Tag: Oh Really?

Sunnyside

RORY: I called the Sunnyside home. Do they need any volunteers? And believe it or not, they don’t, but they do need an accordion player for their Friday night polka party.

Sunnyside Nursing Centers are a chain of aged care nursing and rehabilitation homes in the United States. In real life, there is more than one Sunnyside nursing home in the Wallingford area, where Stars Hollow appears to be located, although none of them are actually called The Sunnyside Home (that may just be what people in Stars Hollow call it, rather than its actual name).

Apart from trying the Fireflies and Sunnyside, Rory also calls the Stars Hollow library, which apparently only has twelve books (surely an exaggeration), and the Chilton tutoring program, who are just taking names at present.

Rory seems to have amassed an enormous amount of brochures for various organisations within a few hours, late in the day. How she managed to do this is something of a mystery

Fireflies

RORY: I called the Fireflies. Do they need troop leaders? Yes. Good, I’ll be a troop leader. Great. The only catch is, it’s summer. Camping season. I need wilderness skills. Why did you never take me camping?
LORELAI: Camping? Are you kidding? I couldn’t get you to step on wet grass until you were three.

The Fireflies are a fictional organisation, perhaps based on the Camp Fire Girls, founded in 1910 as a sister organisation to the Boy Scouts of America. In 1975 it became for both boys and girls, and is now just called Camp Fire. It teaches camping and wilderness skills, just like the Fireflies, and Lauren Graham was a member when she was young. In real life, there are no Camp Fire groups in Connecticut.

The 1997 black comedy film Wag the Dog , with screenplay by Amy Sherman-Palladino’s favourite playwright, David Mamet, uses The Firefly Girls as a replacement for the Camp Fire Girls. This could be an homage (and a slightly naughty one, as in the film the young Firefly Girl receives inappropriate advances from the President in the Oval Office).

If Rory would not step on wet grass until she was three, no doubt that’s from Lorelai’s example – she notoriously hates nature and the great outdoors..

Lorelai Gives Rory a Hammer

RORY: What is that?
LORELAI: A hammer.
RORY: It has feathers on it.
LORELAI: Yes.
RORY: Why?
LORELAI: So the rhinestones and bows won’t feel lonely.

This is the hammer referred to in the title, Hammers and Veils. Of course Rory can’t go off to help the needy like anyone else – she has to do it in an especially quirky, girly manner that immediately marks her as special and the centre of attention. It’s the Gilmore way.

Rory wouldn’t even buy purple legal pads for school because they’d make her look unprofessional at Chilton, but somehow she’s happy to take a gold-painted, pink feathered hammer to volunteer work which she is doing through Chilton, and for which the hammer would surely be useless. Maybe she’s more relaxed now that she’s one of the top students in her class.

Typically for the show, Rory is running ten minutes late for her volunteer job in this scene.

Lorelai Tells Emily About Her Engagement

LORELAI: Okay, well, um, the … Max and I have been serious for quite a while now, and he asked me to marry him, and I said yes. I’m getting married.
EMILY: Well, I think that’s very nice. I certainly hope we’ll be in town for it, but if not I promise we’ll send a nice gift. Now excuse me, I’m going to check on the roast.

Emily is very hurt that Lorelai has waited this long to tell her that she is engaged, literally leaving her to last. Rather than tell Lorelai how she feels and have a discussion about it, Emily disguises her hurt by behaving as if Lorelai’s engagement means nothing to her, shocking and upsetting her daughter in the process.

Lorelai says that she and Max have been serious for “quite a while”, although in fact they only started dating after their January break up about six weeks ago, and their engagement only happened because the alternative was to break up – Lorelai’s original preferred option.

“Light bulb burned out”

LORELAI: “Mom, tomorrow I’m going to build a house.”
RORY: Help build a house.
LORELAI: Did you tell them that there’s a light bulb in your closet that burned out in ’97 that you still haven’t changed?

The light bulb in Rory’s closet burned out when she was twelve or thirteen, possibly of an age where Lorelai could have changed the light bulb for her (mind you, that was the year Lorelai broke her leg, so she may not have been too mobile when it happened). Or what about Luke – he did tons of work on Lorelai’s house a few episodes ago while he was avoiding Rachel, couldn’t he at least have replaced a light bulb?

