Footnotes to the TV series
PARIS: Flescher Prep Gazette, Broadmouth Banner, Richmond Heights Chronicle – these publications are not our competition … The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post – these publications are our competition.
The high school magazines Paris mentions are fictional, while the competition she identifies are major news publications, all previously discussed.
PARIS: The Oppenheimer Award for Excellence in school journalism is not a contest. It’s a statement. It says you’re the best. The best writers, the best reporters, the best editors. It says that you have crushed all others who have dared to take you on. It says that every other single school in the United States of America is feeling nothing but shame and defeat and pain because of the people who won the Oppenheimer plaque. I wanna be those people, I wanna cause that pain.
The Oppenheimer Award for Excellence seems to have been named in honour of Jess Oppenheimer (1913-1988) [pictured], the creator, producer, and head writer of the sitcom I Love Lucy, starring Lucille Ball. Lucille Ball called him “the brains” behind Lucy, and he was the creative driving force of the show. (Jess may also be named after Oppenheimer!).
In real life, there are the National Pacemaker Awards in student journalism, which has a category for high school newspapers. They are administered by the National Scholastic Press Association. Founded in 1927, they are the student equivalent of the Pulitzer Prizes, and for that category the deadline is in June. There is no plaque handed out as a prize.
We never discover whether The Franklin won the award, but it is never mentioned again, suggesting that it didn’t.
LORELAI: Ooh Dad, see if you can find a pair of the new Chanel patent leather pirate boots stuffed back behind your Churchills.
Chanel, fashion brand, previously mentioned.
Patent leather is that shiny, almost plastic-looking, leather, and pirate boots, more correctly cavalier boots, are knee-high boots with a cuff around the top. A pair of Chanel boots of this type could cost around $1000 today. The boots sound suspiciously like something Amy Sherman-Palladino would wear.
RICHARD: You know what else I noticed?
RORY: What?
RICHARD: A first edition Flaubert, mint condition, shoved behind several of my Churchill biographies.
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), French novelist [pictured]. Highly influential, he is considered the leading exponent of literary realism in France. He is especially famous for his debut novel, Madame Bovary (1857), previously discussed.
Richard never specifies which book he has a first edition of, but fans often assume it is Madame Bovary, since Rory likes it. A first edition of even the English translation would cost tens of thousands of dollars, making this very unlikely. However, the first edition of the English translation of Three Tales (1877), published by Chatto and Windus in 1923, can be picked up for as little as $50, and is a very handsome volume. This would be my pick for Richard’s first edition.
Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965), British statesman who served as Prime Minister from 1940 to 1945, and then again from 1951 to 1955. He is especially famous for his inspiring wartime speeches, and is considered one of the most significant figures of the twentieth century.
Richard does not say whether he means biographies by Churchill or about him, but probably the latter, since Churchill only wrote two biographies (not several, although Richard could have multiple copies of each).
EMILY: So I went inside and looked around and it occurred to me that there’s a very limited space there … Now of course there’s a slot open for me and Richard and you and Rory, but after the two of you – that’s it. No more room for anyone else.
Apparently the Gilmore family mausoleum is now almost full, and only has four spaces left. Emily is very concerned about Lorelai getting married, because there would be nowhere for her husband, but she never seems to consider that Rory could very well marry one day, and married or not, both of them are capable of having children (or further children, in Lorelai’s case). Where they are meant to go is never even discussed, and it really sounds as if the Gilmores’ mausoleum has pretty much seen its quota filled by now.
Lorelai suggests that she and Rory could be buried in the same space – a callback to them sharing a bed in the potting shed, and a sign that she really sees Rory as an extension of herself. Rory pleads for more boundaries by saying she’d prefer her own space. Even in death, Lorelai wants to keep Rory enmeshed with her, rather gruesomely.
