TAYLOR: This, young lady, is for the first annual Stars Hollow End of Summer Madness Festival.
LORELAI: You finally found a way to fill September, didn’t ya?
The previous season, there was some sort of Harvest Festival in early September, with scenes of happy people bringing sheaves of wheat to the centre of town, and hanging autumn leaf decorations on lamp posts. The season before that, there was a Teen Hayride in mid-September. It seems like September was getting filled with activities already.
Note that after Lorelai finishes talking to Taylor, she takes a wistful look at Luke, working in his diner, to remind us that she and Luke still aren’t speaking to one another.
Jackson is referring to actress and singer Judy Garland, previously discussed and frequently mentioned, and her husband Vincente Minnelli, born Lester Minnelli (1903-1986). A director of theatre and film, he directed famous films such as Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), An American in Paris (1951), and Gigi (1958). He was married to Judy Garland from 1945 to 1951, and they are the parents of actress and singer Liza Minnelli.
Despite Vincente being married to three other women during his life, and having affairs with women, for years there was speculation that he was gay or bisexual. His biographer, Emanuel Levy, claims that Vincente Minnelli was openly gay in New York, according to stories from people such as Dorothy Parker. However, if so, he seems to have gone back in the closet when he went to Hollywood.
One of the subplots of this episode is Sookie suddenly deciding that her house is too “feminine” for a man to live in now that she is married – even though Jackson was already living with her before their wedding, and has said again and again that he likes the house the way it is. Also, Sookie’s house is warm, cosy, and practical, rather than fussy and frilly.
The same thing happened during the wedding planning, when Sookie unilaterally decided that pink wedding decorations were some sort of hostile message to Jackson that his opinions weren’t important. (We only see a bit of the wedding decorations, but there seems to be some pink, among many other colours, so I’m not sure if she changed her mind or not).
Sookie and Jackson were a very cute couple for most of their courtship, but, as happened many other times in Gilmore Girls, they became almost instantly annoying once they got married. This is the first of several tiresome marital issues (or non-issues?) that they have.
Note that once again, a man liking curtains is linked to him being considered “unmanly” – Luke refused to get curtains for the diner because they were too feminine, but when Lorelai went to his apartment, she is amused to discover he had picked out floral curtains for himself. Oddly enough, the diner already has checked curtains …?
LORELAI: Give me another analysis or I’ll put your Taylor hula-hooping dream into a whole other context.
RORY: I told you, Taylor was supposed to be Dean. I could tell by his freakishly thick head of hair.
Rory had a dream while she was in Washington, apparently sexual in nature, about Taylor hula-hooping. She knows that Taylor was actually a stand-in for Dean, suggesting that she sees Dean as rather boring and irritating, like Taylor. Dreaming of hula-hoops can be indicative of a situation where you keep going around in circles – just as Rory’s relationship with Dean keeps going around the same old circle.
The dream suggests that Rory can’t see any way of breaking free of the dull routine she’s in with Dean. And nothing has changed, because although Rory has a stack of letters from Dean, sent from Chicago, where he’s on vacation, she is trying to write a letter to Jess – having got no further than writing Dear Jess.
We can see Dean’s return address on the envelopes: 106 Don Ridge Drive, Chicago IL 60620. This isn’t a real address – Don Ridge Drive is in Toronto, Ontario, a little nod to Gilmore Girlsfirst being filmed in Canada. The zip code is that of central Chicago – primarily made up of poor African-American neighbourhoods. It seems like an unlikely place for the Forester family to stay with family or friends.
There is a Ridge Drive in Chicago Ridge, a suburban village of around 14 000 people on the outskirts of Chicago. That actually seems far more believable as the area where Dean grew up.
Rory’s address in Washington is 1765 Harring, Washington DC 2005, which is entirely fictional, and doesn’t even look like a proper address, having no building name or street designation. It sounds vaguely like the Hotel Harrington, Washington’s oldest operating hotel, which is centrally located, and within walking distance of landmarks such as the White House, the Capitol, and the Smithsonian. This is certainly the area that Rory would have been staying in.
CHRISTOPHER: Sherry’s pregnant … She just found out and she called me as soon as she found out, and that was her calling to tell me that she found out.
Christopher comes to see Lorelai who is standing on the bridge, waiting for him (another mention of bridges as significant emotional spaces). He tells her that Sherry has called him on his cell phone to tell him she has just discovered she is pregnant – I presume she used a home pregnancy testing kit, as it’s a Sunday.
Oddly enough, Lorelai says, “Women all over the world will line up to see that tiny little woman fat”. Sherry isn’t a tiny little woman, she’s only a few inches shorter than Lorelai, and Lorelai is slim as well. It makes Sherry sound like a stick-thin five foot tall waif, which she isn’t. Not to mention the bizarre thinking that equates being pregnant with being “fat”.
