Junior College

RORY: Or hey, you can go to college in Boston.

DEAN: I’m going to junior college.

RORY: Boston has junior colleges.

DEAN: But not dorm rooms.

In the US, a junior college is a two-year post-secondary school whose main purpose is to provide academic, vocational and professional education. The highest certificate offered by such schools is usually an Associate degree, although junior college students may continue their education at a four-year university or college, by transferring some or all of their credits earned.

Dean might be planning to attend Goodwin College, a junior college in East Hartford that used to be a school of business. They have student housing available so that Dean would be able to live on campus.

There are three junior colleges in Boston – Bay State College, Fisher College, and Labouré College of Healthcare, which provides training for nurses and is probably not for Dean. Bay State and Fisher are mostly for business and administration degrees. Both Bay State and Fisher do have halls of residence for students to stay in, so Dean isn’t correct about that.

Christiane Amanpour’s Situation

RORY: Christiane Amanpour spends half of her life standing in foxholes in third world countries, and she has a husband and a kid. And she was on C-SPAN last week getting some award, so if she and her husband can make it work, we can.

DEAN: So we’ll have access to the CNN jet?

Christiane Amanpour, previously discussed as Rory’s idol. From 1998 to 2018 she was married to James Rubin (born 1960), former Assistant Secretary of State and spokesman for the US State Department during the Clinton administration, and was an informal adviser to Hillary Clinton. Their son Darius Rubin was born in 2000, so aged two years old at this time. Because of Amanpour’s career, her husband James did spend a lot of time home alone with the baby, keeping in touch with his wife by telephone.

In real life, Amanpour received two awards in 2002. The Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism was presented to her at Harvard in March, and the Edward R. Murrow Award for Distinguished Achievement in Broadcast Journalism was presented to her at Washington State University in May. Neither of those were “last week” from Rory’s perspective, although it’s possible she only saw the broadcast of one of them on C-SPAN the week before.

Christiane Amanpour worked for CNN from 1983 to 2010, so throughout the run of Gilmore Girls. As chief foreign correspondent, she reported on crises from many of the world’s hotspots, and in 2002 had filed reports from the Gaza Strip, famously interviewing Yasser Arafat in his compound by phone.

[Picture shows Christiane Amanpour, her husband James, and son Darius in London, 2003]

“On the train coming home”

DEAN: So you’ll come home, do homework all weekend, then leave.

RORY: No, I can do my homework during the week or on the train coming home to see you, who I will spend my weekends with not doing homework. Plus, we can talk during the week on the phone constantly. Trust me, it’ll feel like I never left.

In real life, it’s a three and a half hour train trip from Boston to Hartford, requiring a change at New Haven. Then Rory would need someone (Dean?) to pick her up from the Hartford station for a thirty minute drive home to Stars Hollow. It sounds very tedious to do regularly – of course, she has to go back again every Sunday, so that’s eight hours of travel every weekend! That does give her free time to study though, I guess.

As it happens, Rory doesn’t go to Harvard in the end, and she has a car by then anyway, so this impractical plan never gets put into operation. It does sound as if she hasn’t thought about it very hard though.

[Picture shows South Station in Boston, from where Rory would need to catch a train. It’s a 15 minute bus ride from Harvard, so add a bit more time on for that].

Stalking Tom Waits

CAROL: I worship [Tom Waits]. I even mildly stalked him once … Last year, I heard he was staying at this hotel so I went there everyday and sat in the lobby, drinking massive amounts of coffee, waiting for him to walk by.

I can barely speculate which hotel Tom Waits could have been staying in the previous year. The only concert he had in 2001 was one in his home town of San Francisco, and he took a trip to Copenhagen in Denmark early in the year. He attended the ASCAP Awards at the Beverly Hilton in May, which might be what Carol is referring to (if so, she was in Los Angeles at the time for some reason – where the Palladinos live, probably not coincidentally).

Like Lorelai, Carol worships Tom Waits and drinks huge amounts of coffee. Her mild stalking of Waits at a hotel is replicated later by Lorelai, who stalks Bono at his hotel in exactly the same way.

Kennedy-esque

DARREN: This is a little tradition with us, quizzes at meals. It keeps the Springsteens sharp.

LORELAI: Very Kennedy-esque.

JENNIFER: Mm, we love the Kennedys!

LORELAI: As do we all.

A callback to when Emily spoke glowingly of the Kennedy family quizzes in Season 1, wondering why the Gilmores couldn’t do the same. Rory and Lorelai are now getting a taste of what that would be like!

