Yet Another Confusing Timeline

This is an episode written by Daniel Palladino, so it’s time for … another confusing timeline! This one is a bit more complex than simply having no Friday Night Dinner on a Friday, or Rory wearing her school uniform on a Saturday morning, so bear with me, as I know many fans have real trouble wrapping their heads around this one.

The talk at the high school is on a Thursday at 4 pm, so it’s an after-school event (it’s amazing how many important events schools hold out of hours and on weekends in the Gilmore Girls universe). Luke tries to cancel over the phone, and Lorelai tells him that the careers talk is being held the next day, so we know that it’s Wednesday at this point.

We then cut to Rory and Lane walking down the street together, so school is over for the day. Rory is in her school uniform, and Lane is wearing tan trousers and a denim jacket over a striped red sweater. They go into Stars Hollow Beauty Supply to buy the bleach and purple dye for Lane’s hair, and are served by Shane, wearing a brown lace-up blouse with a pattern of roses on it.

We then cut to Lorelai and Luke; Lorelai is helping Luke get dressed up for the careers talk at the school, so we know it is now Thursday, and presumably some time around 3.30 pm. Jess is already home from school, and he has Shane stashed in the closet, so whatever time she starts work at the beauty store, it hasn’t begun yet.

We then cut to Rory preparing to bleach Lane’s hair (for some reason they are doing it at Lane’s house, where she fears her mother coming home and finding them, instead of doing it at Rory’s house). Rory has changed out of her uniform into jeans and an orange sweater, and Lane is now wearing blue jeans and a striped green sweater.

Rory and Lane must have bought the hair dye from Shane on Wednesday afternoon, because it’s now Thursday afternoon, they are wearing different clothes, and Shane isn’t at work yet.

When Lane panics about her purple hair, she sends Rory back to the beauty store to buy black dye. Rory is wearing a denim jacket over her orange sweater, and Shane is now at work, out of the closet, and wearing a different brown blouse – this one does up with a drawstring and has a wide scoop neckline.

Then we see Stars Hollow after the talk at the school, so it’s presumably some time after 5 pm. Rory and Lane are now wearing different outfits – Rory is in blue jeans and a denim jacket, with a turquoise tee shirt, and Lane is wearing a dark red V-neck sweater with blue jeans. But let us assume that they changed their clothes because they smelled of bleach and dye or something, and also assume that Rory keeps a change of clothing at Lane’s house or brought one with her, because there’s been no time for her to go home and get changed.

Then Jess and Shane walk past them – Shane is still wearing the brown blouse from work, now with a brown jacket over it. So Shane was at Jess’ place around 3.30 pm, where she hid in his closet. She then went to work at the beauty store, selling Rory the black hair dye. Then by around 5 pm, she’s finished at the store, having put in a full hour’s work for the day.

I guess this sort of makes sense – if it’s an after-school job, she might only work there from 4-5.30 pm, but who is working at the store the rest of the time, and why couldn’t they work that extra 90 minutes per day? Another possibility is that Shane has already left school, works full-time at the beauty store, and simply sneaked out of work to see Jess, closing the store for half an hour or so.

This timeline almost fits, except for the fact there’s simply not enough time for all these events to take place. Rory doesn’t get out of school until 4.05 pm, and has a 40 minute bus ride home, yet somehow she is bleaching Lane’s hair around 3.30 pm, and has already had time to change out of her uniform. And Lane gets her hair bleached, dyed, then dyed again, all in the space of, at most, two hours (rather than days). But these quibbles are pretty much par for the course on Gilmore Girls, and nothing out of the ordinary for its usual wacky timeline.

So there you have it, this is how Shane managed to be hidden in the closet, and at work to sell Rory the black hair dye. It requires an awful lot of suspension of belief, and the usual rubber-band timeline, but the viewer can just manage to comprehend it. Of course, it wouldn’t be possible in the real world, but by Gilmore Girls standards, it’s almost coherent. Almost.

Show and Tell, Banana and a Condom

LORELAI: You’re all acting like I walked into that room tossing condoms in the air.

LOIS: You might as well have.

LORELAI: Fine, next time I will. I’ll bring a banana and we’ll have a little show and tell.

Show and tell, also called show and share, or sharing time, is a common classroom activity in elementary school or primary school in North America, the UK, New Zealand, and Australia. Typically, a child will bring an item from home to discuss it.

