MR. ROMAINE: I’m talking about run of the mill responses, a lack of originality, particularly in the essay category. If I read one more over-adulating piece of prose about Hillary Clinton and her profound influence, my head will explode.
A devastating blow to Rory, who now discovers her winning essay topic is in fact an unoriginal, commonplace idea, which many other girls will choose. Apparently writing an essay about any famous person, or a person you don’t personally know, is a sure-fire loser of an idea. Rory would do better to write an essay about Lorelai – which, for all we know, is what she eventually does.
PARIS: My panelists are Jim Romaine, admissions officer at Princeton University, and Ivy League college consultant, Rose Samuels.
Princeton University, previously discussed. Paris’ boyfriend attends Princeton – I don’t know whether that had any bearing on Paris getting their admissions officer on their panel. I wouldn’t put it past Paris, though.
Jim Romaine and Rose Samuels are of course fictional characters, played by Philip Pavel and Karen Bankhead respectively.
In real life, an admissions officer at Princeton University, Stephen LeMenager, had just been removed (in August 2002) after gaining unauthorised access to student’s files on a Yale admissions website the previous April. The investigation and subsequent scandal may have been what put the idea of using Princeton in this episode – they could have had a representative from any Ivy League university, after all.
Ivy League college consultants, also called independent education counsellors, work with students and their parents to decide which schools a student should apply to. They also guide them through the application and essay-writing processes. Top tier college consultants can cost a small fortune, so this is yet another area where being very wealthy can help you on your path to college.
RORY: It’s not due for weeks, and I already have my essay topic picked out … Hillary Clinton … She’s so smart and tough and nobody thought she could win New York but she did and she’s doing amazing, and have you heard her speak?
DEAN: Only when you’ve played me the thousands of hours of C-SPAN footage you taped.
RORY: She’s a great speaker, strong and persuasive, with a wonderful presence, and even those suits of hers are getting better.
Hillary Clinton, previously discussed. We now discover Rory is a complete fangirl of hers.
C-SPAN, Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network. Cable and satellite television network created in 1979 by the cable television industry as a nonprofit public service. It televises many proceedings of the US federal government, as well as other public affairs programs.
Note that Dean has to watch hours of C-SPAN footage taped by Rory, but she wouldn’t watch BattleBots with him until he went to her debutante ball as her escort. Maybe she also pays him back in some way (or she considers just going out with Dean enough of a big favour?).
LORELAI: Oh, they want a picture. How about the one of us sticking our heads through the carved out holes of Johnny Bravo and SpongeBob Squarepants?
Johnny Bravo, animated romantic comedy TV series created by Van Partible for Hanna Barbera which aired on the Cartoon Network from 1997 to 2004. The series focuses on Johnny Bravo (voiced by Jeff Bennett), a dim-witted Elvis-esque womaniser who lives with his mother. Episodes revolve around Johnny asking women on dates, although his advances are usually comically rejected, sometimes violently. The comedy derives mostly from celebrity guest star appearances and pop culture references, as well as adult humour – you can see why Rory and Lorelai would be fans of the show! Johnny Bravo helped launch the career of Seth MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy – you can see why writer Daniel Palladino mentions it, as he worked with MacFarlane.
SpongeBob SquarePants, animated surreal comedy TV series created by marine science educator Stephen Hillenburg for Nickelodeon, based on an unpublished educational comic book Hillenburg created in 1989 to teach his students about undersea life. The show revolves around a cheerful yellow sea sponge called SpongeBob SquarePants who lives in the fictional city of Bikini Bottom, beneath the real-life Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Here he works as a cook at a fast food restaurant called the Krusty Krab, and interacts with other undersea characters. The show first began in 1999 and is still running, having won numerous awards and inspired an acclaimed Broadway musical, which opened in 2017.
Rory and Lorelai presumably had this photo taken during one of Stars Hollows many festivals. Note that Lorelai immediately suggests sending Harvard a photo of both she and Rory together, as if they are one person, or as if Lorelai will be attending Harvard by proxy.