Jennifer says that the Springsteens love the Kennedys, indicating that they are Democrat voters – Connecticut is a Democrat state, and Westport is the most Democrat city of the state. Lorelai is quick to let them know that she is a Democrat voter as well.

AA Degree

RORY: But [Mom] took night classes and graduated last year. She has an AA degree in Business.

An AA degree is an associate degree, an undergraduate degree awarded after a course of post-secondary study lasting two to three years. It is a level of qualification above a high school diploma, and below a bachelor’s degree.

Associate degrees first began in the US in 1898, and there, completing an associate degree can allow the graduate to transfer to the third year of a bachelor’s degree – you’ll remember that Lorelai’s former classmates Liza and Zach were going to continue their studies at universities after graduating from business class at community college.

Lorelai’s degree is most likely an Associate of Applied Business (AAB).

Jack and Jennifer

DARREN: Jack’s pre-med at Princeton and Jennifer is bound for Harvard, like you Rory.

Jack is in a pre-medical program, an educational track that undergraduate students pursue before they go to medical school and study to become doctors. Their undergraduate studies typically focus on subjects such as biology, chemistry, physics, neuroscience, and behavioural sciences. He is attending the same university that Christopher was supposed to attend.

Jennifer can’t really be bound for Harvard at this point – notifications to applications haven’t been sent out yet. She has already applied, or will apply very soon, and Darren is obviously confident she will get in. He seems very confident Rory will as well, unless he’s just being polite – he hasn’t even seen her transcript yet.

Jack and Jennifer are played by Matt Newton and Jeanette Brox – they had both been in Judging Amy and Family Law, although not in the same episodes. Granville Van Deusen, who plays their father Darren, was also in Judging Amy, and like Jeanette, had been in General Hospital spin-off, Port Charles.

Trixie and Bambi McBimbo

RORY: He’s gonna be expecting Chilton High School senior Trixie McBimbo.

LORELAI: And her mother, Bambi McBimbo.

Trixie and Bambi McBimbo are names Rory and Lorelai invent for their fictional characters of an airheaded teenager and her mother. I have seen these names used a lot, even in published works – but only after this episode aired, so they have gone on to have lives of their own.

Alumni Dinner

LORELAI: [Headmaster Charleston]suggested setting up a meeting with a Harvard graduate, like a dinner or something. He even gave me the number of someone he knows.

RORY: An alumni dinner?

An “alumni dinner” is actually a dinner given for alumni of a university, not by an alumnus. Harvard holds several alumni dinners each year.

Headmaster Charleston seems to be talking about meetings for prospective students which are set up by institutions such as the Harvard Club – there is a Harvard Club for Southern Connecticut in Wallingford. My understanding is that these are official events, which at least a couple dozen of the best and brightest from each area attend at the same time – not just one student being given a phone number by their school principal, which seems incredibly sketchy.

After meeting with prospective applicants, the alumni association involved (such as the Harvard Club) will then meet with an admissions officer from the university, and put in a good word for the students they think would make great “Harvard material” (or whatever university it is). It sounds like privileged kids getting even more help to be accepted into university, but these associations are apparently very keen to increase diversity, and may advocate strongly for bright, successful students from a variety of backgrounds.

It almost seems as if Headmaster Charleston considers Rory to be one of these “non-traditional” Harvard applicants, who might benefit from some kind of assistance. I’m not sure Rory is actually that non-traditional, but in any case, I’m pretty sure the situation in this episode doesn’t happen in real life – and if it does, it shouldn’t!

Somehow we’ve gone from Rory being special and having the brains and hard work and tenacity to get into Harvard to Rory needing to be shuffled in the backdoor through some shady deal with a Harvard alumnus.

Kim Deal

LANE: You are not telling me that you did not know that Kim Deal was in the Pixies before the Breeders! I refuse to accept that! [hangs up] These kids have no sense of history.

Kimberley “Kim” Deal (born 1961), singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. She was the bassist and co-vocalist in alternative rock band Pixies, previously discussed, joining in 1986. During the band’s hiatus, she formed the alternative rock band the Breeders in 1989. After the Pixies broke up in 1993, she returned her focus to the Breeders, who themselves went into hiatus in 1994, during which time Deal formed the short-lived rock band the Amps, performing under the name Tammy Ampersand. She reformed the Breeders in 2002, then returned to the Pixies when the band reunited in 2004. In 2013, she left the Pixies to concentrate on the Breeders, who released their fifth album, All Nerve, in 2018.

One of the reasons the person on the phone may not have known that Kim Deal was previously in the Pixies is because she performed under the stage name Mrs John Murphy while in the band.

Lane is not just looking for any band to drum for – it needs to be a band who shares her obsession with alternative rock and indie music, and knows their music history.