much alike, they also need to be fascinating enough to keep the admissions officer reading them! But they can’t be too edgy or creative either, because then you’ll seem too weird for the college to handle. Stressful or what?
There are also opportunities to have an in-depth personal interview with an alumnus of the university, who hasn’t read your application, and doesn’t know anything about you except your name and contact details. It’s basically a job interview, but instead of trying to get a job, you’re trying to get into college, answering questions about all your positive traits that will serve to make the college a better place, while letting them see what kind of person you are.
The harder a university is to get into, the more rigorous and exacting the entire process is – you will need to have higher grades, more impressive goals and aspirations, and have made some kind of major contribution to the world. You will do well to have letters of recommendation from people who are leaders in their field, or actually famous. Your essay will preferably be of publishable standard. You will dazzle, astound, charm, and knock the socks off your interviewer. And that’s just to get in!
Rory’s application arrives in what appears to be mid-to-late September, but that’s just to fit in with the timing of the season in Gilmore Girls. In real life, Harvard usually sends its applications out around the start of August.
PARIS: All right, I’ll push it through … But the next genius who comes up with the brilliant plan to put Elizabeth Arden in the chemistry class can bite my ass.
Elizabeth Arden Inc., major cosmetics, skin care, and fragrance company founded by Canadian-American businesswoman Elizabeth Arden in 1910, first as the Red Door salon on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The brand has been owned by Revlon since 2016 and is headquartered in Miami, Florida.
I’m not sure why students would ask for Elizabeth Arden in the chemistry class – maybe for the hand cream? Or for perfume, to cover the chemical smell?
PARIS: How are we going to get a professional photographer?
LOUISE: Helmut Newton is my godfather.
PARIS: Okay, sign him up – and tell him to leave the whips and chains at home.
Helmut Newton, born Helmut Neustädter (1920-2004), German-Australian fashion photographer whose black and white photographs were a mainstay of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and other magazines. His photos were erotic and stylised, often with fetishistic or sado-masochistic overtones – hence Paris’ instructions not to include whips and chains. Clearly Newton is not really appropriate as a school photographer!
It is interesting to speculate how Helmut Newton became Louise’s godfather. Presumably one or both of her parents have a connection with the fashion world. At this stage of his life, Helmut Newton lived in Monaco, but spent his winters in Los Angeles.
FRANCIE: Paris is student body president – big fat deal. There are three other class presidents – the junior class president, the sophomore class president, and oh, yes, the senior class president – me.
RORY: I know all this.
FRANCIE: Well, then, it’s off the short bus for you, isn’t it?
The short bus refers to a shorter school bus used for transporting children who are physically disabled or who are being educated in special programs, often for learning disabilities.
It is a derogatory way to refer to the mentally challenged, and to call someone stupid, dumb, or slow. Francie is saying Rory is smart enough not to be considered intellectually disabled.
I would like to think that Francie using this offensive language is the writer’s way of letting us know she’s a bad person, except … what would this incident say about Rory?
Francie Jarvis, portrayed by Emily Bergl, turns up again early in Season 3. We first met Francie in the previous season, as the President of the Puffs, a supposedly powerful secret sorority at Chilton that Rory and Paris almost joined. It was a rather silly story line that went precisely nowhere, but we now discover it was just to set up this silly story line that goes nowhere in Season 3.
Francie is now the president of the senior class, and is using all her mighty influence … to get skirt hemlines raised an inch and a half. Apparently this requires all sorts of backdoor machinations, such as kidnapping Rory into a girl’s bathroom and making her fulfil Francie’s evil scheme! The evil scheme to get hemlines raised slightly.
Oddly, Francie never acknowledges that she knows Rory and Paris well enough to have begun the process of accepting them into the Puffs – something which went very, very wrong for everyone except Rory. Possibly this helps explain Francie’s antagonistic attitude towards Rory and Paris.
Note that Francie first speaks with Rory while looking in the mirror, to indicate duplicity and double dealings – not to mention that Rory is “through the looking glass”.
PARIS: Hey, at least I’m not putting her on an iceberg and shoving her off to sea, which considering the fact that you can’t find the Shakespeare section without psychic powers yet the CliffsNotes rack practically smacks you in the face on the way in, is totally justified.
CliffsNotes are a series of student study guides started in Nebraska by Clifton Hillegass in 1958, having gained the US rights to a Canadian series published in Toronto. Hillegass and his wife Catherine started the business in their basement with 16 titles on Shakespeare. By 1964, sales of CliffsNotes had reached one million annually, and there are now CliffsNotes for hundreds of works. IDG Books bought CliffsNotes for $14.2 million in 1998, and it has since been acquired several more times.
PARIS: Look, let’s face it, the last administration might have just as well been running around yelling ‘Toga!’ for all the brilliant things they accomplished.”
Paris references the 1978 comedy film National Lampoon’s Animal House, directed by John Landis, produced by Ivan Reitman, and written by Harold Ramis, Douglas Kenney, and Chris Miller. It was inspired by stories written by Miller and published in humour magazine National Lampoon. The stories were based on Ramis’s experience in the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity at Washington University in St. Louis, Miller’s Alpha Delta Phi experiences at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and producer Reitman’s at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
The film, starring John Belushi in his first screen role, is about a trouble-making under-performing fraternity called Delta Tau Chi whose members challenge the authority of the dean of the fictional Faber College. The film received mixed reviews upon its release, but was a huge commercial hit, becoming the #3 film of 1978 at the box office, and the highest grossing comedy of its time. The film almost single-handedly launched the gross-out comedy genre which became a Hollywood staple, and it is regarded as one of the greatest comedies (or even the greatest comedy), and one of the best films of all time.
The toga party, a staple of college life, is immortalised in Animal House. Whenever the guys at Delta House decide to have a toga party, they start mindlessly chanting, “Toga! Toga! Toga!”. Paris is saying that the previous student government were a bunch of idiots who were only interested in partying.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 