Apparently all the terrible problems Christopher and Sherry were having were not enough to stop them from having (unprotected?) sex. It does beg the question, did Sherry even know they were supposedly having problems and Christopher was thinking of moving out? Maybe all she did was go away on business for a month or so, and Christopher used that as an opportunity to weasel his way back in to Lorelai’s life, telling her some story about how he and Sherry were practically broken up.
As a huge slap in the face to Lorelai, Christopher is going back to Sherry because she’s having a baby. Christopher was never around while Rory was growing up, and he’s apparently never forgiven himself (zero evidence of that, but whatever). He can’t make that mistake again, so it’s back to his girlfriend that he doesn’t love, so he can be a father to their child. (This is actually a terrible basis for a relationship).
It doesn’t make any sense, because he could still be a good father to his second child without going back to Sherry (and I bet while telling her nothing of what he’s been up to with Lorelai in the interim). For that matter, he could have been a good father to Rory while not being with Lorelai all this time.
Notice that when Rory questions why her dad has a work phone call on a Sunday, he responds, “Hey, I have a lot of responsibility now”. Little did he know how true those words would turn out to be!
At the wedding, Lorelai lets her parents know that she and Christopher are back together – even though Christopher still hasn’t broken up with his girlfriend, Sherry! A teensy detail that nobody even bothers asking about or suggests might need a little more thought (or at least waiting for Sherry to get back from her business trip).
While Emily and Richard are quietly pleased about the news, Rory is by no means automatically thrilled about getting Daddy Dearest back in her life. In fact, she is justifiably suspicious of his motives, saying that both she and Lorelai have been waiting for this for a long time, and they cannot take another disappointment from the ever-disappointing Christopher.
Amusingly, she warns Christopher, “We take disappointment extremely hard. I mean it. Property damage is often involved”. In the next season, Rory and Lorelai will resort to property damage due to their romantic disappointments. It’s also a foreshadowing of Rory’s even more spectacular disappointment and property issues later on in the story.
Paris rings Rory on Dean’s cell phone while they are at Sookie and Jackson’s wedding to tell her that they have won the election. It’s a rather strange scene, because it shows Paris at Chilton, with what looks like students and teachers busily counting the votes for the school President elections.
But the election was on Friday, and it’s now Sunday – have they been counting votes all weekend? Couldn’t this have waited until Monday? And why does it take all weekend – surely Chilton doesn’t have that many students?
Also, they clearly haven’t finished counting votes, they are still working at it. And this isn’t a recount either, because the scrutineers are taking the votes straight from the original boxes. How does Paris know she has won already? Is there a tally board up somewhere, so Paris can see that she already has an unbeatable lead?
And Paris says the real clincher was that they got the votes from the school band, which was always a wild card, as the academic clubs were something they could count on. Do all the clubs vote en bloc, or does each particular club get one collective vote (which is obviously very undemocratic?). And how does Paris know all this? Isn’t the voting a secret ballot?
LUKE: I was crazy, and now after all that has happened, after all the chaos and havoc that you have wreaked, you’re seriously standing there wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a butt with hands that are flipping me off, telling me you wanna come back?
Although Luke says that Jess is wearing a tee-shirt depicting a butt with hands giving people the bird, this is not visible in the scene. It looks as if Jess is actually wearing two tee shirts, a grey one over a black one, topped with a dark windbreaker jacket.
Luke goes upstairs to his apartment and finds Jess there. Luke’s first question is how Jess got in, because the only entrance is through the diner and up the stairs, and nobody saw Jess come up. Either he was able to time his arrival so that everyone was busy and distracted just as he got there, or he was able to gain entrance by climbing into an upstairs window somehow – neither of which sounds very plausible.
Jess tells Luke that although things are fine with his mother, and he’s not in any trouble, he wants to come back to Stars Hollow and live with Luke. Luke says that things will have to be different, and Jess agrees. Luke informs Jess that Rory and Dean are still together, and to leave them be. Learning that Rory is at Sookie’s wedding, Jess says he needs to take a walk. Rory came all the way to New York to see him, and it looks as if Jess has returned the favour by coming all the way to Stars Hollow to see her …
Note that Luke doesn’t seem to have received an invitation to Sookie and Jackson’s wedding. Perhaps Sookie has left him off the guest list in support of her bridesmaid, Lorelai, since he and Lorelai are still in an argument. Or perhaps he turned the invitation down, pleading work as an excuse, since he is running the diner as usual.
RORY: Do you happen to know where the almonds I made for table five went?
LORELAI: No.
RORY: ‘Cause they were here last night before Sookie’s dinner.
Rory spends six hours wrapping Jordan almonds in tulle as wedding favours for Sookie and Jackson, only for Lorelai to eat some of them, because Gilmore girls are fun and quirky, and do what they want. Good work teaching your daughter that stealing is cute, Lorelai. Keep at it – just a few more examples, and I’m sure the message will sink in!
Also – six hours to make forty wedding favours? How slowly does Rory work? Each one should only take a couple of minutes.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 