LUKE: Huh. You don’t eat with your mouth open do you? LORELAI: Women don’t eat at all. We just look at food and jump on the treadmill.
Non-mechanical treadmills have been used since ancient times, usually as a mill worked by humans or animals to produce grain. They were also used as a punishment.
After research in the late 1960s into the value of aerobic exercise, the first mechanical treadmills were manufactured as exercise machines for walking and running. They are the biggest-selling pieces of exercise equipment worldwide.
As well as looking down on women who were careful with their diet, Lorelai also looked down on women who exercised. Maybe breaking her leg doing yoga warped her mind.
LUKE: First I have to buy it, then I have to eat it? LORELAI: Hey, the basket of botulism does come with my company.
Botulism is a rare and potentially fatal illness caused by a toxin produced by bacteria. The illness begins with fatigue and blurred vision, followed by weakness in the chest and limbs. Vomiting and diarrhoea can also occur. Paralysis can last for 2-8 weeks, and 5-10% of cases end in death. The most common cause is food poisoning. There are an average of 145 cases of botulism in the US each year, often caused by home-canned foods.
I’m not sure Lorelai is entirely joking about the chance of botulism.
TAYLOR: Thirty-five going once, thirty-five going twice . . . sold to Kirk for thirty-five dollars. KIRK: Yes, finally! You know, if it hadn’t have been for me I could’ve had it for twenty-five.
After Andrew withdraws from the bidding, Kirk wins Sookie’s basket, spending ten dollars more because he bid against himself. It seems as if Kirk didn’t really want either the food or Sookie, but simply the joy of winning something.
Sookie is naturally devastated, because Jackson didn’t talk about how he felt, but sulked and took petty revenge against her in public.
Jackson is piqued because Sookie hasn’t picked up on his hints he wants to move in with her, and petulantly refuses to bid on her basket. With nobody else making a move, Andrew from Stars Hollow Books puts in a bid for it. At this point, Andrew appears to be single, but it’s unclear whether he wants the delicious basket, or Sookie herself. He certainly doesn’t seem worried about upsetting Jackson.
The point where Andrew and Jackson’s names are said together is almost certainly a joking reference to Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), lawyer, soldier, and statesmen who served as the 7th President of the United States, from 1829 to 1837.
DEAN: So buck tradition. RORY: Are you kidding? Do you remember how mad Taylor was when I was sick and I couldn’t go to the turkey-calling contest?
Turkey calling is a type of contest held in North America, where contestants must try to mimic the sound of a turkey so successfully that judges cannot tell the difference between the human and a real turkey. They may use their voice (“natural turkey calling”), or use instruments made of wood, glass, metal, etc, and must perform five different calls.
Turkey calling contests are usually held during the turkey hunting season, in the fall, with Thanksgiving providing a natural occasion to include one. The other season for turkey calling contests is the spring, during the turkey mating season.
If Stars Hollow holds theirs at Thanksgiving, it isn’t mentioned in the Thanksgiving episode we see (that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen offscreen, of course). Also, Rory wasn’t sick the previous Thanksgiving – she seemed fine at the Chilton play, which occurred around the same time. That means that if it’s held at Thanksgiving, Rory must have been sick at Thanksgiving 2000, which took place between “Love and War and Snow” and “Rory’s Dance”. She and Dean had just begun dating then, so he would be able to remember her being too sick to participate.
Another possibility is that it’s part of the Autumn Festival, in early November. Rory wasn’t sick for the 2000 one, but is just possible she was sick the previous year, in 2001. We see her just before and after the festival but not on the day itself, so if she was sick, it would have just been a 24-hour bug (food poisoning from leftovers???).
This is the first mention we get of Taylor apparently insisting that Rory participate in every Stars Hollow activity, even though she didn’t go on the teen hayride in the pilot episode. It puts a slightly sinister spin on the enforced fun that Rory seems to have been pressured into.
RORY: It’s tradition. DEAN: I don’t believe this. RORY: It’s true. My mother and I have been doing this every year since we moved here.
We now know that Lorelai has been taking part in the Bid-a-Basket Fundraiser since 1987, even though she was a maid at the inn at the time, and had only been in Stars Hollow for a few months. It seems she became heavily involved in the town almost immediately.
