Footnotes to the TV series
EMILY: This is a very special girl. You take good care of her.
HEADMASTER: We’ll do our best, Emily.
LORELAI: Oh, God. Rory is not gonna be a problem. She’s totally low maintenance, you know, like a Honda. You know, they’re just easy, just . . . nice office.
Honda is a Japanese company which makes cars and other vehicles. Hondas are well known for being cheap to run and with low repair costs. Given how expensive Rory’s school is, Rory’s “running costs” are not really that low.
Being woken up at 7:10 am instead of 5:45 am sends Lorelai intoa panic. We learn that all her nice clothes are at the drycleaners, and she was planning to pick them up and get dressed in her blue suit with the flippy skirt before she took Rory to school. She fumbles through a drawer, then in the next scene she is hurrying downstairs dressed in cut off denim shorts, a pink tie-dyed tee-shirt, and cowboy boots – apparently the only clean clothes she has to wear.
The trouble is that she opens the closet and we see clothes hanging up in there. Maybe they’re not great clothes, but most of them would be better than going to Rory’s school dressed in denim cut-offs and boots. For that matter, why does she need to wear boots? You don’t send shoes to a dry-cleaner, so she should still have normal shoes to wear. And what time did she plan on going to the dry-cleaner anyway – Rory’s school day starts at around 8 am and it’s a half hour drive, so does the dry-cleaner in Stars Hollow open around 6.30 am?
It’s hard not to reach the conclusion that Lorelai had a very specific outfit in mind – the blue suit with the flippy skirt – and since she isn’t able to wear it due to her own poor time-management skills, is determined to wear something completely unsuitable in a fit of pique.
LORELAI: I’m okay. I just . . . do I look shorter? ‘Cause I feel shorter.
RORY: Hey, how ’bout I buy you a cup of coffee?
LORELAI: Oh, yeah. You drive, though, okay, ’cause I don’t think my feet will reach the pedals.
In Connecticut, Rory would not be eligible to apply for her learner’s permit until she turned sixteen. This is still at least a month away, so it wouldn’t be legal for Rory to drive her mother home even under parental supervision.
LORELAI: You wanted to control me.
EMILY: You were still a child.
LORELAI: I stopped being a child the minute the strip turned pink, okay?
Lorelai implies that she discovered she was pregnant using a home pregnancy testing kit, the kind where the woman urinates on a stick and waits for the test to change colour, a strip which turns pink indicates a positive test. In fact, these sort of lateral flow tests didn’t become available until 1988, and weren’t widely available until the 1990s, while Lorelai got pregnant in 1984. Previous to this, home pregnancy testing kits were more like mini chemistry labs, where you mixed urine and the solution together to see if it changed colour.
Lorelai claims that she stopped being a child the minute she became pregnant. Getting pregnant doesn’t turn a girl into an adult, so Lorelai is wrong on that count. In fact, we can see during the show that becoming a mother at an early age stunted Lorelai’s emotional development so that her maturity remained at the level of a wayward teenage girl even into her thirties. This is the other side of the conflict between Emily and Lorelai, with neither of them being completely in the right or completely wrong, and with both of them over-dramatising their situations and claiming victim status.
By the way, Lorelai was very far from being rare as a teenage mother in Hartford. By the early 1990s, one quarter of all births in the city were to a teen mother. She was definitely an unusual teenage mother though.
EMILY: Your father would have put [Christopher] in the insurance business and you’d be living a lovely life right now.
LORELAI: He didn’t want to be in the insurance business and I am living a lovely life right now.
EMILY: That’s right, far away from us.
Stars Hollow is only half an hour from Hartford, is on a bus route to the city, Lorelai visits it at least twice a week to attend college, and Rory will be going to school just five minutes from their house. Nevertheless, Emily still sees it as being “far away” from them. That gives the viewer some idea of the control Emily would like to have over her daughter and granddaughter, and is a hint of one of the reasons for the conflict between Lorelai and her mother.
SOOKIE: It was a fight. Mothers and daughters fight.
LORELAI: No, we don’t fight. We never fight.
During the course of the show, Lorelai and Rory had their fair share of fights and arguments, during which the normally meek Rory could be shockingly rude and hurtful to her mother. If Lorelai is to be believed, they never had a single fight until Rory was a few weeks shy of her sixteenth birthday, which would mean that they lived in harmony until Rory began gaining some independence for herself. It’s telling that Rory forming an identity for herself apart from Lorelai is the beginning of their various quarrels.
Of course, Lorelai may be just conveniently forgetting all the fights they had before this one.
During their argument, Lorelai says to Rory that she got “knocked up at sixteen”. In fact she gave birth to Rory when she was sixteen and six months old, so she must have got pregnant at fifteen.
Along with her parents’ agreement to give her money to pay for Rory’s tuition at Chilton, Lorelai must in turn agree to have dinner with them every Friday, thus setting in place the pattern of the entire show. She also has to call them once a week to give an update on Rory’s schooling and her own life – this weekly phone call is not mentioned again, and although Lorelai seems to particularly hate talking to her mother on the phone, we never hear Emily (Kelly Bishop) complain that she has missed a phone call. We must assume that either Lorelai dutifully complied each week, or that Emily almost immediately accepted that she would not follow through. Neither sounds quite likely, knowing their personalities. Maybe Lorelai made Rory do the phone call.
The choice of Friday night for the family dinner fulfils at least three functions:
SOOKIE: I’ll make cookies [to celebrate Rory getting into Chilton]. Protestants love oatmeal.
Sookie has a number of eccentric beliefs in regard to food, and this seems to be one of them. The reason for her statement is something of a mystery to me, unless she is thinking of Quaker Oats, whose logo has a man dressed in 18th century Quaker clothing to represent simplicity and honesty. (The company was not founded by Quakers, and never had any connection with the religion).
The interesting part is that her saying this seems to imply that Sookie herself is not a Protestant, although this is never confirmed in the show.
The exclusive co-ed private school in Hartford to which Rory gains a late acceptance, kicking off the events of the entire Gilmore Girls series. It is loosely based on Choate Rosemary Hall, a private boarding school in the town of Wallingford, Connecticut.
The name Chilton may have been inspired (in universe) by Mary Chilton (1607-1679), a Pilgrim who came to America from England on the Mayflower, giving the name a historical connection; Mary Chilton was an ancestor of George Bush and George Bush Jr. According to legend, Mary was the first passenger to step ashore at Plymouth in 1620, excitedly jumping out of the boat and wading out to Plymouth Rock. It seems like a name suitable for daring young girls willing to leap into a new world.
For the 2017-18 academic year, Choate’s tuition fees for a day (non-boarding) student were $44 400. However, they have a generous financial aid package which would mean that someone in Lorelai’s situation would have their tuition fees heavily subsidised. You can also pay by the month with no interest, and unlike Chilton, there is only a small enrolment fee.
It is unclear why Chilton never offered any similar financial aid to Rory – perhaps because she was a late acceptance. For the purpose of the plot it was necessary for Lorelai to be desperate for money, or Gilmore Girls could never have happened. So Chilton had to be a price-gouging school with massive enrolment fees, no financial aid, no payment plans, and no up-front information about their fees for parents (Lorelai is apparently disconcerted to learn Chilton costs anything at all).
Exterior scenes at Chilton were filmed at Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, California; this 1920s Tudor-style mansion is in a public park owned by the City of Beverly Hills, and is a popular place for film and TV locations.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 