Tag: Places

Toledo

KIRK: Today we have … various marzipan fruits made by a sect of cloistered nuns in Toledo.

Toledo is a city of around 80 000 people in central Spain on the Tagus River, known as the “City of Three Cultures”, for the influences of Christians, Jews and Muslims on its history. There are several convents of cloistered nuns in the city, and many of them do indeed specialise in making sweets such as marzipan.

Chuck Berry Live

RORY: Chuck Berry live at The Fillmore on vinyl.

LORELAI: Oh my God, that’s perfect. He loves Chuck Berry. How did you come up with that?

RORY: I called him and asked him what he wanted.

Live at the Fillmore Auditorium, a 1967 live album by Chuck Berry recorded at The Fillmore, a historic music venue in San Francisco. During the 1960s, it was a focal point for psychedelic music and the counterculture in general, mentioned in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The Steve Miller Blues Band (later the Steve Miller Band) were one of its regular acts, and they provide the backing music for this album.

Jamie Loves Paris

RORY: Okay, skip to the end, I can’t take it. How did it turn out?

PARIS: He told me he loved me … I never thought I’d hear a boy tell me he loved me … He invited me back up for Easter break.

After spending Christmas together, Jamie tells Paris that he loves her, and invites her to spend Easter in Philadelphia with his family. Paris is thrilled and disbelieving, but she never says that she loves Jamie, or indicates that she reciprocated with her own love confession. It may be that Paris is more in love with love, and the idea of having a nice boyfriend, than she is with Jamie himself, or that she simply doesn’t trust her own feelings.

Ranch in Texas

PARIS: Well, if there’s nothing really to talk about, what’s the point, right?

LOUISE: You said that one student council meeting a week was not enough.

MADELINE: Yeah, you said that was no way to govern, that meeting once a week was lazy, ineffectual, and if we were going to do it like that, we might as well just buy ourselves a ranch in Texas.

Paris referred in her comment to Prairie Chapel Ranch near the town of Crawford in Texas. It was acquired by former president George W. Bush in 1999, and was known as the Western White House. It was used both as a vacation house, a meeting place, and as a place to host visiting dignitaries.

George W. Bush was considered a lazy president, with some wits remarking that he worked “24/7 – 24 hours a week, 7 months a year”.

Six Flags

LUKE: So, how did the four dinners work out? You guys must feel more stuffed than you’ve ever been.

LORELAI: I don’t know. Is this more stuffed than the great Six Flags hot dog consumption of ’99?

Six Flags is an amusement park corporation founded in the 1960s in Arlington, Texas, and headquartered in Manhattan. It has 27 theme parks in the US, Canada, and Mexico, more than any other amusement park company, and has more than 30 million guests each year. The name Six Flags refers to the flags of the six nations which have governed Texas over the years – Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the USA, and the Confederate States of America.

The nearest Six Flags to Lorelai and Rory is Six Flags New England, in Agawam, Massachusetts. It is just north of the Connecticut border, about an hour’s drive away. They went to the theme park in 1999, possibly during the summer vacation, when Rory was nearly 15.

Belgium

SOOKIE: Mm, about a half-hour ago they set the lawn on fire … But Phil says it’s okay and everything ’cause it’ll grow back twice as lush. Though that’s what he said when he broke my salad bowl that I brought back from Belgium. That’ll maybe grow back, too, huh?

Sookie travelled to Belgium at some point, bringing back a salad bowl with her as a souvenir. Possibly she went there to study some particular culinary art – Belgium is famous for its chocolate-making, for example. It’s just as likely it was a foodie’s tour, allowing her to sample the local produce. It may also have been as part of a trip to Europe. It’s just possible that Sookie and Jackson went to Europe for their honeymoon, although Sookie doesn’t say that we brought the salad bowl back from Belgium. Mind you, she’s pretty drunk by now.

Orlando

CLAUDE: I have a grandson who lives with his mother in Orlando, you know, he’s going through a very similar thing, poor boy.

EMILY: How do they like Orlando, Claude?

CLAUDE: Well, it’s all Mickey Mouse this and Mickey Mouse that, you know. They want to die.

Orlando, Florida, previously discussed. Claude refers to the fact that Walt Disney World is in the city, which apparently ruins it for Claude’s family (surely they knew this before they moved there?).

Because Claude says my grandson, rather than ours, I assume Monique is his second wife. I’m also assuming that his grandson’s mother is Claude’s daughter-in-law or former daughter-in-law, rather than his daughter, because otherwise he would say so. And I’m further assuming that Claude’s son is separated or divorced, because he doesn’t mention him as also living in Florida.

Lots of assumptions! But it’s letting us fill in quite a bit of back story for ourselves. We might also note that Claude is not spending Thanksgiving with his grandson, and never has – he says he has only seen Thanksgiving in American movies.

Stanford

DOUGLAS: We have a grandson your age, he’s going through hell.

NATALIE: He’s already been turned down for early admission to Stanford, his dream.

Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California, in the San Francisco Bay area, ranked among the top universities in the world. It was founded in 1885 by US Senator and former governor of California Leland Stanford and his wife Jane, in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr, and opened in 1891 as a coeducational institution.

After World War II, the university’s provost, Frederick Terman, supported faculty and graduates to build a self-sufficient local industry that would later become known as Silicon Valley. It also houses the conservative public policy think tank, the Hoover Institution, one of the most influential of its kind in the world.

85 Nobel laureates, 29 Turing Award laureates, and eight Fields Medallists have been affiliated with Stanford as students, alumni, faculty, or staff. Stanford alumni have founded numerous companies, which combined produce more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue and have created 5.4 million jobs as of 2011, roughly equivalent to the seventh largest economy in the world.

Stanford has won more College Athletics team championships than any other university, and Stanford students and alumni have won almost 300 Olympic medals.

Stanford is the alma mater of US President Herbert Hoover, 74 living billionaires, and 17 astronauts. Its alumni include the current presidents of Yale and MIT and the provosts of Harvard and Princeton. It is also one of the leading producers of Fulbright Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Rhodes Scholars, and members of the United States Congress.

Stanford is one of the hardest universities to get into, with an acceptance rate of less than 5% – that’s tougher than both Harvard and Yale, and indeed, all the Ivy League universities. It’s perfectly believable that Douglas and Natalie’s grandson didn’t get accepted.

In real life, the deadline for early admission to Stanford is November 1, and notifications aren’t sent out until mid-December, so Douglas and Natalie’s grandson couldn’t really know he’d been turned down by Thanksgiving. (Although, if it is just before Christmas, according to the show’s actual timeline, this would make sense!).

Nordstrom’s

LORELAI: Oh, wow, it’s a piano player.

EMILY: That’s Brad. I found him at Nordstrom’s.

LORELAI: Was he on sale?

Nordstrom is a luxury department store headquartered in Seattle, Washington, and founded by John W. Nordstrom and Carl F. Wallin in 1901. The original Wallin & Nordstrom store operated exclusively as a shoe store, and a second Nordstrom’s shoe store opened in 1923. The growing Nordstrom Best chain began selling clothing in 1963, and became the Nordstrom full-line retailer that presently exists by 1971.

There is a Nordstrom at Westfarms Mall in West Hartford.