JACKSON: I have a cousin who owns a Xerox company that specializes in taking pictures and making them into things – calendars, coffee mugs, collector plates, and pajamas.
Xerox is a corporation selling print and digital document products and series, headquartered in Connecticut, and incorporated in New York. They are best known for making photocopiers – so much so that Xerox is often used to mean any photocopier (like Kleenex and tissues), and “xerox” can be used as a verb, meaning “to photocopy”.
Jackson’s cousin owns a photocopying service which puts photos onto gift items. Jackson has a large family, and we learn a lot about them during the course of the show. We also learn that Jackson was on the wrestling team when he was in high school.
LORELAI: So anyway, I called the bank today. SOOKIE: How did that go? LORELAI: Well, it – wait, yeah, oh, what’s that? Yeah, they’re still laughing.
The plot of this episode revolves around Lorelai’s house getting damaged by termites and her not being able to raise the money to have it fixed. Even though she’s a homeowner, it turns out later in the episode that she has already taken out bank loans using her house as equity twice before, which is why she’s having trouble getting a loan now.
She does say she always pays backs her debts, and she has a good income from working at the inn, so it seems unlikely that banks would give her no help at all. They have loans specifically for renovation and reconstruction, allowing you to pay the loan back as bills come in, so that you don’t pay any interest on the loan until the project is complete.
Lorelai wasn’t even able to get money from a loan shark or predatory lender, which she fictionalises as Jacko’s Loans and Stuff, possibly because she needed more money than they typically loan.
Financial issues rarely seem to add up on Gilmore Girls, and this is an example of a situation which doesn’t seem quite believable.
SOOKIE: When are you going to tent? LORELAI: Next week.
A treatment for drywood termite infestation is to place a tent over the house and fumigate it so that the poison gas can reach every area of the house. It is a measure kept for extreme situations when the termite infestation is severe, widespread, and in areas where normal methods cannot reach.
It can take half a day or up to a week to complete, and the house will need to be vacated, then cleared and aerated afterwards. It is a big inconvenient undertaking, and an expensive one – Lorelai is spending $2000 on her fumigation. She refers to it as a “circus tent”, making this another circus reference.
PARIS: Louise, what did you get? LOUISE: Highlights, just around my face. PARIS: You will take them again and do better.
Although Paris is correct that you can retake the PSAT, you can only do it once every twelve months. So Louise would need to wait until October 2002 to retake it – by which time, she would have taken the actual SAT, making it redundant. If you want to take your PSATs more than once, you need to start at least a year in advance. I feel as if Paris would know this.
Note that Louise’s results are apparently lower than Madeline’s, and it is actually she who is worse academically than her best friend. Louise seemed to be the brighter one in Season 1, but Paris berates her by saying, “You don’t study, you don’t apply yourself”, as if she knows Louise is capable of doing better, but is simply lazy.
MADELINE: 500 Verbal, 560 Math. PARIS: Respectable. MADELINE: I thought so.
Although the show encourages us to think of Madeline as rather dim, in fact her results put her squarely in the middle, with the average PSAT score being in the 500s for each subject. She’s ditzy rather than dumb.
LORELAI: Fifteen thousand dollars? RORY: We’re never eating again. LORELAI: I don’t have fifteen thousand dollars. I’ve never had fifteen thousand dollars. I’m trying to picture fifteen thousand dollars – I can’t! That’s how unfamiliar fifteen thousand dollars and I are with each other!
Apparently Lorelai bought her house for less than $15 000, or the downpayment was less than that. That would seem almost unbelievable today, but is plausible for a house in rural Connecticut needing urgent repairs in the mid 1990s (for the downpayment, not the entire price).
KIRK: You have termites … Tens of thousands of them. Subterranean, drywood, the whole gamut.
Termites are an insect closely related to cockroaches, and sometimes called “white ants”, although they aren’t ants, or even close to them. They are considered a pest because of their wood-eating habits, and can cause significant damage to wooden structures.
There are three groups of termites: dampwood, drywood, and subterranean, which would be the “whole gamut”. Subterranean termites live underground in nests or mounds, dampwood termites eat wood exposed to rain or soil, while drywood termites thrive in warm environments – which, if you live somewhere cold, means that they live living in your nice warm wooden house!
It seems unlikely that Lorelai has all possible types of termites, but it also seems unlikely Kirk is qualified as a termite expert. She almost certainly has a serious infestation of drywood termites.
This song plays as Lorelai wakes up happy, gets coffee, goes outside, and falls through the porch. It was written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, published in 1955. It was introduced in the 1956 Alfred Hitchcock film, The Man Who Knew Too Much, sung by Doris Day. Her rendition went to #2 in the US and #1 in the UK, and the film received the Academy Award for Best Song. It became Doris Day’s signature song, and is regarded as one of the best songs in cinema history.
The song popularised the phrase que sera sera to indicate a sort of cheery fatalism, although the phrase itself was used as a heraldic motto as early as the 16th century. It is an English mistranslation of “what will be, will be” from the Spanish; in Spanish it would be lo que será, será. No such similar phrase is known of in Spanish or Italian, it has always been an English saying.
In The Man Who Knew Too Much, Doris Day sings the song in the hopes that her kidnapped son will hear it. The song’s message of hope is often used in film and television juxtaposed against disastrous events to create a moment of black comedy, of which we see a very mild version in Gilmore Girls. The joke is that Lorelai has no idea what is coming.
(It might seem unusual to go out on your porch in the your pyjamas early in the morning in the depths of winter to drink your coffee, but Lorelai has that special relationship with snow. And they’re actually in California).
LORELAI: Okay. So we should celebrate. Hey, how about we get all dressed up tonight and hit The Rocky Horror Picture Show?
The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the 1975 musical comedy horror film, previously mentioned. Directed by Jim Sharman, it is based on the 1973 stage production of The Rocky Horror Show, with music, book, and lyrics by Richard O’Brien (who co-wrote the film’s screenplay and plays Riff Raff in the film).
The film begins with a young engaged couple named Brad and Janet who get lost one night and end up at the castle of a cross-dressing bisexual mad scientist named Dr Frank-n-Furter, who is from another planet. The film both parodies and celebrates science fiction and horror films from the 1930s to the 1970s, set against the backdrop of the glam rock era, which allowed much exploration and transgression of gender and sexuality.
The quirky film originally struggled to find an audience, but midnight screenings soon led to it gaining a cult following, especially in the LGBT community. Free admission was often given to those who arrived dressed as the characters, so it became an early example of cosplay fandom, and there is traditionally strong audience participation, with the audience encouraged to sing, dance, and shout lines from the film. Can you see why this is a film Lorelai would love?
The Rocky Horror Picture Show continues to be shown in cinemas, making it the longest-running release in cinema history. Midnight screenings are still popular, but Stars Hollow is showing it at the sensible time of 8 pm. Even so, I don’t believe Mrs Kim would have approved of Lane seeing the film on a school night, although Rory intends to invite her.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 