Even though Lorelai only asked her mother to join her as revenge for nagging her to get more involved at Chilton (and perhaps even as a callback to the imaginary mother-daughter talent show at Chilton Emily teased Lorelai with in Paris is Burning), Emily actually ends up having a good time (and dare I say it, so does Lorelai? Notice how she begins smiling and having fun once she sees Luke enjoying her performance).
Lorelai and Rory so seldom allow Emily to join them in social activities, but when they do, she often enjoys being part of the fun. There’s a playful side to Emily that is rarely given the chance to come out, and that Lorelai and Rory could have really helped with if they had bothered.
AVA: Oh, he’s adorable. And he [Luke] looks strong, is he strong? LORELAI: Oh I don’t know. I don’t think he’s gonna be in a sideshow anytime soon, but he can get the lid off a pickle jar.
The Strongman, a man performing amazing feats of strength, was a circus sideshow attraction in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Yep, another circus reference! These days, Strongman events have become athletic competitions.
Ava’s later comment about hoping Luke is unattached is a sign that she is a single mother, like Lorelai. It seems as if Lorelai might have more in common with some of the Chilton moms than she thought. However, Ava’s interest in Luke has doomed her chances of becoming Lorelai’s friend, which is a shame as they seemed like they could have got on well together, and been allies in the Chilton world. Romantic and sexual attraction pretty much ruins everything in Gilmore Girls.
[Emily walks out onto the patio] EMILY: What is this, a refugee camp? Come inside and eat at the table. LORELAI: Mom, the whole point of barbecuing is to eat outside. EMILY: Animals eat outside. Human beings eat inside with napkins and utensils. If you want to eat outside, go hunt down a gazelle. Make your decision, I’ll be inside.
More of Emily’s repressed, WASPY-y attitudes to eating, where pizza is something you only eat in a Turkish prison, and eating outside is something for animals or people in refugee camps. I can only think this attitude comes from country club barbecues, where the food would be cooked outside by the catering staff, but served indoors at tables like any other meal.
You can see how a lot of Lorelai’s poor dietary choices come out of a rebellion against her mother’s strict views on what foods are acceptable. Note that Lorelai and Rory immediately begin gnawing on corn cobs while hunched over in a corner, exactly like wild beasts, or starving people, comically fulfilling Emily’s expectations of what eating outside does to someone.
As with the ten generations of Gellers who went to Harvard, Paris also comes from a family of Puffs, and thus feels she “needs” to join them to continue a family tradition. There’s a sense of panic from Paris that Rory is “stealing” her rightful place in the world, or that Paris cannot really succeed unless Rory fails.
LORELAI: Talk to some kids, I’ll hang out with their moms, and we’ll get into Harvard, take over the world, then buy Chilton and turn it into a rave club.
A rave club is one which hosts dance parties (“raves”), typically featuring Djs and electronic dance music. Most often associated with the early 90s.
Note that Lorelai says, “We’ll get into Harvard”, rather than “You’ll get into Harvard”, as if Rory has to succeed for both of them.
LORELAI: I told him that he was completely out of line with this treatment of you, that you are not a loner freak, you have plenty of friends, and you don’t own a long black leather Matrix coat, and they should fall down on their kneesocks everyday that you deign to show up at that loser school.
The Matrix, previously discussed. The hero Neo wears a long black leather trench coat.
Also, how does Rory have “plenty of friends”? She has one friend, Lane! Getting along well with your mother’s social circle doesn’t make them your friends, as Lorelai seems to think. Lorelai has trouble accepting that she and Rory aren’t one person, but two.
LORELAI: All right, I confess, I was hiding Barry Manilow. RORY: You confess! LORELAI: But he was very big when I was very small and it’s the live version where he does a medley of all the commercial jingles he’s written.
