RORY: Man, it’s winter carnival time again already … Are you going?
LANE: I have to. We are raising money for the marching band this year, mandatory booth manning is involved … It’s for letters so we can finally have letter carriers. For some reason, the powers that be think that the reason we never win at competitions is because no one knows who we are. The fact that we suck has never occurred to them. What’s wrong with our uniforms?
Another festival – the Stars Hollow High School Winter Carnival, which is held around mid-January. It is always a fundraiser, and this year it’s raising money for the school marching band to have letters spelling out their name at interschool competitions.
In the early 2000s, it was free to apply to up to three colleges, but after that you had to pay a small application fee for each one. Because of this, it was common to only make three applications, and it looks as if Rory applied to three universities: Harvard, Princeton (where her paternal grandfather went), and Yale (where her maternal grandfather went). She probably didn’t want to ask Lorelai for the money for further applications, knowing that she’d be upset about it, nor did she want to go behind her mother’s back and ask her grandparents for the money.
Lorelai acts as if applying to Yale is a complete shock, even though she knows Rory had an interview there, and she herself read a brochure about it, as if she was trying to get used to the idea. Apparently she needed a lot more time for it to sink in.
Chilton would certainly not permit Rory to only apply to Harvard. It is staggering that Lorelai wouldn’t already know this – she did attend a private school, even if she never ended up applying to university. And even if she somehow didn’t know this from her school or her parents (surely Richard and Emily would have talked to her about college?), it’s something which she should have educated herself about if she wanted to help Rory get into Harvard.
It also seems very telling that Rory has never talked this over with Lorelai, but kept her college applications a secret from her mother. It seems that she was so nervous about how Lorelai would react that she never discussed it with her. Lorelai’s overreaction at dinner shows that she was right to be wary about it, but then again, Lorelai probably wouldn’t have overreacted so badly in public if Rory had talked about it with her first.
DOUGLAS: We have a grandson your age, he’s going through hell.
NATALIE: He’s already been turned down for early admission to Stanford, his dream.
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California, in the San Francisco Bay area, ranked among the top universities in the world. It was founded in 1885 by US Senator and former governor of California Leland Stanford and his wife Jane, in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr, and opened in 1891 as a coeducational institution.
After World War II, the university’s provost, Frederick Terman, supported faculty and graduates to build a self-sufficient local industry that would later become known as Silicon Valley. It also houses the conservative public policy think tank, the Hoover Institution, one of the most influential of its kind in the world.
85 Nobel laureates, 29 Turing Award laureates, and eight Fields Medallists have been affiliated with Stanford as students, alumni, faculty, or staff. Stanford alumni have founded numerous companies, which combined produce more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue and have created 5.4 million jobs as of 2011, roughly equivalent to the seventh largest economy in the world.
Stanford has won more College Athletics team championships than any other university, and Stanford students and alumni have won almost 300 Olympic medals.
Stanford is the alma mater of US President Herbert Hoover, 74 living billionaires, and 17 astronauts. Its alumni include the current presidents of Yale and MIT and the provosts of Harvard and Princeton. It is also one of the leading producers of Fulbright Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Rhodes Scholars, and members of the United States Congress.
Stanford is one of the hardest universities to get into, with an acceptance rate of less than 5% – that’s tougher than both Harvard and Yale, and indeed, all the Ivy League universities. It’s perfectly believable that Douglas and Natalie’s grandson didn’t get accepted.
In real life, the deadline for early admission to Stanford is November 1, and notifications aren’t sent out until mid-December, so Douglas and Natalie’s grandson couldn’t really know he’d been turned down by Thanksgiving. (Although, if it is just before Christmas, according to the show’s actual timeline, this would make sense!).
TEACHER: The multi-layered membrane systems of the cytoplasm are the smooth endoplasmic reticulum, the rough endoplasmic reticulum, and the Golgi body. Now, the smooth endoplasmic reticulum is concerned with the manufacture of lipid molecules.
Cytoplasm: all of the material within a cell, enclosed by the cell membrane, except for the cell nucleus.
Endoplasmic reticulum: the transportation system of the cell, and has many other important functions. It is made up of the rough endoplasmic reticulum and smooth endoplasmic reticulum.
Golgi body (or Golgi apparatus): a sub-unit of most cells, particularly important in processing proteins.
Lipid: a broad group of molecules which includes fats, fatty acids, cholesterol, and fat-soluble vitamins (such as A, D, E, and K).
[Later that night, Rory walks into her bedroom, turns out the light and tries to go to sleep. A moment later, she turns the light back on, grabs her Yale brochure from her night table and starts reading it. Upstairs, Lorelai is reading the same brochure in her bedroom.]
The episode ends with both the Gilmore girls reading a Yale brochure, so the viewer can tell that Rory is now seriously considering applying, and Lorelai is also trying to get used to the idea.
The application deadline for Yale is immediately after the New Year, in early January, so Rory has time still to put together a good application.
LORELAI: Don’t study so much that you get brilliant, go mad, grow a big bald egghead and try to take over the world, okay, ’cause I wanna go shoe shopping this weekend.
Lorelai sounds as if she is referring to the fictional character Ernst Stavro Blofeld from the James Bond novels and films, created by British author Ian Fleming. He is a criminal mastermind and the chief antagonist of the series, instantly recognisable from his bald head. He has been played by several actors, but his portrayal by Donald Pleasance is often thought of as “the classic Blofeld”.
Ernest Blofeld gained degrees political history and economics, and also engineering and radionics, but used his formidable intellect for nefarious purposes. He becomes completely insane by the end of the book series, and is obsessed with gaining world domination.
Ernst Blofeld has been often parodied in film and television, including the character of Dr Evil in the Austin Powers movies.
HARRIS: It was a pleasure to meet you. I’ll read that book you recommended.
RORY: And don’t be fooled by the Oprah seal on the cover, it’s actually very good.
Rory refers to Oprah’s Book Club, a segment on the Oprah Winfrey Show, which highlighted books selected by the host, Oprah Winfrey. It ran from 1996 until 2011 (with a hiatus in 2002), and in that time it recommended 70 books. Because of the book club’s popularity, previously obscure works could become bestsellers, making an Oprah’s Book Club seal on the cover a highly influential piece of marketing.
Rory does not tell Richard (or the viewer) which book she recommended to the Dean of Admissions. However, due to the aforesaid hiatus, Oprah’s Book Club only recommended two works in 2002. My guess is that Rory recommended Sula, a 1973 novel by Toni Morrison, and her second published work.
The novel is set in the 1920s and ’30s in a fictional small town in Ohio (a favourite setting for Dawn Powell stories, one of Rory’s most admired authors). It is about two black girls named Nel and Sula who are close friends, but who take different paths in life (rather like Rory and Lane). While Nel chooses marriage, motherhood, and the close bonds of the town’s black community, Sula goes to college, lives in the city, and defies conventional sexual morality, bringing down condemnation from the town’s community.
It feels like a book which Rory would be interested in, and would also think suitable to recommend to a Dean, since it is by a Nobel Prize winning author, and the plot involves college and female education.
EMILY: But think about this – you’re fighting so hard to send Rory off to Harvard no matter what that you haven’t even stopped for one second to consider that if she went to Yale, she could live at home.
It doesn’t seem feasible for Rory to live full-time at home while attending Yale, and she’d miss out on the whole college experience. Emily might mean that Rory could live at home on the weekends. When Rory does go to Yale, she spends at least her first semester coming home every weekend, or nearly every weekend.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 