RORY: I’m just saying I’m no stranger to the Big Apple.
JESS: You are if you’re calling it the Big Apple.
The Big Apple is a nickname for New York City, first popularised in the 1920s by John FitzGerald, a sports writer for The New York Morning Telegraph. Its popularity since the 1970s is mostly due to a promotional campaign by the city’s tourism authorities to boost the city during a fiscal crisis.
Although Rory says she’s been to New York a few times, she only mentions The Bangles concert in 2001 and a 2000 shopping trip where she didn’t even get out of the car. This could very well be her third trip to New York (and the second where her feet touched the ground!).
RORY: And a couple years ago Mom drove us in to shop, and she couldn’t find a good parking place and all of the parking lots were a total rip-off, so she kept making U-turns and cutting off taxis and we were being screamed at in so many different languages that we just turned around and drove home and bought a Hummel at the curio store in Stars Hollow.
Hummel figurines, often just called Hummels, are a series of porcelain figurines based on the drawings of Sister Maria Innocentia Hummel, a German nun from the Franciscan Order. These sketches began to appear in Germany and Switzerland during the 1930s, mostly pastoral scenes of children.
Porcelain-maker Franz Goebel acquired the rights to turn the sketches into figurines, the first line produced in 1935. Introduced at the Leipzig Trade Fair, they quickly found American distributors. The popularity of Hummels grew after World War II as American soldiers stationed in West Germany began sending them home as gifts.
Nostalgia was a big factor in the figurines becoming popular, and they were commonly purchased during European travel as souvenirs. During the 1970s, prices began to skyrocket, and the M.I. Hummel Club was founded in 1977. Today a genuine Hummel would cost over $100 for a small piece, to more than $1000 for a larger and more elaborate one.
Lorelai bought a Hummel in 2000, presumably before the show opens in September of that year. Although I can see how Lorelai would appreciate the kitschy appeal of these collectables, I cannot recall actually seeing a Hummel on display in their house.
[Jess is reading on a bench as Rory walks up behind him]
RORY: Hi.
JESS: How ya doing?
After all the effort Rory has made to come to New York, apparently on a whim, she seemingly just walks in a side gate of Washington Square Park and finds Jess straight away (Rory is looking pretty fresh for someone who’s been on a bus for hours and just had a long walk). He’s sitting helpfully on a prominent park bench right at the entrance. It is now presumably somewhere between midday and 12.30 pm.
I know Jess was very lucky, phoning Rory when Lorelai was drunk and had the stereo on loudly so they could talk in private, but it’s nothing to Rory’s luck in finding Jess! All she had to go on was that he often hung out in Washington Square Park, and without making any plans to meet at a particular day, place, or time, it looks as if she turns up and Jess is right there. I mean, even if Jess was in the park, it’s ten acres – it could take hours to search for him. And lucky he hadn’t gone to the toilet or to lunch just as she arrived!
It would have been more believable if Rory and Jess had some sort of agreement to meet in New York, but that would have made Rory much more sneaky, treacherous, and selfish. It has to seem completely spontaneous, so that the relationship between Rory and Jess can remain innocent.
None of the scenes in this episode were actually filmed in New York – they were all shot at the Warner Bros lot in California. This scene takes place in New York Park, Burbank. There is no side gate such as the one Rory walks through, and if she approached Washington Square Park straight down Fifth Avenue, she would come to the main entrance, with the famous archway. Needless to say, it doesn’t look like Washington Square Park, and the real park is far more crowded, especially on a sunny spring afternoon around lunchtime.
Rory gets off the bus at the Port Authority Bus Terminal at 625 Eighth Avenue, in the heart of Times Square. She asks strangers for directions – because the super organised Rory has of course headed off to New York without a map, or even looking at a map! Impulsive Rory has taken over, and she doesn’t check anything!
Someone eventually tells her that Washington Square is at the end of Fifth Avenue, upon which Rory starts asking people where Fifth Avenue is. Basically, Rory has been directed to walk along West 41st Street and across (or past) Bryant Park until she reaches Fifth Avenue – it’s three blocks and perhaps 10 minutes walk from the bus terminal. Once on Fifth Avenue, she can walk straight there – but it is a distance of almost two more miles, almost forty blocks, and more than half an hour on foot, carrying a heavy backpack!
Google Maps tell me it would be slightly quicker (by about five minutes) for Rory to walk straight down Eighth Avenue and then approach Washington Square Park on an angle via Greenwich Avenue, but I think the directions she received were less likely to get her lost or confused – just straight across, then straight down. The numbered grid pattern of Manhattan streets makes it relatively easy to navigate the city.
It’s more than two hours from Hartford to New York City by bus, so, presuming Rory was able to get a bus fairly quickly after leaving Chilton, it might be around 11.30-11.45 am when she arrives at the bus terminal. She still has quite a bit more of her journey ahead of her.
“Ask a New Yorker” informs us that New Yorkers are actually very ready, even eager, to give directions to tourists and strangers in town, but you should always ask at least a couple of people, because sometimes their directions aren’t that great. (They know their own small part of the city very well, the rest of it, not so much).
New Yorkers walk an average of five miles a day getting around the city, and they walk fast, so Rory is getting straight into New York mode by hitting the pavement and wearing out shoe leather. Hopefully all that walking around Stars Hollow has kept her fit – although at the start of the episode, she moaned about getting sore feet just walking to Sookie’s house …
Rory walks through Chilton’s front gates with Paris, Paris doing all the talking. As Paris heads to her locker, Rory looks around apprehensively, then walks back through the gates. She’s not only skipping school but also missing out on a meeting of the school paper which she told Lorelai she had after school, meaning she wouldn’t be at the graduation ceremony until 6 pm. This doesn’t seem like something a really keen journalist would do. Perhaps Rory hopes to make it back to school in time for the meeting.