Rory says she has also been taking part since she arrived in town too, but she was only a toddler. Perhaps she means that she accompanied Lorelai on her picnic lunch dates, as a sort of chaperone to make sure things could never get too romantic, and because Lorelai either didn’t want to leave her with a babysitter, or had no babysitting options.
It’s unclear at what age Rory was deemed old enough to take part in the fundraiser with her own basket, but most likely not until she was sixteen and had a boyfriend to buy her basket. That would be since the previous year, 2001. So Rory’s grand “tradition” has probably been going for a whole twelve months.
It’s also “tradition” for the woman to bake a delicious picnic lunch, but Lorelai and Rory don’t bother sticking to that tradition. There’s so many places that Dean could poke holes in Rory’s narrative or call her out, but he never does.
SOOKIE: And I like your living room. Though that house across the street has sort of that creepy Miami Beach blue, which means that during the day you really can’t look out your window, but at night it’s not so bad.
Miami Beach is a coastal city in Florida, located on natural and artificial islands which separate the beach from Miami. It has a population of around 83 000, and has been one of the most popular resorts in the US since the early twentieth century.
I’m not exactly sure what Sookie means by “Miami Beach blue”, but Miami Beach has a famous Art Deco Heritage District, the largest collection of Art Deco architecture in the world. Many of the buildings are painted or picked out in pale blue, in line with the city’s beachy aesthetic, and she may be thinking of that.
I don’t know why this is considered “creepy”. All I can think of, and it’s really quite a stretch, is that the house in the famous 1991 “Ghostbusters” case of Stambovsky vs Ackley was painted pale blue.
The legal case involved a woman named Helen Ackley selling her house in Nyack, New York, to a man named Jeffrey Stambovsky, without disclosing to him that the house was reputedly haunted – he refused to sign the contract when he found out about the haunting. The courts ruled in favour of Mr Stambovsky.
The only reason I am even mentioning it is because the filmGhostbusters was referenced in the same scene, the mentalist Kreskin, previously discussed, was among those who tried to buy the house, and because when Helen Ackley eventually sold the house to a different buyer, she moved to Florida, so it all seems to fit, in some extremely nebulous way.
It seems possible that Sookie took note of the pale blue house when the story broke nationally, and for ever after, thought any kind of pale blue house was somehow spooky.
The show opens the day before the Stars Hollow Bid-on-a-Basket Fundraiser, with signs telling the viewer that bidders can win themselves a delicious home-cooked picnic lunch, that it’s held on Sunday at midday, and that all proceeds go to the Stars Hollow Retirement Home (the signs are sponsored by Doose’s Market). Across the street at the market, baskets are on sale, and more signs tell us that it’s also known as the Bid-on-a-Basket Festival. We can see a woman leaving with her new basket.
Inside the market, Lorelai and Rory are shopping for their own baskets, but of course they don’t intend to cook a delicious home-cooked picnic lunch (or even make Sookie do it for them, like they did for the bake sale). They’re just going to put old leftovers in their baskets – as we now know they keep leftovers for a long time, it’s sounding like a Salmonella Festival for anyone bidding on their baskets!
These type of fundraisers are called “box socials” and were common in the 19th century and 1900s, with women cooking the food and packing it into a box or basket, and men bidding for them. Although it was meant to be a “blind” auction, married and attached women would let their husband or sweetheart know which basket was theirs, so they could bid on it – bidding on a woman’s basket was a way to let her know you were interested in more than her home cooking.
Box socials are also low-key dating auctions, with the winning bidder not only getting the basket, but the chance to share the picnic lunch with the lady who provided it. A lunch basket auction of this type features in the 2001 YA novel Flipped by Wendelin Van Draanen (in this case, it is a high school boy who provides the basket, and girls bid on the chance to have lunch with him). This seems like a bit of a coincidence, or perhaps merely zeitgeist.
Although Flipped is set in the 1990s, when it was made into a film in 2010, they set it in the 1960s, as if that scene was deemed too old-fashioned to be believable. They must have agreed with Lorelai, who complained that the concept was “backwards”. In fact there has been a mild resurgence in box socials since the 1990s.
The show never makes it explicit, but according to the timeline, the Bid-on-Basket Fundraiser seems to be held in mid-February, and it would make sense if it was the Sunday after Valentine’s Day. That’s a clear connection with love and romance, although it isn’t practical at all to have a picnic in winter! In real life it would be freezing.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 