Footnotes to the TV series
DEAN: What’s the matter, Jess? Why you walking away?
JESS: It’s getting a little West Side Story here, Dean, and I gotta warn you, my dancing skills are not up to snuff.
West Side Story, previously discussed.
This is the second time that Jess has referenced the musical in regard to he and Dean.
[Luke and Jess walk out of the diner; Jess is carrying a garbage bag] ….
LORELAI: Hi, Saint Nick.
Saint Nicholas of Myra (270-343), a bishop in the early Christian church of Greek descent, living in Myra in Asia Minor (now Demre in Turkey). Saint Nicholas is the patron saint of (among other things) children and students, and his feast day is December 6.
The saint’s legendary habit of secret gift-giving gave rise to the traditional Christian icon of Santa Claus, through the Dutch figure Sinterklaas. On December 6, his feast day is celebrated with gift-giving, and the saint is portrayed as an elderly, serious man with long white hair and a beard, wearing red vestments over a white bishop’s robe.
Saint Nick is an English translation of Sinterklaas, and the American Santa Claus and Christmas traditions which arose in the 19th century seem to be a nostalgic revival of earlier Dutch folklore from immigrants to New York. Santa Claus is called Saint Nick in the Christmas poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas”, previously discussed.
Lorelai calls Jess “Saint Nick” because he is carrying a garbage bag, which Lorelai likens to Santa’s sack of presents. This is the second time that Lorelai has sarcastically referred to Jess as Santa Claus or Saint Nick – the first time was to accuse him of stealing Rory’s bracelet. Using the reference again seems to be a veiled barb, and a reminder to Jess that she is watching him.
LANE: Really? After all this – the marathon hymns, the weak punch, the crabby Koreans, you still wanna go out on a date with me?
[Dave nods, then kisses her] DAVE: I’ve gotta go . . . but I’m gonna call you tomorrow.
Lane and Dave puts into place what I assume to be another step in their plan when Lane says she needs to run after Dave to return his Bible. Did Dave really bring a Bible with him, and purposefully leave it behind, or did Lane prepare and plant the Bible in advance?
Either way, one or the other had the genius idea of having Dave inscribe the Bible: This Bible belongs to God, but is being used by Dave Rygalski. Mrs Kim reads this, and it immediately convinces her that Dave is a solid young Christian man, and allows Lane to go after him.
This episode is the one where Dave and Lane kiss for the first time, and begin dating (Rory kissed and began dating both Dean and Jess around Thanksgiving, too, and it was when Lorelai went on her first date with Max – November, it’s dating month on Gilmore Girls!).
Lane is so excited by what happened that when she pages Rory to tell her all about it, she can only write bible kiss bible, which Rory says is a great band name.
EMILY: You can’t even let Rory have one piece of our lives, even if it’s her choice. You hate us that much.
[Lorelai doesn’t respond. Emily walks back into the house]
Emily and Richard see Rory every Friday evening for dinner, and pay for Rory to attend a private school that’s close enough to their home for Rory to visit after school if she wants to. Rory has her own bedroom at Richard and Emily’s, and they threw her a lavish party for her sixteenth birthday. They have given her generous gifts, and Rory played golf with her grandfather one weekend, while going to a debutante ball at her grandmother’s request.
Granted, this all happened in the last two years – before that, they only saw Rory a few times a year. Also granted, Lorelai has been fairly reluctant about most of this contact, and has often submitted to it with bad grace. However, I don’t think it’s fair for Emily to say that Lorelai hasn’t let Rory share even one piece of her grandparents’ lives. They have regular contact, and Rory is actually quite close to Richard and Emily.
Lorelai’s flair for over-dramatising her problems clearly comes from Emily.
It’s very hard to defend Lorelai in this episode. Although she was clearly blindsided by the news about Rory applying to Yale, and it must have stung to find this out along with strangers and bare acquaintances, she behaves horribly by throwing a very public tantrum at her parents’ dinner table in front of guests – and at Thanksgiving, no less.
She’s thirty-four, but once again, behaves like a petulant teenager, and also tosses around some false accusations that Rory has somehow been brainwashed into applying to Yale. This comes across as paranoid, and is pretty insulting to her daughter – she’s eighteen, and capable of making her own decisions.
LORELAI: Where else did you apply? ….
RORY: Princeton . . . um, Yale.
LORELAI: Yale?
In the early 2000s, it was free to apply to up to three colleges, but after that you had to pay a small application fee for each one. Because of this, it was common to only make three applications, and it looks as if Rory applied to three universities: Harvard, Princeton (where her paternal grandfather went), and Yale (where her maternal grandfather went). She probably didn’t want to ask Lorelai for the money for further applications, knowing that she’d be upset about it, nor did she want to go behind her mother’s back and ask her grandparents for the money.
Lorelai acts as if applying to Yale is a complete shock, even though she knows Rory had an interview there, and she herself read a brochure about it, as if she was trying to get used to the idea. Apparently she needed a lot more time for it to sink in.
DOUGLAS: You can’t just apply to one place.
NATALIE: Chilton wouldn’t allow that.
LORELAI: Is that true?
RORY: Pretty much.
Chilton would certainly not permit Rory to only apply to Harvard. It is staggering that Lorelai wouldn’t already know this – she did attend a private school, even if she never ended up applying to university. And even if she somehow didn’t know this from her school or her parents (surely Richard and Emily would have talked to her about college?), it’s something which she should have educated herself about if she wanted to help Rory get into Harvard.
It also seems very telling that Rory has never talked this over with Lorelai, but kept her college applications a secret from her mother. It seems that she was so nervous about how Lorelai would react that she never discussed it with her. Lorelai’s overreaction at dinner shows that she was right to be wary about it, but then again, Lorelai probably wouldn’t have overreacted so badly in public if Rory had talked about it with her first.
DOUGLAS: Well, you didn’t apply to just Harvard, did you?
RORY: Well, no.
LORELAI: No? … We applied elsewhere?
Lorelai says, “We applied elsewhere?”, as if to underline that Rory is fulfilling Lorelai’s dreams as well as her own.
NATALIE: You have your mother’s wit.
EMILY: Sometimes I wish she’d give it back.
The show again demonstrates that Lorelai’s sarcastic sense of humour is very similar to Emily’s – Emily makes an immediate waspish comment when Natalie points this out.
EMILY: I thought a little background music would add a nice touch. He knows every song ever written.
LORELAI: “Free Bird”! Hi Brad.
“Free Bird” or “Freebird” is a song by rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, written by Allen Collins and Ronnie Van Zan. The song featured on the band’s 1973 debut album. Released as a single in 1974, “Free Bird” got to #19 in the US. A live version of the song got to #38 in 1977. It is Lynyrd Skynyrd’s signature song, the finale during live performances, and their longest song, often going well over 14 minutes when played live.
The lyrics sound like something Lorelai would relate to in regard to her parents:
But if I stay here with you …
Things just couldn’t be the same
‘Cause I’m as free as a bird now
And this bird you cannot change
Oh, oh, oh, oh …
And this bird, you cannot change
Lord knows, I can’t change
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 