Skipping school for no reason, especially at this crucial point of the school year, seems like something Chilton wouldn’t be very impressed about (let alone Paris). However, we never see Rory face any consequences for it. Perhaps she made up the work she missed, or Lorelai wrote the school a note or something to explain her absence.
Note that even while approaching the school with Paris, Rory is already looking away as if wishing she was somewhere else, or looking for an escape route.
PARIS: Branch is a graduate of MIT and Henemen went to Berkley. Berkley! I mean, he may have majored in Math but what did he minor in? Bean sprouts? Forget it.
Berkeley, the oldest campus of the University of California, a public research university founded in 1868, previously mentioned. The oldest university in California, Berkeley hosts many leading research institutes, including the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and the Space Sciences Laboratory. It founded and maintains close relationships with three national laboratories, and has played a prominent role in many scientific advances.
Among its alumni, faculty and researchers, Berkeley has more Nobel laureates, Turing Award winners (25), Fields Medalists (14), and Wolf Prize winners (30) than any other public university in the nation; it is affiliated with 30 Pulitzer Prizes, 19 Academy Awards, and more MacArthur “Genius Grants” (108) and National Medals of Science (68) than any other public institution. The university has produced seven heads of state or government; six chief justices, 22 cabinet-level officials; 11 governors; and 25 living billionaires.
It is also a leading producer of Fulbright Scholars, MacArthur Fellows, and Marshall Scholars. Berkeley alumni, widely recognized for their entrepreneurship, have founded numerous notable companies, including Apple, Tesla, Intel, eBay, SoftBank, AIG, and Morgan Stanley.
The writers seem to love giving supposedly smart Paris silly and ill-informed things to say, and this time it’s that Calculus teacher Heneman can’t be any good because he went to Berkeley – one of the best universities in the world, with a powerhouse record in Mathematics and Science.
Her questionable belief seems to stem from the fact that Berkeley is in California, and therefore “hippie”, and from the the university’s history in the 1960s, when it had a reputation for political activism. I find it hard to believe that an intelligent student in 2002 could be basing her ideas about Berkeley from events which occurred twenty years before she was born!
After awkwardly running into each other at Doose’s Market, Lorelai attempts a reconciliation, but Luke evades her overture by saying he has to get back to work. He is not ready to forgive her yet, and it’s another sign to Lorelai that Jess being gone has not really solved any of her problems.
I’m not sure what Luke came into the market for, but he’s just left without buying anything, so whatever it was, he didn’t get it!
Note that Frosted Flakes breakfast cereal is shown in the background, which was so prominent in the scene where Lorelai discovers Jess will be moving to Stars Hollow.
LORELAI: My community college doesn’t even have a lawn, they won’t necessarily have a ceremony.
Rory is correct: community colleges have graduation ceremonies, like any other college. You don’t need a lawn – they can be held in an auditorium, theatre, gym or even a separate hired venue.
The fact that Lorelai’s college isn’t having one, only her business class as a separate event, is obviously just to fit in with the restrictions of filming the episode.
As with so many episodes written by Daniel Palladino, I cannot follow the timeline of this episode very easily. It opens early in the morning, and we know it’s a school day, because Rory is dressed in her Chilton uniform. Yes, she has to get a bus to school, and they can’t go to the diner, so it makes perfect sense for them to walk a long way for a friend to cook them breakfast! They really should have just made their own breakfast, for practical reasons.
However, the next few scenes have Rory dressed in her normal clothes and Lorelai isn’t at work, so that it seems to be the weekend. That implies they had breakfast at Sookie’s on a Friday morning, but the previous episode ended on Friday night. And they can’t have skipped a week, because Rory was meant to have her cast removed in two weeks, so it would have been gone by that time.
I think just as “PS I Lo … ” has two Thursdays in a row, there are two Fridays in a row as we transition from “Help Wanted” and “Lorelai’s Graduation Day”.
The timeline issue could have been fixed by simply making their breakfast on Saturday morning, which makes sense because they always eat out for breakfast on Saturday, and they would have plenty of time to walk to Sookie’s (and Lane would have the free time to practice drumming on pots and pans). It would even make it slightly more plausible that Jackson was sitting around in his PJs and not at work.
Possibly the problem isn’t the fault of the writer this time, but of the costume department, for putting Rory in a school uniform she shouldn’t have been wearing. The only way I can make sense of this is for Rory to have run out of clean clothes and forced to wear her uniform on a weekend – or she has some school activity that Saturday, like a debate, and is already dressed for it.
LORELAI: Hey, what’s with Narcoleptic Nate over there?
[Jackson, who is leaning against the counter with his eyes closed, moans]
SOOKIE: He’s not much of a morning person.
Slightly unbelievably, Jackson, a market gardener, isn’t much good in the mornings, and needs at least an hour of sitting around semi-comatose in his pyjamas before he wakes up. Shouldn’t he be getting up at dawn every day for work? I feel as if market gardeners are, by the nature of their profession, early risers, especially in spring. You can’t just wander in at 9.15 am with a cup of coffee, saying, “Wow traffic was really bad this morning, huh?” to the tomatoes.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 