LORELAI: I don’t know. Um, how ‘bout this table with it’s unobstructed westward view of the wide cosmopolitan expansive Klump Street?
Lorelai seems to be saying that Luke’s is on Klump Street. I presumed that the street that Luke’s is on is Main Street – Luke mentioned Main Street, and it looks like the main street of town, as it’s where major businesses are, like the market. If there is a bigger, more important Main Street somewhere, we never see it, which seems odd.
It’s just possible she means that you can see the street which crosses it, as Luke’s is on a corner, and that this is Klump Street. If so, that’s the street Weston Bakery is on. Klump Street is the location of the giant slinky.
In fact, due to the frosted glass, curtains and blinds on the diner windows, customers don’t actually seem to have a great view of anything much from the tables at Luke’s.
EMILY: A cigar club. Can you imagine a more disgusting organization to join? Your grandfather now pays money to sit in an enclosed room with a bunch of other men and blow smoke in each other’s faces. Twice a week he comes home smelling like a flophouse.
This is Richard’s first attempt to reinvent himself after retirement by joining a cigar club, where men gather to buy and smoke cigars together.
In real life, there are many places in Hartford which have cigar bars and lounges. The upmarket Hartford Club [pictured] has a cigar room for guests, and this seems like the sort of place Richard would feel comfortable.
This explains Richard’s absence for Friday Night Dinner, now the writers can’t use his job as an excuse. It does seem a little strange that Lorelai and Rory can never miss Friday Night Dinner except for emergencies or extraordinary circumstances, but Richard can miss it just to smoke a cigar!
A flophouse is American English for a dosshouse: a cheap hotel, hostel, or boarding house designed to house poverty-stricken homeless people. It seems unlikely they would actually smell of expensive cigars.
LORELAI: Yes! Ha, ha, sorry guys, don’t feel bad. I’m totally into Dungeons & Dragons.
Dungeons & Dragons (often abbreviated to D&D or DnD) is a multi award-winning fantasy tabletop role-playing game originally designed by Gray Gygax and Dave Arneson. First published in 1974 by Tactical Studio Rules Inc, in 1997 it was published by Wizards of the Coast (now owned by Hasbro).
Dungeons & Dragons was developed from miniature wargames, but instead of working in military formation, each player creates their own character to embark on imaginary adventures in a fantasy setting. A Dungeon Master serves as a referee and storyteller. The characters form a party who interact with the world and each other by solving problems, engaging in battle, exploring, gathering treasure, and gaining knowledge. In doing so, characters gain Experience Points, becoming increasingly powerful.
Dungeons & Dragons was the first modern role-playing game, and remains the best known and best selling in the US, with an estimated 20 million people having played the game, and more than $1 billion in sales.
Lorelai tells the guys that they’ve had a lucky escape, because she’s into Dungeons & Dragons (and must therefore be a hopeless nerd). However, today the games have become more popular than ever, and are actually quite fashionable.
LORELAI: Oh, hey, one of them’s seen Ghostbusters 124 times.
Ghostbusters is a 1984 supernatural comedy directed by Ivan Reitman, and written by Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis. It stars Akroyd, Ramis, and Bill Murray as a trio of eccentric parapsychologists who start a ghost-catching business in New York City.
The film was released to critical acclaim, becoming a cultural phenomenon. It was the #2 film of 1984, one of the most successful comedy films of the 1980s, and the highest-grossing comedy ever at the time. It’s theme song, “Ghostbusters” by Ray Parker Jr, was also a #1 hit. It is considered to be an iconic 1980s movie, and one of the most important comedy films ever made.
With its dedicated fan following, it launched a multibillion dollar multimedia franchise, including an animated television series and its sequel, video games, board games, books, comics, clothing, music, and haunted attractions.
The 1989 sequel Ghostbusters II was less successful. It was rebooted in 2016 with an all-female main cast, and amusingly, Melissa McCarthy, who plays Sookie, was chosen as one of the stars of the film; it was a commercial failure and received mixed reviews. A second sequel to the 1984 film, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, was released in 2021.
Watching the film 124 times between 1984 and 2002 doesn’t even seem that out there – it’s less than once a month. As usual, Lorelai’s obsessions with films are seen as cool and quirky, while anyone else’s are sad and pathetic!
LORELAI: Ugh, every great relationship has its obstacles. You’d know that if you weren’t dating Andy Hardy.
Andrew “Andy” Hardy, fictional character played by Mickey Rooney in 16 films made by Metro-Goldwyn between 1937 and 1946 (and another in 1958, trying unsuccessfully to continue the series). The Hardy films, enormously popular in their day, were sentimental comedies set in a Midwestern town, celebrating ordinary American life.
The Hardy family first appeared in the 1928 play Skidding by Aurania Rouverol, with Charles Eaton as Andy. The first film was A Family Affair, based on the play, with Mickey Rooney as Andy, and he continued in the role from the ages of 16 to 25.
Andy Hardy soon became the central character, with the films focusing on the relationship between he and his father, Judge Hardy (a bit like Gilmore Girls focusing on Rory and Lorelai). The plot typically involved Andy getting in trouble with money or girls because of selfishness or trying to fudge the truth. He would then have a man-to-man talk with his father, a man of absolute integrity, and end up doing the right thing (very different to Gilmore Girls).
Lorelai seems to be teasing Rory about Dean, suggesting that she’s dating a wholesome, inexperienced teenage boy from the Midwest, like Andy Hardy. Meanwhile, Lorelai is looking for a real man, like William Holden.
Interestingly, the cast of A Family Affair were plucked straight from the 1935 comedy, Ah, Wilderness! The plot involves a well-read teenage boy named Richard (played by Eric Linden) from a Connecticut town, graduating as valedictorian and going to Yale, just like Rory. The film also features a box social!
