PARIS: Why does one pinhead always have to vote for Jerry Garcia?
Jerome “Jerry” Garcia (1942-1995), musician best known for being the principal songwriter, lead guitarist, and a vocalist with the rock band Grateful Dead, which he co-founded and which came to prominence during the counterculture of the 1960s. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 as a member of the Grateful Dead.
He had already passed away at this stage, so the votes for him as commencement speaker were definitely jokes.
PARIS: I knew that suggestion box was a bad idea. Watch Choate get Joan Didion while we’re being read “Eloise at the Plaza”.
Paris refers to Eloise: A Book for Precocious Grown-Ups, a 1955 book by Kay Thompson, illustrated by Hilary Knight. Originally marketed to adults, in 1969 it was released as a children’s book as Eloise, with no changes to the text or illustrations.
Eloise is a mischievous six-year-old girl who lives in the penthouse of the Plaza Hotel in New York City with her nanny, pet pug dog and pet turtle. Thompson based Eloise on an imaginary friend she had in childhood, although it has been speculated that her goddaughter Liza Minelli may have been a possible model. There are several books in the Eloise series, but Eloise never ages. In April 2003, a Disney television film was broadcast called Eloise at the Plaza, with Sofia Vassilieva in the title role.
A fan theory, which you may take with as many grains of salt as you wish, is that Louise was named after the character Eloise. I cannot think of any way that could be confirmed or denied, but it doesn’t seem that implausible. Louise and Eloise both have blonde hair, are rich and spoiled, rather bratty, and have unavailable, neglectful parents.
Kay Thompson died in 1998, so could not have been the commencement speaker, and famously hated her fans, so would be unlikely to agree to it anyway. Hilary Knight is still alive, but it doesn’t seem likely that he would have done it either.
MICHEL: It was one of the premiere hotel schools in the world. You two, on the other hand, are going to take a two-hour course at the Radisson.
Radisson Hotels, international hotel chain headquartered in Minnetonka, Minnesota. The first hotel was opened in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1909, by Chicago heiress Edna Dickerson. A high-end luxury hotel, it was bought by the Carlson Company in 1962, and the chain had 32 locations by 1982, becoming one of the top hotel chains by 2013. It was bought out by Choice Hotels in 2022.
The Radisson Hotel in Hartford [pictured] is at 50 Morgan Street South, and it hosts conventions and other events. Does this mean The Learning Center holds it classes at the Radisson, or just this one? Somehow, Michel has turned a one-day course into a two-hour course.
MICHEL: Oh, yes, that’s right. Tomorrow the two of you go back to school. LORELAI: It’s not school, it’s a one-day course at The Learning Center.
In real life, The Learning Center in Hartford is a preschool program for small children. There are a few adult education centres in Hartford, but they tend to focus on government programs such as GED testing, citizenship tests, and learning English as a second language.
Jackson learned beekeeping, how to buy foreclosed real estate, and diary writing, and all these educational opportunities are available in Connecticut (although not at the same place), so this doesn’t seem unrealistic.
EMILY: If you pay for first class and the airline sticks you in coach, people expect you to be upset. No one calls you demanding or unreasonable. And yet here is this woman whom I pay more than she can get anywhere else in Hartford, whose severance package could finance a summer cruise down the Rhine, dragging me into court saying that I was unfair.
The Rhine, the second-longest river in Central and Western Europe, at 1230 km (760 miles). It rises in the Swiss Alps, flows predominantly through Germany, and ends in the Netherlands, where it empties into the North Sea. It has been a vital waterway since the days of the Roman Empire, and cities along it include Basel, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Strasbourg, and Rotterdam.
Cruises down the Rhine are expensive, around $5000 per person for even a modest one. As Emily’s maids never seem to last more than about a week, it seems implausible they could have a generous severance package such as she describes.
Jess and Rory have plans to meet up at 9 pm after the winter carnival, as Jess doesn’t want to go. However, Rory “coincidentally” runs into Dean on the way, who is taking his little sister Clara to the carnival. Clara asks if Rory can go to the carnival with she and Dean, and before she has a chance to give an answer, Jess suddenly decides he is going too. He possessively puts his hand on Rory’s back while they walk behind Dean and Clara.
Jess is not only irritated that Rory is being friendly with Dean and that he feels forced to accompany Rory to the carnival, but by Clara’s insistent questions and comments to him. Clara is ten or eleven by now, but behaves more like a child of five or six in this episode.
We’ve never seen her act like this before, she’s always been quiet and rather sweet, if a little young for her age, so I wonder if Clara is deliberately trying to annoy Jess. She may see him as the horrible boy who took Rory away from Dean, and therefore away from her as well. Between Dean and Clara, Jess has the awful time at the carnival he had been expecting.
RORY: I can be just as big a pain in your butt as you are in Paris’s, capiche?
Capiche, previously discussed.
All those references to Rory and Lorelai being fans of The Godfather and other gangster films pay off (??) when Rory suddenly starts acting like a high school crime boss in this episode.
FRANCIE: Hey, no one is denying Gidget a chance to snag Moondoggie for the clambake, but the rest of us have things to accomplish.
A reference to the film Gidget, previously discussed. In the film, Moondoggie (played by James Darren) was Gidget’s love interest and eventual boyfriend. They didn’t really attend a clambake, but a luau. Presumably Francie thinks a clambake is the closest thing to a luau in New England.
TRIX: Well, for the past year, I’ve been renting my home in Hartford to a group of musicians. They’ve recently moved out, so I had to come check on the house and secure a new tenant.
LORELAI: What kind of musicians?
TRIX: A rock and roll group of some sort. I believe they call themselves Korn.
Korn, a nu metal band formed in Bakersfield, California in 1993. The band is notable for pioneering the nu metal genre and bringing it into the mainstream. Their self-titled debut album was released in 1994, receiving positive reviews, and being credited with establishing the new wave of metal. Mainstream success came with Follow the Leader (1998) and Issues (1999), both of which debuted at #1. The band has sold more than 40 million records worldwide and have two Grammy Awards.
In real life they lived in Los Angeles in the early 2000s, not in Hartford.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 