Saturday 21st

SOOKIE (on phone to Emily): Listen, I’m sorry to call so late, but I need to ask you a question. I’m planning a surprise wedding shower for Lorelai and Max, and it’s gonna be more like a big party actually. But I’ve cleared the date with everybody around here, so we’re all set to go, but I wanted to make sure you guys were gonna be around before I finalised everything. It’s going to be Saturday the 21st.

The surprise wedding shower for Lorelai and Max is planned for June 21; this is the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, and traditionally the high point of summer. It is a symbolic day to celebrate an engagement, when the sun is at its zenith, and there is more light available than any other day. Traditionally, the time around the summer solstice is associated with love and fertility.

In real life, June 21 was a Thursday, not a Saturday, in 2001.

Because of Sookie’s phone call, where she discovered that Lorelai had got engaged without telling her parents, a distressed Emily orders Richard to apologise to Rory. She is afraid that if they push Rory away as they did with Lorelai, that they will lose her as well, and the thought is unbearable to her.

This will set up a pattern where Richard and Emily try to treat Rory as differently from Lorelai as possible. They were strict and even harsh with Lorelai, but Rory the angel child will receive little else but praise and indulgence, for fear that if she doesn’t get her way in all things, she will become another Lorelai and escape. Whether this plan is a good one for Rory’s character and independence is never questioned.

Twinkies

LORELAI: Uh, uh, well, pens are very nice, but I just bet there is a fabulous fancy dessert just sitting out there in that kitchen of yours.
EMILY: As a matter of fact there is. Twinkies.
LORELAI: What?
EMILY: Well, Rory told me that was her favorite dessert.

Twinkie is a brand of snack cake formerly owned and made by Hostess Brand. First invented in 1930, they were conceived as a sponge cake filled with banana cream; when bananas were rationed during World War II, the company switched to vanilla cream, and it proved so popular that it remained the predominant flavour.

Emily’s cook Antonia makes her own Twinkies to reproduce Rory’s favourite dessert – of course Emily could never just buy a box of Twinkies. Home made Twinkies are more difficult to make than Beefaroni, but well within the range of a competent home cook. A professional like Antonia would have no problem, but oddly enough doesn’t make them ahead of time, so the Gilmore girls never get to try them.

Emily supplying Rory with her favourite foods, even though her choices must have made her grandmother shudder, is a callback to when Emily served Lorelai and Rory pudding, one of their favourite desserts. Lorelai was so impressed by Emily’s effort that she must have thought she’d try it again.

Cher and Gregg Allman

RORY: Okay good, so it’s decided. Breaking up, not for us.
DEAN: I mean, hey, not that it’s a bad thing. I’m sure some people like it.
RORY: Oh sure, Cher, Greg Allman, bet they’d give it a big thumbs up.

The singer Cher (born Cherilyn Sarkisan in 1946), earlier mentioned, married singer-songwriter Gregg Allman (1947-2017) in 1975, and they were divorced in 1978. Greg Allman remarried almost immediately (he married seven times in all), while Cher has never married again. Despite their troubled marriage, Greg Allman reported that he and Cher remained on speaking terms, one of only two ex-wives this was true of. This is another reference to marriage ending in divorce in this episode.

It seems slightly implausible that Cher’s divorce in the 1970s is the handiest break-up reference for Rory, but Cher received numerous mentions during the run of Gilmore Girls.

J. Edgar Hoover

RICHARD: Rory, wonderful news. You finished in the top three percent of your class.
LORELAI: Oh yeah, Dad, J. Edgar Hoover over here was just telling us.

John Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) was the first Director of the FBI, and instrumental in its founding in 1935. Lorelai is making fun of her mother’s “spy work” in discovering that Rory is in the top 3% of her class from Bitty Charleston, the headmaster’s wife.

Rory had got herself into the top 10% by the time of the midterm exams, and now the top 3% by the time she completed her final exams for the year. This rise is remarkable, and not very believable in a prestigious school full of excellent students. She started late, began the year getting a D and missing a vital test in her best subject, English Literature, and only got a B+ for her Biology midterms – surely that would bring her average down a bit further than that?