Footnotes to the TV series
LORELAI: Let me just say, if we walk in there and his dead mother is sitting in a rocking chair, not a bit surprised.
A reference to the 1960 film Psycho, previously discussed.
In the film, the deranged murderer kills his own mother, but keeps her in the basement sitting in a rocking chair, treating her as if she were still alive. This seems to be another clue that Lorelai suspects Dwight of murdering Beenie Morrison, or being a serial killer.
NATALIE: There she is, the Cobra … This woman gets her way or she squeezes ’til you comply.
Emily’s friend is Natalie Swope, played by Judy Geeson. You may remember her as one of the ladies from Emily’s tea party on the patio in “Presenting Lorelai Gilmore”. Emily introduces Natalie and Lorelai as if they are strangers, even though Natalie asked after Lorelai and seemed to remember her quite well in the previous season, despite not seeing Lorelai since she was a teenager (although, as Lorelai and Rory attended Emily’s Christmas party each year, this doesn’t seem plausible).
Natalie refers to Emily as “the Cobra”, because she squeezes people (puts pressure on them) until she gets what she wants from them. There are various snakes called cobra, but only those in the genus Naja from Asia are true cobras. They are notable for being able to rear up off the ground and flatten their necks to appear larger. They don’t attack prey by squeezing them, however – that’s pythons and boa constrictors. Cobras have highly venomous fangs instead, and all species are capable of delivering a fatal bite to a human.
Lorelai sometimes seems selfish and unreasonable in the way that she instinctively refuses her mother’s requests, but Emily’s reputation as domineering and manipulative, determined to get her own way at no matter what cost to the other party (the auctioneer is actually ill in this episode, but Emily has forced him to turn up and work) provides a good reason for that. She has no wish to be one of the Cobra’s many victims, and what seems like a reasonable request may well turn out to be something more sinister.
LORELAI: Uh, well, I guess, I could water your lawn, Dwight – sure.
DWIGHT: Boy, that is something. If I would have asked somebody back where I used to live to water my lawn, I would’ve gotten a much more HBO kind of answer.
Home Box Office (HBO), a pay television channel, owned by Warner Bros. Discovery (Gilmore Girls was on the Warner Bros. TV channel, the WB). First launched in 1972, it was the first pay TV network in the US, and the first in the world to begin transmitting via satellite.
HBO, as a channel available to subscribers, was able to broadcast programs without having to edit them to remove adult or objectionable material, and its sister channel Cinemax even broadcast softcore pornography until 2018. Dwight is saying that he would have received a much more adult-oriented answer in his previous neighbourhood (presumably in a city) if he asked someone to water his lawn for a few days.
Lorelai has always been shown to be pretty good at shutting down anyone who asks her to do anything for them she doesn’t want to, yet somehow, she is unable to resist Dwight’s plea. I guess she doesn’t want to get on the bad side of a new neighbour, or she doesn’t want him to think Stars Hollow isn’t a nice place, when he seems so excited to have moved there. Possibly her fight with Pete, which she later learned she’d been unreasonable about, has taken up all her energy. Or Dwight just has some mystical power over her. Maybe the same mind control that he used to get Beenie Morrison’s house!
DWIGHT: You know, I just got this beautiful lawn put in, really amazing shade of green, and the guy who put it in for me, he told me that I have to keep each blade of grass very moist for the first few days while the roots take, but I have to go on a business trip for a few days. Huh, last minute, and believe me, I tried to get out of it but my boss said, ‘Dwight, get off your keister and go make us some money’, so I gotta go.
Keister, slang for the anus or the buttocks. Its origin is uncertain. In the 19th century, it was criminal slang for a burglar’s tool box, then later, criminal slang for a strongbox or safe, while “tripe and keister” meant a conman’s display case on a tripod. It probably comes from kiste, a German and Yiddish word for a box or case.
It seems Dwight not only moved in without Lorelai and Rory noticing anything, he also got a new lawn laid down without them noticing!
I am not sure what business Dwight works for that he could commute to it from Stars Hollow. He could work in Hartford and drive in every day, but he’s really presented as more of a big city person, with a New York vibe. By the way, people really take a lot of business trips in the Gilmore Girls universe!
DWIGHT: I just moved in across the way.
LORELAI: Oh, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Beenie Morrison’s old place.
Although Beenie Morrison was never seen or mentioned before, he used to live in the house directly opposite Lorelai and Rory. Oddly enough, they never noticed Beenie talking about selling, putting the house up for sale, erecting a FOR SALE sign, saying goodbye, or moving out. This has led many fans to the theory that Dwight simply murdered Beenie and moved into his house! Although this doesn’t explain why they didn’t also notice Dwight moving in, and why they never heard anything, when Stars Hollow is so gossipy. It’s strange how very, very oblivious the Gilmore girls have been to the house across from them until their attention is drawn to it.
Even Lorelai seems to suspect something isn’t right with this scenario. When Dwight says it’s “great” to be in his new house, Lorelai says, “Only if Beenie Morrison didn’t want to live in it any more”, as if she wonders whether Beenie was forced out in some way. Dwight says he paid Beenie a good price – even overpaid. That might suggest that rather than Beenie putting his house up for sale, Dwight picked it out on a visit to Stars Hollow, and made Beenie Morrison an offer he couldn’t refuse.
RORY: I can’t believe you got into a fight with Pete.
LORELAI: Hey, you do not suddenly decide that garlic is an extra topping, not after five years, not after all we’ve been through.
