EMILY: You know historical homes are infested with mold, don’t you? … It gets inside the walls and grows out of sight and shoots off spores that slowly kill you and your family. LORELAI: You should get a show on the Home & Garden Channel, Mom.
Home & Garden Channel, initialised to HGTV. A cable channel devoted to home and garden issues, with a primary focus on real estate reality shows where people buy, sell, or renovate homes. It was launched in 1994.
HGTV is a cheap and cheerful network which people watch to relax and be soothed. A show on the horrors of killer mould doesn’t sound like something they’d produce.
RICHARD: Uh, what does [Sherry] do? Does she work? CHRISTOPHER: Uh, she’s the East Coast sales rep for L’Oreal Cosmetics.
L’Oreal is a French beauty product company headquartered in Clichy, France, with a registered office in Paris. It is the largest cosmetics company in the world. It was founded in 1919 by chemist Eugène Schueller.
The US headquarters of L’Oreal are in New York City, but they certainly employ sales reps in Boston. Christopher says Sherry is the sales rep for the East Coast, as if they have only one! I’m pretty sure Sherry is only a sales rep for L’Oreal. Christopher loves to talk everything about himself up.
This does bring into question whether this business trip is really for Christopher, or was it for Sherry’s work? It seems like it’s actually her job that would involve travel, not his. Bearing in mind his comment about eating at White Castle (which is in New York), it could be that they were in New York for Sherry’s business, then decided to spend the weekend in Connecticut to see Rory. In which case, they could be staying as close as Woodbury, making their travel time to Stars Hollow even more achievable.
SHERRY: So we’ll swing by around six? RORY: Oh, sounds good.
The debate at Chilton started at 3.30 pm, and presumably finished no earlier than 4.05 pm, the end of the school day. Lorelai and Rory talked to Christopher and Sherry after the debate, and then they had a half-hour drive back to Stars Hollow. Say they got home at 4.45 pm, and have entertained Christopher and Sherry for about half an hour, it should be around 5.15 pm by now. Christopher and Sherry now have 45 minutes to drive back to Litchfield, get ready to go out, then drive back to Stars Hollow. Assuming a 20 minute travel time between Litchfield and Stars Hollow (the distance between Litchfield and Waterbury, and Litchfield and Washington Depot), they have only five minutes to get ready before getting back in the car.
It is very, very tight, but unlike other fantasy timescales in Gilmore Girls, this one is actually doable. Just.
SHERRY: Great. Oh, of course this does leave you a sad little orphan. CHRISTOPHER: Oh, that’s okay. I’ll have one of my patented White Castle bachelor dinners.
White Castle, a hamburger restaurant chain in the US operating in 13 states, mostly in New York and the Midwest. It is credited as the world’s first fast-food hamburger chain, founded in Wichita, Kansas, in 1921 by Walt Anderson and Billy Ingram. Anderson is credited as the inventor of the hamburger bun, while Ingram’s business savvy helped popularise the hamburger. The chain is still owned by the Ingram family.
In real life, the nearest White Castle restaurant to Litchfield is in Nanuet, New York, almost two hours drive away. Possibly Christopher is simply using the name to mean he’ll be grabbing a burger somewhere, or eating at a chain restaurant.
SOOKIE: I’m looking for a guy that looks like a guy that you could be with, only I’m deducting seventeen years off his age and I’m adding an all-boys private school uniform and a Yankees cap.
Sookie is looking around for Christopher, until Lorelai points out Sookie doesn’t know what he looks like. It seems hard to believe Lorelai has never shown Sookie a picture of Christopher, but from the way Rory treasures an old strip of photos of Christopher and Lorelai, it appears they possess no photo of him.
Sookie explains that she’s been looking for someone Lorelai would go out with, but imagining him seventeen years younger and in a private boy’s school uniform. This may suggest that Lorelai and Christopher went to separate single-sex private high schools. In real life, there are no single-sex private schools in Hartford itself, but a few in the nearby surrounding suburbs and towns that Lorelai and Christopher could have easily attended.
I’m not sure why Sookie is mentally making him a teenager in a school uniform when he’s an adult though. Maybe she’s going to then mentally add seventeen years to his age?
She gives him a Yankees cap because that’s what Luke wears!
