BOOTSY: I spent a summer training horses in Montana.
Montana is the fourth-largest US state, situated in the north west region of the nation. Its name is from the Spanish for “mountainous country”, and the Rocky Mountains are in the west of the state, while the eastern side is characterised by prairies and badlands. It is sometimes called “Big Sky Country”. The economy is primarily based on agriculture, including cereal crops and ranching. Dude ranches are common here, and it’s possible that Bootsy is exaggerating a summer vacation on a dude ranch as “working with horses”.
EDIT: Thanks to sharp-eyed reader melcauble for pointing out a silly error in this entry, where I accidentally wrote Rune instead of Bootsy!
LORELAI (to Richard): You and Mom, you always go out of town this time of year. RORY: Last year it was the Bahamas.
Last year we discovered it was Richard and Emily’s annual tradition to hold a Christmas party in mid-December. This year we discover another tradition: they go out of town around Christmas time (presumably after the party, but possibly before).
I’m not sure whether they actually go away for Christmas, or if they travel in the week or so before Christmas, and get back in time for the 25th. Richard and Emily spoke about only seeing Lorelai and Rory at Christmas and Easter, so did that just mean attending the Christmas party each year? As that was attended by their friends, it doesn’t seem as if they spent much time together as a family at all, even in the holidays. Perhaps they meant the entire Christmas season – the party, and then Christmas itself.
Richard and Emily went to the Bahamas in December 2000, after Richard had been hospitalised for an angina attack. As Christopher’s parents, Straub and Francine Hayden, live in the Bahamas, it seems very likely the Gilmores either stayed with them, or visited them, during their vacation. It was only a couple of months later that Christopher’s parents come to Hartford just as Christopher arrives for a visit to Stars Hollow, suggesting it was a plan that the elder Gilmores cooked up to bring Lorelai and Christopher together – with devastating results.
LORELAI: For the Bracebridge Dinner. JACKSON: Geez, you guys are going crazy with this dinner. SOOKIE: Jackson, I told you, this dinner is not just about food. We are recreating an authentic 19th century meal. LORELAI: The servers are all gonna be in period clothing, they’re gonna speak period English. Here, look at the costumes.
The Bracebridge Dinner is an annual tradition which has been held at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park, California since 1927, when the hotel opened. The interior of the Ahwahnee was an inspiration for the hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s film, The Shining – a hint as to how Lorelai may have become interested in holding her own Bracebridge Dinner.
The Bracebridge Dinner is a seven-course formal gathering held in the Grand Dining Room and presented as a feast given by a Renaissance-era lord. It was inspired by the fictional Squire Bracebridge’s Yule celebration in a story from the 1820 work, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., by American author Washington Irving. Music and theatrical performances based on Irving’s story accompany the introduction of each course.
Tickets to the Bracebridge Dinner cost around $400 and are generally difficult to obtain, sometimes being awarded in a lottery system. In 1992, there were 60 000 applicants for the 1650 seats available. This could be the reason why the Trelling Paper Company from Chicago have decided to hold their own Bracebridge Dinner at the Independence Inn.
Sookie says they will be serving an authentic 19th century meal, but in fact it is a Renaissance-themed meal. There’s not that much authentic about the dinner really, however I’m pretty sure the 19th century one wasn’t either. It’s a bit of fun and frolic, not a history lesson.
MICHEL: [on phone] Yes, you can rent a car in Manhattan and return it in Hartford. That’s … that’s no problem, sir. Yes. Yes, you can return it to Bradley International. That’s … that’s very convenient.
Bradley International Airport is in the town of Windsor Locks, about fifteen minutes drive north of Hartford. Originally a World War II military airfield, it opened as a civilian international airport in 1947. It’s the major airport for the Hartford region, and the one that the characters all presumably use when they need to catch a flight anywhere.
RORY: I wonder if Grandpa’s still in Akron? LORELAI: Well for Akron’s sake, I hope he’s moved on to Boise.
Boise is the capital of Idaho, a city with a population of around 240 000. It’s more than two thousand miles from Akron, so not a natural place to “move on to” from there.
