EMILY: Just because your own experience sitting for a portrait was bad doesn’t mean Rory’s has to be.
RORY: What portrait? I haven’t seen this.
Rory actually has seen a portrait of Lorelai – there’s one with her as a young girl with her parents in the living room. Emily is talking about a different portrait, of Lorelai when she was a teenager that never got completed, but it’s surprising that Rory doesn’t think she’s talking about the living room portrait. Young Lorelai actually doesn’t look too impressed in this one, either.
RORY: Too bad Grandpa’s not here. He likes weird food. LORELAI: Yeah, where’s he eating his weird food tonight? Argentina? Morocco? EMILY: Akron … The amenities are atrociously lacking. He had to eat at a coffee shop last night. The whole thing’s terribly insulting. He’s miserable.
Akron is a city in Ohio, with a population of nearly 200 000, although the Greater Akron area is around 700 000. It has a long history of rubber and tyre manufacturing, earning it the name Rubber Capital of the World. Today it has an economy based on manufacturing, education, healthcare, and biomedical research, with many polymer companies. Racially diverse, it has been the site of several key scenes in African-American race relations, including being the place where Marcus Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Society in 1914. Like many manufacturing centres, it suffers from the effects of air and soil pollution.
It is one of many cities which claims to have invented the hamburger, which might be one reason why Gilmore Girls doesn’t rate it as a place for fine dining. They do seem to be lacking silver service restaurants, although with a selection of delicious-looking steakhouses and grills. I feel as if Richard should have been able to find something decent to eat there, but this is the man who ate chocolate pudding with an expression like it was rat poison. Maybe his hotel wasn’t situated near any good food options.
It is one of the few times that Richard needed to travel for work within his home country. Richard seems to travel overseas an inordinate amount for someone who’s an executive at an insurance firm – is that much European travel really necessary in insurance? (Especially when a problem at their office in China was sorted out with a phone call from Richard). I wonder if being sent to Akron is another symptom of Richard being “phased out” of his job.
The episode ends with Rory back in the dining hall at Chilton, peacefully reading and listening to her Walkman. She hasn’t been made to socialise after all, and the headmaster has been forced to back down and realise that Gilmore girls have to follow their own rules.
Another girl asks if she can sit with Rory, and she takes her own book out and starts reading in silence. Rory smiles at this confirmation she is not the only person at Chilton who likes to read at lunchtime, and now she isn’t a weird loner any more. She has a lunch friend, just as Mrs Verdinas insisted she find.
According to the credits, this girl is named Lisa. She’s played by Connecticut actress Madeline Zima, who already had quite a lengthy CV at this stage, and was most famous for playing Grace Sheffield in The Nanny.
Lisa was one of the other girls who was going to be inducted by the Puffs at the same time as Rory and Paris, although she is never introduced to the viewer and never speaks to Rory that we see (they might have spoken off-screen). She is the girl wearing blue and yellow checked pyjama pants with a grey tee shirt and a blue cardigan.
Possibly Lisa was also told to find some friends, rather than sit and read at lunchtime – although if so, couldn’t Headmaster Charleston or Mrs Verdinas have simply introduced Rory and Lisa to each other, suggesting that they have something in common? You know, like a normal school? Lisa was never shown eating lunch with the Puffs, so presumably she was recruited some other way, or that occurred after Rory and Paris joined the table, and was therefore offscreen.
Do not expect to ever see Lisa again, or hear her mentioned. Did she and Rory ever speak to each other and become real friends? Did they show each other the books they were reading? Did they have anything else in common? These questions are never answered.
In an episode that doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, it finishes with a character that remains an enigma.
EDIT: This article was heavily edited with the kind assistance of Sarah M, who was able to identify Lisa as one of the girls at the Puffs induction ceremony, something I was unable to do.
LUKE: I was giving her directions for the quickest way back to Hartford. It was very romantic. I said you take a right at Deerfield, and you catch the I-5 and you take it south. Oh man, hot stuff. LORELAI: That is so typical of you. LUKE: What? LORELAI: That is not the quickest way back to Hartford. Everybody knows that you take Main to Cherry to Lynwood and then grab the I-11. Everybody knows that Luke. Everybody, apparently, but you!
Neither of these directions are realistic. The I-5 is the main interstate highway on the west coast of the US, running along the Pacific coast between Mexico and Canada. Luke also says that you travel south to Hartford from Stars Hollow, even though everything in the show suggests that you would travel north-east to reach Hartford from the town. The I-11 is a highway in Nevada, running from the Arizona state line to the city of Henderson.
At least you learn a few street names in Stars Hollow. Main (presumably the main street of town they show all the time), Deerfield, Cherry, and Lynwood.
RORY: So does that mean that you might reconsider my suspension? HEADMASTER: You’re an excellent student. You deserve to go to Harvard. I wouldn’t want to stand in the way of that.
Utterly, utterly ludicrous. No headmaster would ever tell a student they deserve to go to Harvard, especially one who’d just been caught in his office in the middle of the night. There are many excellent students, Harvard is very difficult to get in to, they won’t all make it. Yet in only her second year at Chilton, Rory is more or less told it is her right to be there.
The writers of Gilmore Girls never seemed to understand how schools and colleges actually operate. Considering how much of the show revolved around Rory’s secondary and tertiary education, it seems like something they maybe should have brushed up on.
SECRETARY: Headmaster Charleston, the parents are starting to arrive. HEADMASTER: Thank you, Mrs. Traiger.