Emily says the cemetery offered them the opportunity to buy an “annex” for extra family members. I don’t think this is an option in real life, although they have two public mausoleums at Cedar Hill where future generations of dead Gilmores could be stashed. Richard’s mother Trix dies during the series run, and surely other elderly Gilmores as well – how long are those extra four spaces going to last, and how long can they keep kicking existing Gilmores into the annex, which is also of finite space?
In A Year in the Life, Richard Gilmore dies and is buried in a plot with a headstone, not in a mausoleum. Maybe they really did run out of space?
EMILY: Well, I visited the family mausoleum today … I just wanted to check on things, make sure they were keeping it up, changing the flowers, you know.
A mausoleum is a building which contains a burial chamber with spaces for the dead to be interred. They have existed since ancient times for rulers, the nobility, and gentry, and became particularly popular in Europe and its colonies in the 18th and 19th centuries as burial options for the wealthy.
In real life, Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford [pictured] has mausoleums for burials, usually owned by wealthy and prominent families, many of them of historic significance. The Gilmore family mausoleum is presumably one of them.
The show ends with another Friday Night Dinner – not the one immediately after the Thursday night scene at Stars Hollow High School, but the following one, more than a week later. Lorelai tells Emily that work began on the house the previous morning, so that we know they have already done the termite fumigation, and everything is on track for their house to be fully repaired.
Getting a house’s foundation repaired usually takes about three days, so it might be be finished over the weekend. Even allowing for extra time because the damage was so extensive, we can feel confident that Lorelai’s house will be completely fixed by Tuesday or Wednesday at the latest (in time for the next episode!).
LORELAI: I got your note.
RORY: Yeah, well pinning it to the Mallomars is always a safe bet.
Mallomars are graham cracker biscuits overlaid with marshmallow, then coated in dark chocolate. First introduced in 1913, they are manufactured by Nabisco and produced in a factory in Ontario, Canada (like the pilot episode of Gilmore Girls). They are a seasonal item, only available from October to April, so it fits that Lorelai and Rory are eating them in the middle of winter.
Jackson once gave Lorelai a recipe which sounded very much like home made Mallomars with jam instead of marshmallow.
EMILY: You have any idea who Miles Hahn is? … He’s the president of the First National Bank. We’ve been doing business with him for years. He’s become a very dear friend of ours actually.
A name sometimes given to local banks in the US; there have been many of this name, most of which have closed down or been taken over by now. There are still examples in Florida, Utah, Nebraska, and Pennsylvania, but there’s never been one in Hartford.
It is unclear if Emily means that they use the First National Bank themselves, or if she means that Miles Hahn has been doing business with Richard through the insurance company he works for. I presume the first one.
RORY: And then [Mrs Kim] chased me halfway down the street with the hose. It was like a scene from Silkwood.
Silkwood is a 1983 biographical drama film directed by Mike Nichols and starring Meryl Streep, based on the book Who Killed Karen Silkwood? by Howard Kohn. Karen Silkwood was a nuclear power whistleblower and union activist who died in a car crash in 1974 while investigating unsafe practices at the plutonium plant where she worked. Although the film ends with her death, in real life a 1979 lawsuit ended with the jury awarding $10 million in damages to the Silkwood estate, with the company settling out of court for $1.38 million.
The film was a commercial and critical success, with Meryl Streep receiving praise for her performance, as well as supporting actors Kurt Russell and Cher. Silkwood was released on DVD in 1999, so Lorelai and Rory would have seen it within the last couple of years.
In the film, Karen Silkwood and her fellow workers become contaminated by radiation, which the nuclear plant officials try to blame on Silkwood. The decontamination process is brutal, ending with being blasted in the face with a hose – now known as a “Silkwood shower”. Rory compares her treatment from Mrs Kim with Karen Silkwood’s decontamination, as well as the suggestion that she is being unfairly blamed for the termite infestation.
Mrs Kim’s behaviour is, of course, comically wrong. Rory cannot “carry” termites to Mrs Kim’s store, and spraying someone or something with water won’t get rid of termites.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 