David Lynch, previously discussed, grew up in Boise. As he’s Amy Sherman-Palladino’s favourite director, I expect that’s why it rates a mention.
TAYLOR: When Mrs. Lanahan couldn’t buy her head of lettuce that morning for her lunch, she drove straight to Woodbury to buy lettuce from a competing market.
Woodbury is a small town in Litchfield County, Connecticut of about 9000 people, around ten miles from Waterbury, which is the nearest big town. In the Gilmore Girls universe, Woodbury is posited as the nearest town to Stars Hollow, and portrayed as something of a rival town (the Mount Pilot to Stars Hollow’s Mayberry).
In real life, Woodbury is about ten miles from Washington Depot, as if to underline that this is the inspiration for Stars Hollow, even though it contradicts other information, such as being half an hour’s drive from Hartford. However, if we placed Stars Hollow the same distance away in the other direction, roughly where Waterbury is, this would make it half an hour’s drive to Hartford, and also put it on the I-84and the bus route from New York to Hartford.
So this is a bit of geographic information that actually makes quite a bit of sense (of course often contradicted by various geographic impossibilities!).
LORELAI: So, Mia, how’s living in Santa Barbara? MIA: Horrible. Did you know the damn sun shines all the time out there? RORY: They’ve written songs about that.
Santa Barbara is a coastal city in California about ninety miles north of Los Angeles. Situated on the Pacific Ocean with a dry sunny Mediterranean climate, it is promoted as “The American Riviera”. Due to its geographic positioning, it has both cooler summers and warmer winters than surrounding areas, and despite what Mia says, it tends to be wetter in winter than its surrounds too, although rainfall is very variable.
It’s the sort of expensive place that wealthy people retire to, suggesting that Mia has done very well out of the hotel industry. Is it really possible she got that rich just from the Independence Inn? Surely she has other properties or investments as well? Maybe she’s a wealthy widow?
People in Stars Hollow seem to be strangely attracted to distant California. Christopher and Liz ran away to California to start new lives, Fran went on holiday there, Mia retired there. The writers live there, the show’s filmed there …
I’m not aware of any famous songs about the sunshine of Santa Barbara specifically that Rory might be thinking of, but there’s several songs about California.
FRAN: Oh, I don’t enjoy vacations. I toured the California Gold Country ten years ago. It was hot and the bus smelled.
The Gold Country (also known as Mother Lode Country) is a historic region in northern California, mostly around the Sierra Nevada and into the Sacramento Valley. It’s famous for the gold mines which attracted immigrants, known as the ’49ers, during the 1849 California Gold Rush. Most of the mines were shut down in 1942 because of World War II, but several gold rush towns are still popular tourist attractions.
Fran would have taken her bus tour around the Gold Country in 1991, presumably in summer since she says it was hot. Summers are hot and dry in this region.
LORELAI: Mmm, I’m terrible at coming up with names. When we first bought out house, Rory and I wanted to name it, you know, like Jefferson named his place Monticello, but all we could come up with is The Crap Shack.
Former US President Thomas Jefferson, previously discussed, called his main plantation Monticello, from the Italian for “little mountain”, as it’s situated on a peak of the Southwest Mountains, near Charlottesville, Virginia. The plantation house was first begun in 1768 in a neoclassical style, but extensively remodelled in the 1790s with elements from Parisian homes Jefferson had seen in France and ideas of his own devising, and work continued into the 1820s. Monticello is now a National Historic Landmark and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and features on the US five cent coin.
Notice that Lorelai wears a black blouse with a red cherry print design on it – Monticello is famous for its orchard, including its cherry trees. You can still buy cherry preserves from the Monticello gift shop. I cannot say if the colour of the blouse is significant in light of the slave labour that was used at Monticello, and even to some extent, in the building of the plantation house itself.
This is the first time we learn that Lorelai and Rory supposedly called their house The Crap Shack when they moved in, when Rory was eleven. Presumably the house was in poor condition, and has needed a lot of work to get it to the standard we see. It can’t be a name they use very often – they’ve always just referred to as “home” or “the house” so far. Perhaps that’s because the house is now far less crappy than when Lorelai bought it and the name doesn’t really apply any more.
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 Annotated Gilmore Girls 