RORY: Lane, this is flat out stalking. LANE: Look, I don’t have much time. I’ve already used up my five minutes of phone time so this is totally illicit, but I have to talk to you. There’s a new Belle and Sebastian single coming out today.
Belle and Sebastian, Scottish indie pop group formed in Glasgow in 1994 by Stuart Murdoch and Stuart David. After the limited release of their 1996 album Tigermilk , they recruited other musicians and singers. The band took their name from a short story Murdoch had written inspired by the television adaptation of the French novel Belle et Sébastien about a six-year-old boy and his dog.
Their 1996 album If You’re Feeling Sinister is widely considered the band’s masterpiece, while their 2000 album Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant brought mainstream success in the UK.
In fact, Belle and Sebastian didn’t release any new singles in 2002, although they brought out an album called Storytelling in June, the soundtrack to the 2001 film of the same name. Their most recent single was “I’m Waking Up to Us”, an EP put out on November 26 2001. It went to #39 in the UK and #22 in Scotland. It was #4 on the UK indie charts. I can only think this is the single Lane is referring to.
The song is about the break up of a relationship and the realisation that it would never have worked, which would fit in with Lane’s mood. Some of the lyrics include:
You know I love you here’s the irony You’re going to walk away intact I think you never liked me anyway …
I think I’m waking up to us We’re a disaster You don’t want to know me
PARIS: You’re only doing 135 wpm. RORY: Wpm? PARIS: Words per minute. RORY: Of course. PARIS: That’s slow.
Most people speak at 120-150 words a minute in everyday conversation, putting Rory’s 135 words per minute right in the centre of average.
It’s been found that people are more persuasive when they increase the speed at which they talk, so Paris is correct that it’s better to talk faster rather than slower. Debaters do usually speak much faster than a normal conversational speed.
LORELAI: Schmitty’s over the hill, he’s washed up, put him in Cooperstown.
Cooperstown is a historic village in New York state of less than 2000 people. It is best known as the home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, which opened in 1944 on farmland which had once belonged to James Fenimore Cooper (his father William Cooper was the town’s founder). The name Cooperstown is now synonymous with the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Cooperstown once laid claim to being the birthplace of baseball, but this was universally discounted by baseball historians. Nevertheless, it is a twin town of Windsor in Canada, which lays claim to being the birthplace of ice hockey.
Mike Schmidt (“Schmitty”) did get elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, several years after his career ended.
Even though Lorelai was playing bagel hockey and choosing a goalie, she has switched metaphors as if playing baseball. This is no doubt because Scott Patterson, who plays Luke, is a former baseball player.
LANE: Okay, I’m dying for news. Give me some headlines. RORY: Oh, well, I’ve got a debate coming up. And, um, Dean’s been working extra hours lately saving up for a new motorcycle, so I hardly see him. Mom and I haven’t done laundry in three weeks, but I have taken to jumping into the gigantic pile of dirty clothes while we play our Reader’s Digest World Famous Polka CD that we got used for ninety-nine cents.
I wasn’t able to find a World Famous Polka CD released by Reader’s Digest, but I did find Polka Party with Myron Floren on his accordion, released on CD in 1991 by Reader’s Digest. It’s possible that “world famous polka” is simply the sarcastic way that that Rory refers to it – “our world famous polka CD”. Otherwise it’s simply fictional.
Among the snippets from her life that Rory tells Lane is that she has hardly seen Dean since the Bid-on-a-Basket Fundraiser, almost a week ago. Conveniently, he has started working extra hours to save up for a new motorcycle, just after they got into a fight. I think we can assume they aren’t on the best of terms at the moment.
LORELAI: This whole morning has been a little Twilight Zone-y. LUKE: Or Outer Limits-y … Great show, just as eerie, same era, but no one ever references it. LORELAI: Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t speak geek.
The Outer Limits, an anthology television series originally broadcast from 1963 to 1965. It is often compared to The Twilight Zone, but stories were more science-fiction based than fantasy or supernatural, and were more straight action and suspense, often showing the human spirit spirit confronting dark existential forces, either from within or without.
The Outer Limits was very influential on the development of Star Trek – one reason why Luke might be a fan of the show. The Outer Limits was revived in 1995, and its last episode shown in January 2002, so Luke may very well have only recently finished watching the new series (and could be missing the show now it’s gone).
Lorelai is completely full of it for saying she doesn’t “speak geek”. She is a huge fan of Star Trek herself.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 