Footnotes to the TV series
Rory’s school day is 8 hours long, meaning that classes start at 8.05 am and end at 4.05 pm. This is at the upper end of school hours in Connecticut, although there are schools in Connecticut with even longer hours. The start and end times, no doubt coincidentally, are the same as the Classical Magnet School in Hartford.
PARIS: She’ll never catch up. She’s a month behind already.
If Paris means that four weeks have passed since they started school, then the date is Monday 2 October 2000. If she is exaggerating somewhat and it is the end of the month they started school, then it is Monday 25 September 2000. The second one seems more likely.
Paris learns from Rory’s file that she has chosen to be a Journalism major. In some American high schools, students choose a major subject stream in the same way they will at college or university. This will affect which electives they can take.
Rory tells Headmaster Charleston that her aspiration is to study Journalism and Political Science at Harvard. Harvard doesn’t have an undergraduate degree in Journalism or Political Science, but Rory might have been planning to obtain a Bachelor of Arts in Social Studies, focusing on Government, and then getting a Master of Liberal Arts in Journalism.
Emily Gilmore and Headmaster Charleston’s wife Bitty are both on the symphony fundraising committee. In real life the Hartford Symphony Orchestra is one of America’s leading regional orchestras, performing more than 200 times each year. It raises funds through subscriptions and donations, and by hosting special events.
LORELAI: I’m okay. I just . . . do I look shorter? ‘Cause I feel shorter.
RORY: Hey, how ’bout I buy you a cup of coffee?
LORELAI: Oh, yeah. You drive, though, okay, ’cause I don’t think my feet will reach the pedals.
In Connecticut, Rory would not be eligible to apply for her learner’s permit until she turned sixteen. This is still at least a month away, so it wouldn’t be legal for Rory to drive her mother home even under parental supervision.
LORELAI: You wanted to control me.
EMILY: You were still a child.
LORELAI: I stopped being a child the minute the strip turned pink, okay?
Lorelai implies that she discovered she was pregnant using a home pregnancy testing kit, the kind where the woman urinates on a stick and waits for the test to change colour, a strip which turns pink indicates a positive test. In fact, these sort of lateral flow tests didn’t become available until 1988, and weren’t widely available until the 1990s, while Lorelai got pregnant in 1984. Previous to this, home pregnancy testing kits were more like mini chemistry labs, where you mixed urine and the solution together to see if it changed colour.
Lorelai claims that she stopped being a child the minute she became pregnant. Getting pregnant doesn’t turn a girl into an adult, so Lorelai is wrong on that count. In fact, we can see during the show that becoming a mother at an early age stunted Lorelai’s emotional development so that her maturity remained at the level of a wayward teenage girl even into her thirties. This is the other side of the conflict between Emily and Lorelai, with neither of them being completely in the right or completely wrong, and with both of them over-dramatising their situations and claiming victim status.
By the way, Lorelai was very far from being rare as a teenage mother in Hartford. By the early 1990s, one quarter of all births in the city were to a teen mother. She was definitely an unusual teenage mother though.
RICHARD: Speaking of which, Christopher called yesterday.
LORELAI: Speaking of which? How is that a speaking of which?
RICHARD: He’s doing very well in California. His internet start-up goes public next month. This could mean big things for him. [to Rory] Very talented man, your father.
The internet bubble of 1997-2001, also known as the dot-com boom, was a period of excessive speculation in internet-based services and businesses services. During this time there were huge numbers of internet startup companies, some providing internet access, others using the internet to provide services. Most of this startup activity was located in Silicon Valley in the Bay Area of San Francisco in California – nicknamed thus for its high concentration of tech-based companies. By their nature high-risk ventures, start-up companies have a high rate of failure.
RORY: So, Grandpa, how’s the insurance biz?
RICHARD: Oh, people die, we pay. People crash cars, we pay. People lose a foot, we pay.
Richard Gilmore was written as having a job in the insurance industry because Hartford is known as “The Insurance Capital of the World”. Many insurance companies are based in the city or have major branches there.
While Lorelai is visiting her parents in Hartford to ask them for money, she says that she just finished her business class. Later we learn that as well as working full-time, Lorelai also attends community college in Hartford two evenings a week to study business.
In real life, there is only one community college in Hartford – Capital Community College. This college offers a 4-semester associate degree in Management (Entrepreneurship), suitable for those wanting to improve their work qualifications, or equip them to start their own business. It sounds ideal for Lorelai’s needs.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 