Barry Manilow (born Barry Pincus in 1943) is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and producer who’s had a career spanning more than fifty years. His biggest hits include Mandy (1971), I Write the Songs (1975), Can’t Smile Without You (1975), and the Grammy-winning Copacabana (1978). He has had 51 Top 40 hits, with 13 of them getting to #1, and has sold more than 85 million records worldwide.
Lorelai admits that she has been hiding a Barry Manilow CD under the seat of the car. The album she refers to is his 1977 Barry Manilow Live, recorded at the Uris Theatre in New York. It contains a track which is titled Very Strange Medley, and as Lorelai says, it’s a medley of commercial jingles that Manilow wrote before he became a star. Some of the products promoted are Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, Dr Pepper, and Pepsi. Manilow says he included it against the values of his “artsy-fartsy” friends.
Rory teases Lorelai by singing a song which appears on this live album – Looks Like We Made It. It’s from his 1976 album, This One’s For You, released in 1977, and reached #1. People often take the song’s lyrics as being positive, but in fact they’re bittersweet – the narrator of the song and his ex-lover, have finally “made it”, but separately, not together. Only by breaking up have they found success. A possible reminder that, as a mother and daughter, Rory and Lorelai will have to go their separate ways at some point if Rory is to have a future.
LORELAI: Wow, busy today. Has Luke been advertising or something? RORY: He gets good word-of-mouth. LORELAI: Well, we have to start spreading bad word-of-mouth so we can always have a table. RORY: Well, that would be wrong, but sure.
The show opens with Lorelai and Rory having a weekend breakfast at Luke’s and finding it disturbingly busier than they anticipated. (It actually doesn’t look busier than any other time they’ve shown Luke’s diner on a weekend at breakfast time).
Even though there’s a free table right inside the door, they still joke about ruining Luke’s business to make sure they never, never, ever, run the risk of missing out on a table. Then they end up ordering coffee and muffins, which they … didn’t really need a table for, anyway? They could have taken those to go. But from the goofy way Lorelai gazes at Luke, it seems she’s here for more than food …
Lorelai is surprised to see Luke being polite and friendly to a customer, saying he’s usually so gruff. Luke is chatting to a middle-aged woman sitting alone – probably trying to make her feel welcome, as single, older women quite often get short shrift in cafes and restaurants. It’s not only a kind gesture, but good business sense (and quite believable behaviour for someone who lost their mother young and was brought up with traditional values). No wonder he gets good word-of-mouth!
LORELAI: You know, I’m really lucky. RORY: Yeah, why? LORELAI: I have someone to complain to when life sucks or work sucks or just everything sucks. I have someone I can talk to.
Lorelai realises that she is lucky that she can confide in Rory, but that Emily does not have a daughter she can talk to when life goes wrong for her. She has a moment of insight of how lonely Emily must be without that daughterly support that she takes for granted, and for once doesn’t immediately blame Emily for not fostering their relationship, the way she has with Rory. She’s willing to acknowledge how much Emily has missed out on.
At the end of the episode, she goes to her parents’ house before her business class, and finds Emily gardening on the patio. She lets Emily know that if she ever needs someone to talk to, Lorelai will be there for her. Although Emily does not avail herself of this offer, Lorelai remains to keep her mother company. Ironically, she has ignored her own advice to never go out on the patio!
Note the bright yellow lilies in this shot, as a hint of what happiness would be possible, and a slight callback to Lorelai’s thousand yellow daisies. Do Emily and Lorelai share a love of yellow flowers?
A bookends-style joke for the episode. At the beginning, Jess was in trouble for wearing his “inappropriate” Metallica tee-shirt to work at the diner. Now he comes out dressed as a Luke clone, in his own checked flannel shirt and backwards baseball cap, claiming he assumed that it was the uniform for the job.
While Luke berates him, Rory and Lorelai look on in amusement. Jess can feel gratified that once again he has managed to get Rory’s attention through his clothing choices.
It is also another “mirroring” scene, where Luke and Jess are presented as mirror images of each other, just as when Jess first stepped off the bus into Stars Hollow.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 