Footnotes to the TV series
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”.
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 17th 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.
RORY: She made you apply to every one [of the colleges]?
LANE: And measured my head for a wimple.
Wimple, a medieval form of female headcovering, formed of a large piece of cloth worn draped around the neck and chin, covering the top of the head. Its use developed in early medieval Europe; in medieval Christianity it was unseemly for a married woman to show her hair. Today a plain wimple is worn by the nuns of certain orders who retain a traditional habit.
Once again, the show (or Lane?) somehow conflates Mrs Kim’s Seventh Day Adventism with Catholicism, something that seems to happen a lot.
MRS. KIM: They’re all good religious programs, and I’ve already thrown out the ones that let boys and girls sit in the cafeteria together, the party schools.
Party school, a college or university with a reputation for heavy drinking and drug use, or a general culture of licentiousness at the expense of educational credibility and integrity. It’s a term mostly used in the US, and The Princeton Review publishes a list of “party schools”. The University of Connecticut is on it.
Mrs Kim considers any college where boys and girls are permitted to sit together to eat a “party school”. In real life, Seventh Day Adventist colleges and universities often do have restrictions on contact between male and female students, but nothing so extreme as not letting them eat together, that I have heard about.
MRS. KIM: College applications … Every one in this pile approved by me and Reverend Melmin.
Last season Lane mentioned “the reverend” who takes them for Bible study class on Saturday morning plays handball. Now we discover his name is Reverend Melmin, who must be the pastor of the Seventh Day Adventist congregation in Stars Hollow. In real life, Seventh Day Adventist pastors aren’t actually addressed as “Reverend”, I think he would be “Pastor Melmin”.
LORELAI: I’m a success, who’d have thought? … From rags to riches . . . I wonder why Larry King hasn’t called.
Larry King, born Lawrence Zeiger (1933-2021), award-winning television and radio host. A radio interviewer in the Miami area in the 1950s and ’60s, he gained prominence in 1978 as the host of The Larry King Show, an all-night nationwide call-in radio program. From 1985 to 2010 he hosted the nightly interview TV program, Larry King Live on CNN. He continued hosting TV interview shows until his death at the age of 87.
Lorelai hasn’t really gone from rags to riches … she’s gone from riches to rags to a moderately comfortable independent existence.
[Picture shows Larry King on CNN in 2002 with former president Bill Clinton]
Lorelai gets a phone call from Debbie Fincher, one of the mothers from Stars Hollow High School Parents and Teachers Association. We learn here that when Rory was a student at the school, Lorelai was actively involved in the PTA and got along well with the other parents, even being considered “a kick” because of her wicked sense of humour (very much like Emily, as it happens).
Rory was even friends (or at least friendly) with Debbie’s daughter Kathy Fincher, and used to go to her house to swim in their pool. Perhaps Kathy was one of the mysterious Stars Hollow girls who appeared at Rory’s sixteenth birthday party, and was never seen again? It does seem a little odd that Rory lives in a small town with teenagers that she went to school with and was apparently even friends with, yet has only kept in contact with Lane. Perhaps she runs into them offscreen.
The reason for Debbie’s call is to ask Lorelai to give a talk at the high school about her success in business, and to think of someone else they might ask. Lorelai agrees, and promptly suggests Luke as the second person.
Debbie Fincher is played by Heidi Swedberg, who had been in TV series such as Northern Exposure (1991), Murder She Wrote (1994), and Touched by an Angel (1996). She was best known for playing George Costanza’s fiancée Susan Ross in Seinfeld (1992-1997).
LANE: No, you’re thinking your mom, here, Rory. If I said that to mine, she’d start waving a crucifix at me.
A crucifix is a cross with an image of Jesus on it, as distinct from a plain cross. The word comes from the Latin for “fixed to a cross”. It’s a principal symbol in Christianity, particularly for those in the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox faiths.
Seventh Day Adventists, like many Protestant religions, don’t actually use crucifixes, or wear crosses on chains, and often Seventh Day Adventist churches don’t even have a plain cross. Gilmore Girls seems to use Mrs Kim as a sort of grab-bag of extreme religious tropes and clichés, even when it doesn’t make any logical sense.
[Shane rushes over to Jess at the counter]
LORELAI: That girl’s a freak.
[Jess and Shane start kissing]
Lorelai says that Shane is a “freak” because she kisses her boyfriend in public – something Rory does all the time, and something Lorelai did when she was a teenager! It’s a pretty terrible thing to say about a teenager who is literally right there.
Even though Lorelai doesn’t want Rory to go out with Jess, for some reason she seems miffed that Jess has chosen somebody else, and snipes about Shane (she should be grateful Shane is making Jess unavailable). She may be trying to send Rory the message that only a “freak” would go out with Jess.
LANE: Hello Stars Hollow, are you ready to rock?
LORELAI: Let me guess, band practice tonight?
Lane was given permission by Sophie to use the music store to practice drumming two evenings a week, on Wednesdays and Fridays at 6 pm (evenings when she knew her mother would be out doing church activities). Lane is now really pushing that generous offer by finding a band that needs a drummer and letting them use Sophie’s music store as a free rehearsal space! It sounds like a pretty awful way to repay Sophie, but maybe Lane already fixed this up with Sophie offscreen. I hope so.
You may be wondering whether this episode starts on a Wednesday evening – it can’t be Friday, because Lorelai and Rory are having dinner at the diner, instead of heading off to Hartford for Friday Night Dinner with Richard and Emily. It appears to be a Saturday, oddly enough, so perhaps Lane also got Sophie to agree to a third evening of band practice per week. How Sophie would have agreed to all these changes to the orginal agreement, I don’t know.
This scene shows how happy Lane is to finally be in a band and playing music, she is absolutely radiating joy as she bounces into the diner and starts eating Rory’s dinner. Lane isn’t making any effort to keep her activities a secret, and even though Stars Hollow is super gossipy, she doesn’t seem worried about Mrs Kim finding out. Maybe that’s how confident she feels now she’s actually living her dream.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 