The first mention of Pete as the owner/manager of the pizza store which Lorelai and Rory frequent, they have apparently been customers there since 1997, ever since Lorelai bought her own house. We met Joe delivering their pizza in “Kiss and Tell”, and Lorelai ordered a pizza from Joe in “The Break Up Part 2” – perhaps Joe is Pete’s son, and it’s a family business?
The bag Rory is carrying seems to have Bell Pizza written on it, but later the pizza store is called Antonioli’s Restaurant and Pizzeria. There is a Bell Pizza in the Los Angeles suburb of Bell, however.
EMILY: We have a couple of wonderful writing desks, and some French end tables, rocking chairs, picture frames, lamps, davenports.
Originally, davenport was the name given to sofas made by the furniture makers A.H. Davenport and Company, from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It sold luxury furniture through its showrooms in Boston and New York City in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and made furniture for the White House. They ceased business in 1974.
The word is now used for a rather confusing number of sofa types in the US. It may mean a boxy formal upholstered sofa, like the ones originally made by Davenport, or a sofa which converts into a bed, or a futon-style sofa with storage underneath it, or just a generic word for a large high-end sofa. I’m not actually sure in which sense Emily is using it, but I think either the first or the last is the most likely.
As an extra layer of confusion, a davenport is also a 19th century English word for a small writing desk, but as Emily already mentions writing desks as separate possibilities, I think this one can safely be ruled out.
JESS: Hey, the girls that I like don’t give a damn about me! And unlike some other people I know, I’m not gonna sit around hoping that they change their minds and suddenly notice me.
LUKE: What’s that supposed to mean?
JESS: You fixed any neighbor’s porches lately? Or you go on a picnic or you get rooked into giving a ridiculous speech at a high school?
Jess tells Luke that his cynical view of relationships has partly been formed by watching Luke pine for Lorelai. He seems to have become indignant at the way Lorelai talks Luke into things, and the way Luke offers her free handyman work around the house. Jess seems to have decided that whatever else he might be, he’s not some sap who’s going to make a fool of himself over a girl.
Jess mentions Luke fixing Lorelai’s porch, which happened before Jess moved to Stars Hollow. Either he’s fixed it again recently, or someone told Jess about Luke fixing the porch. I presume that it was Luke himself, because Rory didn’t seem to know about it – it was early in the morning, and she blamed Lorelai for the noise that Luke made, before going back to bed. I suppose Rory might have accepted Lorelai’s explanation afterwards, and later told Jess about Luke fixing the porch – she may have thought it was a funny story.
LORELAI: No, technically, I didn’t drop out. I, uh, I kept going as long as I could while I got pregnant, which I would recommend to any girl. Not the getting pregnant part, obviously. Um, although, uh, if that happens, um, you know. . . it shouldn’t. I mean, it could but you should try to avoid it. . . um, anyway, uh, I got my GED, yeah.
GED, the General Educational Development tests. These are tests in four different subjects which, when passed, provide certification that the test taker has US or Canadian high school level skills. The subjects are: Mathematical Reasoning, Reasoning Through Language Arts, Social Studies, and Science. It is an alternative to the high school diploma. It is only ever referred to as the GED.
In Connecticut, a person is eligible to register for the GED tests once they are seventeen or older, and have officially withdrawn from school for at least six months. There is a test centre in Hartford (the Adult Education Center), and if the person is under 21, testing is free ($13 if over 21 or not a military veteran).
Lorelai says that she never officially dropped out of school, and kept up her studies as long as she could. However, her former school friend Mitzi said that she hadn’t seen Lorelai since she was seven months pregnant, suggesting Lorelai didn’t return to school for the new academic year in September 1984.
At the time, there was a high school for teen mothers in Hartford that Lorelai could have attended, but I’m sure Emily would never have permitted that (the shame! The social disgrace! Lorelai having to mix with working class girls! The horror, the horror!). Lorelai said that her “conservative high school” wouldn’t let her graduate while nursing a baby, so she doesn’t seem to have found an alternative.
Lorelai was eligible to take the GED in 1985, and it would have been easy for her to access the test when she lived in Hartford. I’m guessing she took the GED while she still lived with her parents.
By the way, Lorelai was far from unusual for being a teenage mother trying to balance motherhood and education. By the early 1990s, one quarter of all births in Hartford were to a teen mother, and in 1991, more girls in the city got pregnant than graduated high school.
Lorelai begins giving her careers talk at Stars Hollow High, but it is almost immediately hijacked by students who are more interested in hearing about when she got pregnant with Rory, and whether she regrets it. You get the distinct impression that for these teens, Lorelai has long been a source of fascination (and probably of gossip), and they have been waiting for an opportunity to ask questions about her decision to keep Rory and commit to being a single mother.
Lorelai looks to Debbie Fincher for help, but receives absolutely none – it’s a supervised event organised by the PTA, and yet nobody steps in to ask the students to keep their questions only on the subject of Lorelai’s career, not her personal life. Lorelai could have said something along these lines herself, but she makes an attempt to answer their questions honestly, to show that she’s not ashamed. Unfortunately, she makes a bit of a mess of it – by the end she is very unwisely offering to take them all out for coffee to discuss her life in more depth. Boundaries, Lorelai!
One of the girls asking questions is Riki Lindhome (she’s the one with blonde pigtails), who would play the role of Juliet in later seasons of Gilmore Girls. At that time she had had a small role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She later got her big break in Tim Robbins’ hit play, Embedded, and was then cast in her first film role by Clint Eastwood in Million Dollar Baby (2004). She’s gone on to have a successful career in film and television, and performs in a comedy duo called Garfunkel and Oates with Kate Micucci.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 