[Picture shows Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in Love Finds Andy Hardy, 1938].
LORELAI: So I’ve decided I’m saving myself for William Holden … Sunset Boulevard was on last night, and I don’t know…I’ve known him for years – Sabrina, Stalag 17 – and yet last night something snapped.
William Holden, born William Beedle (1918-1981), actor who was one of the biggest box-office draws of the 1950s. Winner of an Academy Award and an Emmy for Best Actor, he starred in some of Hollywood’s most popular and highly-acclaimed films. He was named as one of the biggest stars of the year six times between 1954 and 1961, and is considered one of the greatest male stars of Classic Hollywood Cinema.
Sunset Boulevard, 1950 black comedy film noir directed by Billy Wilder, starring William Holden as a screenwriter and Gloria Swanson as a former silent film star, who draws him into her demented fantasy world where she dreams of making a triumphant return to the screen. A commercial success, the film was praised by critics and won three Academy Awards. It is regarded as one of the greatest films ever made. William Holden wears a swimsuit in the film [pictured] which has made many others interested in him – it’s not just Lorelai!
Sabrina, 1954 romantic-comedy drama directed by Billy Wilder, starring William Holden as a thrice-married playboy who is the lifelong crush of a young woman named Sabrina, played by Audrey Hepburn. She finds love with his brother, played by Humphrey Bogart. Backstage, it was Holden and Hepburn who got hot and heavy. Sabrina was a box-office success, and won an Academy Award for Best Costumes.
The show opens the day before the Stars Hollow Bid-on-a-Basket Fundraiser, with signs telling the viewer that bidders can win themselves a delicious home-cooked picnic lunch, that it’s held on Sunday at midday, and that all proceeds go to the Stars Hollow Retirement Home (the signs are sponsored by Doose’s Market). Across the street at the market, baskets are on sale, and more signs tell us that it’s also known as the Bid-on-a-Basket Festival. We can see a woman leaving with her new basket.
Inside the market, Lorelai and Rory are shopping for their own baskets, but of course they don’t intend to cook a delicious home-cooked picnic lunch (or even make Sookie do it for them, like they did for the bake sale). They’re just going to put old leftovers in their baskets – as we now know they keep leftovers for a long time, it’s sounding like a Salmonella Festival for anyone bidding on their baskets!
These type of fundraisers are called “box socials” and were common in the 19th century and 1900s, with women cooking the food and packing it into a box or basket, and men bidding for them. Although it was meant to be a “blind” auction, married and attached women would let their husband or sweetheart know which basket was theirs, so they could bid on it – bidding on a woman’s basket was a way to let her know you were interested in more than her home cooking.
Box socials are also low-key dating auctions, with the winning bidder not only getting the basket, but the chance to share the picnic lunch with the lady who provided it. A lunch basket auction of this type features in the 2001 YA novel Flipped by Wendelin Van Draanen (in this case, it is a high school boy who provides the basket, and girls bid on the chance to have lunch with him). This seems like a bit of a coincidence, or perhaps merely zeitgeist.
Although Flipped is set in the 1990s, when it was made into a film in 2010, they set it in the 1960s, as if that scene was deemed too old-fashioned to be believable. They must have agreed with Lorelai, who complained that the concept was “backwards”. In fact there has been a mild resurgence in box socials since the 1990s.
The show never makes it explicit, but according to the timeline, the Bid-on-Basket Fundraiser seems to be held in mid-February, and it would make sense if it was the Sunday after Valentine’s Day. That’s a clear connection with love and romance, although it isn’t practical at all to have a picnic in winter! In real life it would be freezing.
RICHARD: And drive behind me. I don’t want that thing blowing up right in front of the Jag. DEAN: No problem. Try to keep your electrical system working long enough to get there.
Jag is short for Jaguar, a luxury British vehicle company headquartered in Coventry, originally founded in 1922 as the Swallow Sidecar Company. The current name was chosen in 1945. It holds royal warrants from Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles, and has manufactured cars for the British Prime Minister.
There isn’t a good shot of Richard’s Jaguar, it’s behind Rory’s car. I have been informed by a trustworthy source that the car appears to be a Jaguar XJ6 sedan, possibly a 1974 model, based on its hood ornament, chrome bumper bar and paint colour. That’s a classic car known for its performance and superb handling.
Dean mocks it for being unreliable, probably because the 1970s XJ6 sold to the US market is notoriously difficult and expensive to restore and maintain, due to its complexity and numerous issues with the electrics. However, Richard is later shown to be very interested in old cars and has a lot of money (and a chauffeur … hey, whatever happened to Lance, anyway?), so he would be well positioned to take care of an old Jag properly.
You can see Richard is being slightly hypocritical about Rory’s car, since his own vehicle is old, and probably has more safety and reliability issues than the one that Dean has rebuilt.
LORELAI: Dean, now that you’re done with that, will you build me a plane? One that looks like Shamu?
Shamu is the name given to various killer whales (orcas) at Seaworld parks. The first Shamu was captured in 1965 and died in 1971. Her name means “friend of Namu” – Namu was a male orca captured in 1965, named after a fishing port in British Columbia, Canada, close to his site of capture. The whales named Shamu were always the “star” of the killer whale show.
In 1988, Southwest Airlines designed a plane called Shamu One, a Boeing 737 painted to look like a killer whale, to promote travel to Seaworld in Texas.
Southwest Airlines ended their relationship with Seaworld in 2014, after the release of the 2013 documentary Black Fish focused on the mistreatment of orcas in captivity. In 2016, Seaworld discontinued its orca breeding program.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 