Rory quotes from the 1984 martial arts drama film The Karate Kid, directed by John G. Avildsen, and written by Robert Mark Kamen, who had earlier success with his screenplay for the 1976 boxing film, Rocky. It stars Ralph Macchio as karate student Daniel LaRusso, and Pat Morita as his mentor, Mr. Miyagi. The film was a commercial success, becoming a sleeper hit, and the #5 film of 1984. It received positive reviews, and launched Macchio’s career, while revitalising Morita’s, who had mostly been known for his comedic role as Arnold onHappy Days. It has also been credited with popularising karate in the US.
Mr Miyagi is the handyman in Daniel’s apartment, and when he defends Daniel from bullies with his unexpected karate skills, Daniel asks him to teach him karate. However, to his dismay, at first all Mr Miyagi does is give him chores to do, such as waxing his car – instructing Daniel how to do so with the words, “Wax on, wax off”.
Only later does Daniel realise that all the chores (waxing, sanding, painting) are teaching him the hand movements for karate and giving him muscle memory. Thus he learns to trust his mentor, knowing that even the seemingly mundane tasks he is given are a valuable part of his training.
Rory says this line teasingly to Lane, to remind her that every line she puts in her band advertisement has to be paid for out of her wages, and that if she’s going to make the ad really long, she’d better start waxing more tables. Rory is being realistic – Lane’s advertisement is ridiculously long and expensive!
It’s possible that on a deeper level, this quote from The Karate Kid is also saying that Mrs Kim is the Mr Miyagi to Lane’s Daniel. Although Lane’s mother seems harsh and stern, she is actually teaching her daughter some valuable lessons. Lane is certainly not afraid of hard work, and has a strong work ethic, which can only be of help in learning and practising music. And the Kim’s house is filled with music – religious music, but at least Lane has been brought up to listen to it. This could be a tiny hint that Mrs Kim is not a complete monster, and has had at least some positive effects on Lane’s musical aspirations.
LANE: Okay, I just crunched the numbers and at two thousand words and twenty-five cents a word, this stupid ad’s gonna cost five hundred dollars! That’s five months worth of Minwaxing end tables at my mom’s store.
Minwax is a company founded in Brooklyn in 1904 by Arthur B. Harrison. It’s currently headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio. They make Minwax Wood Finish Stain, so Lane is staining end tables (small tables designed to sit next to an armchair or sofa).
This solves the mystery of where Lane gets the money to buy music and other paraphernalia – she gets paid $100 a month (around $25 per week) for staining furniture at the antiques store. It’s not a lot of money, but Lane is thrifty.
Lane refers to it as her “mom’s store”, even though she has a father as well (or she did at the start of the show, anyway). I don’t know if Mrs Kim is the actual sole owner of the store, or if Lane refers to it that way because she sees her mother as the “boss” of the store, being there all the time while her father is mysteriously absent.
The Animals [pictured]: English rhythm and blues and rock band, formed in 1962. They were known for their gritty, bluesy sound and deep-voiced frontman, Eric Burdon, most famous for their signature song and international #1, “The House of the Rising Sun”, as well as hits such as “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”, and “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”. After a new line-up, they moved to California in 1966 and achieved commercial success as a psychedelic and hard rock band, with hits such as “San Franciscan Nights”, and “When I Was Young”, before disbanding at the end of the decade. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.
A-ha: Norwegian synth-pop band founded in Oslo in 1982 by Paul Waaktaar-Savoy (guitar), Magne Furuholmen (keyboards/guitar/vocals), and Morten Harket (vocals). Their 1985 debut album, Hunting High and Low, is their most successful – it yielded international hits such as “Take On Me” and “The Sun Always Shines on TV”, and went to #1 in Norway, #2 in the UK, and #15 in the US. They are the most successful global pop act to come out of Norway, and the first Norwegian band to be nominated for a Grammy. Their music has often been included in music soundtracks, they performed the theme song for the 1987 James Bond film The Living Daylights, and are one of the highest-grossing bands of all time.
I feel as if the commercial success and international acclaim of these bands might be what caused Lane to cut them from her extensive list. A-ha is probably a “guilty pleasure” because it is pop, rather than rock.