Lorelai refers to sex education classes where teenagers are taught about safe sex by learning to put condoms on a banana.

Lorelai Gets Accosted by the Stars Hollow Moms

As Lorelai and Luke leave the school after their talks, Debbie Fincher leads a posse of concerned mothers, presumably other members of the PTA, who are appalled to hear what happened during Lorelai’s talk. Not appalled enough to put a stop to it or anything, but appalled nonetheless. It’s all to drive home the point, yet again, that Lorelai is a “cool mom” and not like any other mother around.

I am not sure how Debbie managed to get all these women together at once so quickly – were they all hiding around the corner, just waiting for Debbie to come fetch them? Did Debbie leave early in order to round the other mothers up? I suppose we are meant to presume that their lives are so empty that they have literally nothing better to do.

Note that the Stars Hollow moms all dress alike in the same kind of brown patterned cardigan, and all wear blonde bobbed wigs. It’s the episode for bad wigs, this one.

According to the credits, the other two mothers besides Debbie who speak to Lorelai are called Jan and Lois, played by Julie Wittner and Merry Simkins.

G.E.D.

LORELAI: No, technically, I didn’t drop out. I, uh, I kept going as long as I could while I got pregnant, which I would recommend to any girl. Not the getting pregnant part, obviously. Um, although, uh, if that happens, um, you know. . . it shouldn’t. I mean, it could but you should try to avoid it. . . um, anyway, uh, I got my GED, yeah.

GED, the General Educational Development tests. These are tests in four different subjects which, when passed, provide certification that the test taker has US or Canadian high school level skills. The subjects are: Mathematical Reasoning, Reasoning Through Language Arts, Social Studies, and Science. It is an alternative to the high school diploma. It is only ever referred to as the GED.

In Connecticut, a person is eligible to register for the GED tests once they are seventeen or older, and have officially withdrawn from school for at least six months. There is a test centre in Hartford (the Adult Education Center), and if the person is under 21, testing is free ($13 if over 21 or not a military veteran).

Lorelai says that she never officially dropped out of school, and kept up her studies as long as she could. However, her former school friend Mitzi said that she hadn’t seen Lorelai since she was seven months pregnant, suggesting Lorelai didn’t return to school for the new academic year in September 1984.

At the time, there was a high school for teen mothers in Hartford that Lorelai could have attended, but I’m sure Emily would never have permitted that (the shame! The social disgrace! Lorelai having to mix with working class girls! The horror, the horror!). Lorelai said that her “conservative high school” wouldn’t let her graduate while nursing a baby, so she doesn’t seem to have found an alternative.

Lorelai was eligible to take the GED in 1985, and it would have been easy for her to access the test when she lived in Hartford. I’m guessing she took the GED while she still lived with her parents.

By the way, Lorelai was far from unusual for being a teenage mother trying to balance motherhood and education. By the early 1990s, one quarter of all births in Hartford were to a teen mother, and in 1991, more girls in the city got pregnant than graduated high school.

Lorelai’s Careers Talk Goes Off Script

Lorelai begins giving her careers talk at Stars Hollow High, but it is almost immediately hijacked by students who are more interested in hearing about when she got pregnant with Rory, and whether she regrets it. You get the distinct impression that for these teens, Lorelai has long been a source of fascination (and probably of gossip), and they have been waiting for an opportunity to ask questions about her decision to keep Rory and commit to being a single mother.

Lorelai looks to Debbie Fincher for help, but receives absolutely none – it’s a supervised event organised by the PTA, and yet nobody steps in to ask the students to keep their questions only on the subject of Lorelai’s career, not her personal life. Lorelai could have said something along these lines herself, but she makes an attempt to answer their questions honestly, to show that she’s not ashamed. Unfortunately, she makes a bit of a mess of it – by the end she is very unwisely offering to take them all out for coffee to discuss her life in more depth. Boundaries, Lorelai!

One of the girls asking questions is Riki Lindhome (she’s the one with blonde pigtails), who would play the role of Juliet in later seasons of Gilmore Girls. At that time she had had a small role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She later got her big break in Tim Robbins’ hit play, Embedded, and was then cast in her first film role by Clint Eastwood in Million Dollar Baby (2004). She’s gone on to have a successful career in film and television, and performs in a comedy duo called Garfunkel and Oates with Kate Micucci.

