Town Meeting

This is the first episode in which we see a town meeting, and we learn that they are held on Thursday nights (somehow Lorelai gets back from business class in time for the meetings). We also discover that they are held in Miss Patty’s dance studio rather than a town hall, and never find out why, but can assume it’s for some suitably eccentric and quirky reason.

In real life, even a much smaller town than Stars Hollow would have a town hall. Washington Depot, the original inspiration for Stars Hollow, is about a third the size and still has its own town hall. The practical reason not to have a town hall on the show is that it would mean building a new set for it that would be rarely used. A town hall would also require a much larger cast to fill it to capacity.

Boogie Nights

DEAN: So, uh, at what point does the outsider get to suggest a movie for movie night?
RORY: That depends. What movie are you thinking of?
DEAN: I don’t know … Boogie Nights, maybe.

Boogie Nights is a 1997 drama film written, produced, and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. It is about a young dishwasher in a nightclub, played by Mark Wahlberg, who becomes a popular porn star. His career rises through the Golden Age of Pornography in the late 1970s, and then falls during the excesses of the 1980s. It was released to critical acclaim, the soundtrack also gaining praise.

That Dean would suggest watching a R-rated film about a porn star that has several sex scenes with his new school-age girlfriend, and her mother that he just met that evening, is frankly staggering.

Pink Moon

(Dean looks around Rory’s bedroom, and picks up a CD)
DEAN: Wow. Very clean. How much does it suck that they use Pink Moon in a Volkswagen commercial?

Dean is referring to the song Pink Moon by Nick Drake, earlier identified as one his favourite singers.

This is by far the most pretentious and hypocritical thing the usually down-to-earth Dean ever says in Gilmore Girls. Nick Drake had been obscure for decades when his song Pink Moon was used in a Volkswagen commercial. Without the commercial, Dean would never have even heard of Nick Drake, and as the commercial only came out in December 1999, he had been a Nick Drake fan for less than a year.

I can only imagine he was trying to impress Rory with his hipness, by making out that he had somehow known about Nick Drake previous to the commercial, to the point where he could feel betrayed that they used his music to sell Volkswagen. I’m not buying it.

In turn, Rory clearly went out and bought the Pink Moon album just because Dean liked it, then pretends that she knows and cares all about it to the same extent. But the show lets us know that, whereas that isn’t the case with Dean’s statement.

Weeping Willow

DEAN: I like it [Stars Hollow]. It’s quiet, but nice. I like all the trees everywhere.
LORELAI: Yeah, the trees are something. When Rory was little, she found out that one was called a Weeping Willow so she spent hours trying to cheer it up. You know, like telling it jokes and – No, I’m sorry that was me.

Another vignette from the childhood of the mysteriously fey and naif Rory. It’s amazing that at the same time she was talking to trees and waiting for fairies to arrive, her favourite TV show was Saved by the Bell, in which episodes sometimes covered issues such as drug abuse and homelessness.

“When do you have time?”

RORY: When do you have time to watch General Hospital?

A question we’d all like answered – General Hospital in on weekdays in the afternoons, when Lorelai is at work. Yet somehow she has managed to keep up with the show for at least the last few years. American soap operas are notoriously slow-paced, so that Lorelai could theoretically keep up with the show by only watching it sometimes. Even so, how did she manage to watch even a few episodes while at work?

Note that this is another example of shortness of time being mentioned.

Fridge

When Rory gets home after kissing Dean and talking to lane, she finds her mother in front of an apparently malfunctioning fridge, talking with a repairman. The fridge is open, and despite all that we hear about Lorelai and Rory’s unhealthy diet during the course of the show, the fridge was clearly full of food, including fresh vegetables (also quite a few things that don’t need to be in a fridge, such as unopened tins, bottles, and jars).

Rory’s Childhood

The adult guests at Rory’s birthday party swap stories of Rory as a child. Babette and Morey remember her thinking a toadstool ring was a fairy ring, and waiting for the fairy to arrive. Lorelai says that Rory was “about ten” at the time, but later we learn that Lorelai and Rory didn’t move next door to Babette and Morey until Rory was eleven.

Although eleven is about ten, it’s pretty old to still believe in fairies. This charmingly naive fairy-lover is hard to tally with the intellectually precocious child-Rory we keep hearing about, but does show that the brainy Rory has an imaginative side.

We also learn that Rory took ballet lessons from Miss Patty, and that although she worked hard at her dancing, she wasn’t very good. Only Miss Patty seems to think she had any talent and is disappointed that she stopped. This reminds us of Amy Sherman-Palladino, who trained in ballet. Unlike Rory, she could have turned professional, and Miss Patty’s sadness is a parallel to Amy’s mother’s disappointment when she decided to pursue writing rather than ballet as a career.

“Ten generations of Gellers”

PARIS: Ten generations of Gellers have gone to Harvard. I have to go to Harvard.

According to Paris, the Geller family have been attending Harvard University since the 18^th century. This doesn’t seem possible, as the Gellers are Jewish, and at that time Jews weren’t permitted to attend Harvard (and tended to be excluded from higher education, and many other institutions). The first Jewish student at Harvard in 1720 had to convert to Christianity, and still wasn’t really accepted. Even in the twentieth century, there were heavy restrictions on Jews attending Harvard.

It is possible that Paris is lying in a desperate attempt to persuade Rory that she “deserves” to go to Harvard more than Rory does. Of course later on Paris and Rory do attend the same university together.

Lorelai’s Last Birthday

Rory asks Lorelai if she remembers her last birthday in Richard and Emily’s house, and Lorelai says it was when she was pregnant with Rory, so April 1984. Later we find out that Lorelai didn’t leave home until Rory was almost two years old, so she would have had two more birthdays at her parents’ house.

Maybe she means that it was the last birthday party her parents threw for her, which is rather sad, but understandable – as a teenage mother she would have lost touch with old friends, and not had many opportunities to make new ones yet, quite apart from her parents wanting to keep their situation private. More likely the scriptwriter (Amy Sherman-Palladino) originally imagined that Lorelai left home at sixteen when Rory was a few months old before realising that wasn’t very realistic.

Christopher

LORELAI: He calls like once a week and we see him at Christmas, sometimes Easter. It’s all very civil.

This is the point where we discover that Rory has had some contact with her father throughout her life, seeing him at least once a year and sometimes twice a year. The weekly phone call, like the one to Emily, seems something of a polite fiction – it seems greatly out of character for Christopher to phone so regularly. Most likely he phoned whenever he thought of it, which probably wasn’t that often.