This song by alternative rock band Modest Mouse is playing in Rory’s bedroom during the opening scene. Only later do we discover Lane is in her bedroom, and it is she who is listening to it.
“Tiny Cities Made of Ashes” is a track from the band’s 2000 album, The Moon & Antarctica. The first to be released by the band on a major record label (Epic Records), it led to fans being worried that they would lose their unique sound. However, the album received positive reviews, with some critics feeling that it was actually the band’s “weirdest” album. It was ranked as one of the best albums of that year. The album went to #120 in the US, and has been certified gold, having sold almost half a million copies.
Knowing that Lane is in Rory’s bedroom the whole time in this scene, it seems a bit strange that Rory doesn’t share the big news of the Harvard application arriving with her best friend. I suppose it’s something Rory wants to experience with Lorelai first, and perhaps she doesn’t want to shove her academic opportunities in Lane’s face – and she also knows Lane is too busy concentrating on writing her band ad to listen. Still, it’s a slightly melancholy indication that their lives are going to continue in different directions.
RORY: Oh, geez. Let the record show that when my application to Harvard arrived, we were watching The Brady Bunch Variety Hour … Man, this morning I was reading Dead Souls – it couldn’t have come then?
Dead Souls, a 1842 novel by Russian author Nikolai Gogol, widely regarded as a classic of Russian literature. The novel chronicles the adventures of a mysterious traveller and the people he encounters, and was intended to represent a modern-dayInfernoof Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Gogol himself saw his work as an “epic poem in prose”, and within the book characterised it as a “novel in verse”. Gogol intended the novel to be the first part of a three-volume work, but burned the manuscript of the second part shortly before his death. Although the novel ends in mid-sentence, it is regarded by some as complete. It is very possible that Rory is reading Dead Souls for English Literature at school.
JESS: I’m sorry, did I hear from you at all this summer? Did I just happen to miss the thousands of phone calls you made to me, or did the postman happen to lose all those letters you wrote to me? You kiss me, you tell me not to say anything . . . very flattering, by the way. You go off to Washington . . . then nothing. Then you come back here all put out because I didn’t just sit around and wait for you like Dean would’ve done? And yeah, what about Dean? Are you still with him? ‘Cause last time I checked, you were, and I haven’t heard anything to the contrary.
While popping into Doose’s Market to buy food for a second dinner after Friday Night Dinner (because the meal Emily provided was either insubstantial, or they were too upset to eat very much), Rory runs into Jess while shopping (he’s apparently buying one can of something). She lets him know she’s surprised and not exactly thrilled he found a girlfriend over the summer vacation, and Jess absolutely lets her have it.
Jess makes it clear he’s not going to put up with being badly treated, the way Dean often seems to allow. Rory kissed him, told him to keep quiet about it – as he says, not exactly flattering – then goes to Washington, not calling or writing to him in the interim (again, there seems to be some sort of fiction that Rory went straight to Washington from the wedding, which definitely didn’t happen, and couldn’t have happened). Then she comes back to Stars Hollow, clearly still with her boyfriend, Dean.
Jess doesn’t know that Rory tried to write to him while she was away, but didn’t know what to say, and that she tried to come to the festival in town without Dean, all dressed up, hoping to see him. But even if he did, I’m not sure it would radically alter his position. Rory still didn’t contact him, and she didn’t break up with her boyfriend – I think Jess is making it clear that he doesn’t want to keep flirting with Rory until she ditches Dean. Which is pretty honourable, considering how much cheating goes on in this show, with very little angst over committing it.
Note that Rory and Jess in this scene mirror Christopher and Lorelai earlier in the episode, with Rory taking the same position as her father – she wishes things could be different, but isn’t willing to do the work necessary to get there. Like Lorelai, Jess says that until things change, he’s not interested. Unfortunately, Rory resembles her father emotionally far too much at times.
When Rory comes out of the supermarket, Lorelai asks if she’s done (shopping), and Rory says angrily, “Oh, I’m done”. Needless to say, she is very far from being done with Jess!
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 