Butch Danes

[Luke walks over to her. His high school picture is hanging in the display case with the caption “State High Hurdles Champion: 1985 – Butch Danes”]

LUKE: For the love of . . . what’s that doing there?

Here we discover Luke’s nickname in high school was “Butch” (a very manly nickname, best known from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid).

If Luke was seventeen in 1985, that would make him the same age as Lorelai, both of them born in 1968. If he was any younger that year, he would be younger than Lorelai, which doesn’t seem likely (it’s a stretch of plausibility that he’s the same age – Scott Patterson is almost a decade older than Lauren Graham). I don’t think he can have been eighteen, because he didn’t do his final year of high school.

Luke said he didn’t have a single positive memory from high school, yet he was a star athlete and a state hurdles champion. It can’t have been all bad. It’s definitely a lot better than what Jess has been through at school.

Amish School in Nicaragua, Piece de resistance

LANE: Oh, and the piece de resistance! She found an Amish school in Nicaragua.

This is completely fictional. There are no Amish colleges or universities, as their education only goes up to eighth grade. There is an Amish community in Nicaragua, but it isn’t as strict as others – they use electricity and drive cars.

Pièce de résistance – French phrase commonly used in English. It means, “the most important or remarkable feature”.

Richard Nixon

LANE: Quaker College was a delightful surprise, with its special appeal to Richard Nixon, who’s dead but still deeply involved in campus recruiting.

Richard Nixon, former US president, previously and frequently mentioned. He was born into a evangelical Quaker family in California in 1913, and brought up in Quaker ways of the time, such as abstaining from dancing, alcohol, and swearing. He largely left his religion behind in his pursuit of political power, and doesn’t seem to have attended Quaker meetings or events in adulthood.

Nixon was offered a scholarship to Harvard, but chose to remain close to home instead and attended Whittier College in Whittier, California from 1930 to 1934, graduating with a BA in History. Although named after the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier, the college hasn’t been officially affiliated with the Society of Friends since the 1940s. A liberal arts college, Latino students make up half the population, and 75% of the students are people of colour. If Richard Nixon is recruiting students from beyond the grave, his policy is perhaps slightly unexpected.

Quaker College

LANE: Quaker College was a delightful surprise …

Quakers belong to the religious movements known as the Religious Society of Friends. Members usually share a belief that every person can experience the light of Christ within themselves. They avoid doctrines, creeds, and hierarchies, and some Quakers are non-theists, so beliefs can be very diverse. The movement arose in Britain in the 17^th century, stressing a personal relationship with Christ through reading and studying the Bible. They tend to follow a simple, truthful, peaceful, and sustainable lifestyle. There are many Quaker organisations devoted to peace and humanitarian causes.

There are fourteen Quaker colleges and universities in the US. The best known is probably Bryn Mawr College, a women’s liberal arts college in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. It’s an elite institution, and many famous women have attended, including Katharine Hepburn, poets Hilda Doolittle and Marianne Moore, and Korean-American pop star Michelle Zauner. I think Lane would be extremely lucky to go there, but I doubt her parents can afford it.

There isn’t anywhere called Quaker College – the closest would be Friends University in Wichita, Kansas [pictured]. It has an attractive campus, a strong track record of producing contemporary artists, and its choir travels the world. Again, it sounds like a pretty great option for study. Presumably Lane isn’t giving its name, but designating it as a Quaker-run college.

Seventh Day Adventist Schools

RORY: Out of twenty-three schools, there wasn’t one that you might want to go to?

LANE: It depends on what I’m looking for. Of course, all the great Seventh Day Adventist schools were represented, with their ban on dancing, gum chewing and bowling.

There are twelve Seventh Day Adventist colleges and universities in the US, and one in Canada. The closest one to Connecticut is probably Washington Adventist University, in the suburbs of Washington DC. If Lane had to apply to all of them, that leaves at least ten more she applied to that weren’t Seventh Day Adventist.

Seventh Day Adventists really do disapprove of secular dancing, seeing it as worldly and immoral. Chewing gum isn’t forbidden, but it isn’t seen as part of a healthy diet, and some older Seventh Day Adventists prefer that gum not be chewed in public.

Back in the day, I think bowling was considered an unsuitable entertainment, along with anything else that was a competitive pastime, but these days it can seen as a wholesome activity, and there are even Seventh Day Adventist bowling teams.