Mrs Traiger is Headmaster Charleston’s secretary, last seen in The Lorelai’s First Day at Chilton. I’m not exactly sure what she’s doing here in this scene. Can’t Headmaster Charleston handle this situation without his secretary? Does she have all the keys to the school? Did he phone her and make her get out of bed in the middle of the night and come down to the school, just so she can make all the phone calls to the parents? This woman is not getting paid enough!
PARIS: And the connection you make with the Puffs, they last the rest of your life. My cousin Maddie got her internship at the Supreme Court because of Sandra Day O’Connor. RORY: Sandra Day O’Connor was a Puff? PARIS: Yes. She was Puffed in 1946, became the president in ’47, and in ’48 she actually moved the group to the very table you sat at today.
Sandra Day O’Connor (born 1930) is a retired attorney and politician who served as the first female associate judge in the US Supreme Court from 1981 to 2006. Prior to that, she was a judge and elected Republican leader in the Arizona Senate, the first female majority leader in a state senate.
O’Connor most often voted with the conservative bloc of the Supreme Court, and was sometimes named as the most powerful woman in the world. She retired in 2005, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2009.
In real life, Sandra Day O’Connor could not have gone to Chilton or been a Puff. She was born in Texas and lived on a cattle ranch, attending a private girl’s school in El Paso. For her final year of schooling, she took a 32-mile bus trip every day to attend Stephen F. Austin High School in El Paso (rather like Rory going to Hartford).
In 1946, aged 16, she enrolled at Stanford University, where she gained a BA in Economics in 1950, so she was far beyond the world of high school sororities by that stage. And even at university, she didn’t join a sorority, as they didn’t exist at Stanford at that time.
I think she was just too tough and sensible to ever bother about table allocation in the dining hall, or gossiping about Homecoming. I presume the ludicrousness of the idea is what gave it appeal as a joke.
We also learn that Paris has an older cousin named Maddie who interned at the Supreme Court with the assistance of Sandra Day O’Connor. Maddie must have been a Puff as well, and possibly has a career in law. In real life, membership of sororities and fraternities can gain you coveted positions, although I doubt a high school one would actually be that influential.
LORELAI: I told him that he was completely out of line with this treatment of you, that you are not a loner freak, you have plenty of friends, and you don’t own a long black leather Matrix coat, and they should fall down on their kneesocks everyday that you deign to show up at that loser school.
The Matrix, previously discussed. The hero Neo wears a long black leather trench coat.
Also, how does Rory have “plenty of friends”? She has one friend, Lane! Getting along well with your mother’s social circle doesn’t make them your friends, as Lorelai seems to think. Lorelai has trouble accepting that she and Rory aren’t one person, but two.
Indignant that the school has dared to suggest her daughter is less than perfect, Lorelai marches into the headmaster’s office in high dudgeon to put him straight on the Gilmore Girl philosophy of not doing anything you don’t feel like.
Headmaster Charleston pulls the wind from her sails by immediately getting out her file (really? Schools keep files on parents? What kind of school is this?). The file is worryingly thin, denoting a lack of parental involvement. Lorelai has only been to one bake sale a year ago, and was observed to not stay afterwards to talk to other parents. Seriously, how does he know all this stuff? Why does he care?
Perhaps tactfully, Headmaster Charleston does not bring up the fact that Lorelai got rather too involved in the school by having a serious relationship with Rory’s teacher. That’s all forgiven and forgotten, but failing to hang out after a bake sale? That’s on your permanent record, Missy!
Now, usually when Lorelai is told to do something, she gets stroppy and calls everyone a Fascist, but this is Rory’s future, so after a few futile attempts to explain she’s too busy, she meekly leaves with a list of organisations at Chilton she might join.
Just as the school wouldn’t listen when Rory was slightly late to a test because she lives out of town and got hit by a deer, there is no attempt to understand that Lorelai is a single mother who works and studies, and is also doing about a million volunteer jobs in Stars Hollow already. Do fathers have to do any of this volunteer stuff for Chilton, or are their lives considered far too busy and worthwhile to be called upon in this way? If so, one of the more realistic things in the show!
Mrs Verdinas, Rory’s guidance counsellor at Chilton, speaks to her about her lack of socialising at school, which Headmaster Charleston told her about a few weeks ago. Mrs Verdinas is her new guidance counsellor; the previous year it was Mr Summers, who we never saw.
This means that only a short time into the academic year, Headmaster Charleston, who is running an entire school, has decided the big problem he needs to address is Rory reading at lunchtime. How he knows about this is a bit of a mystery, unless he spends his free time stalking students in the dining hall.
In a school with hundreds of students, Mrs Verdinas and Headmaster Charleston have been keeping such a close watch on Rory that they’re bothered she’s been spending her lunch times reading and listening to music. Even though she’s getting good grades, works on the school paper, and interacts well with other students on class projects, none of that counts because she doesn’t have any friends at school.
Apparently colleges don’t accept “loners” (really?), and Chilton isn’t going to write a good letter of recommendation for Rory (have they never heard of simply telling some vaguely-worded white lies?). And friends in class doesn’t count, they have to be friends to eat lunch with. Mrs Verdinas never even checks what Rory is reading – perhaps reading Gore Vidal at lunch is better preparation for college than gossiping with Madeline and Louise?
It isn’t even a matter of Mrs Verdinas having a quiet chat to Rory to suggest she might try socialising a little more outside class, she more or less threatens to ruin Rory’s academic future unless she gets some lunch friends, stat!
Yes, it’s all pretty unbelievable, but that is the plot of this episode.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 