RUNE: Welcome Lords and Ladies. I call upon these sprightly horns to commence our proceedings. [horns play] Hey Chuck Mangione, you wanna back up a step?
Charles “Chuck” Mangione (born 1940) is a flugelhorn player, trumpeter, and composer. He came to prominence in the 1960s as a member of Art Blakey’s jazz band, then formed The Jazz Brothers with his brother Gaspare “Gap” Mangione. He has released more than sixty albums, and achieved international success with his 1977 jazz-pop single, Feels So Good. His compositions have been used in films and for the Olympic Games. He played himself as a voice actor on animated sitcom King of the Hill (1997-2010).
RORY: Grandma and Grandpa. LORELAI: Ugh, you’ve got to be kidding. RORY: But this could help to cheer him up. LORELAI: I’ll send him a Def Jam Comedy tape. That’ll cheer him up.
Def Comedy Jam was a stand-up comedy television series which aired from 1992 to 1997. Inspired by the Uptown Comedy Club in Harlem, it helped to launch the careers of several African-American comedians.
SOOKIE: We are crazy for doing this. LORELAI: We’re beyond crazy. We are ‘Anne Heche speaking her secret language to God and looking for the spaceship in Fresno’ crazy. SOOKIE: Oh Quiness, Nakka dune notta.
LORELAI: Il el nostra doska don.
Anne Heche (born 1969), actress, director, and screenwriter. First became known as a soap opera actress, before gaining mainstream recognition in the late 1990s in films such as Donnie Brasco (1997) and Six Days, Seven Nights (1998). She was also famous for her high-profile three-year relationship with comedian Ellen De Generes, who came out to the press shortly after she and Anne began dating.
On August 19 2000, the day after her relationship with Ellen ended, Anne drove from Los Angeles to Cantua Creek, near Fresno, parking her vehicle on a roadside. She walked for more than a mile through the desert wearing shorts and a bra before knocking on a stranger’s door and asking for a shower. As she seemed reluctant to leave, the homeowner called the sheriff’s department. When deputies arrived, Heche told them that she was God, and would take everyone up to Heaven in a spaceship (she later said she had taken ecstasy). She was admitted to a psychiatric unit in Fresno, and released after a few hours.
While promoting her 2001 memoir, Call Me Crazy, Anne told interviewers that she had been mentally ill for the first thirty-one years of her life due to horrific sexual abuse by her father (a closeted gay man who died of AIDS when Anne was thirteen), which began when she was only a baby. Her surviving family strongly reject those claims, although even without that, her childhood doesn’t sound like a picnic.
Anne said that she created a fantasy world called The Fourth Dimension and had an alter ego named Celestia who was the daughter and reincarnation of God, spoke her own language, had special powers, and was in contact with extraterrestrials. It seems likely Lorelai read Call Me Crazy, as it is the sort of camp celebrity memoir she could not resist (like Mommie Dearest and Tears and Laughter), although all the information could be gleaned from the press at the time.
Anne Heche stated that she had no further mental health issues after the episode at Cantua Creek, and she has gone on to have a successful career in film and television.
Sookie’s statement means, “Oh God, I cannot do this” in Anne Heche’s invented language. Lorelai replies, “It’s too scary for me now”, in the same language. Anne said this when she believed God wanted her to heal a friend’s injured ankle, however she says she did go on to heal her friend through laying on of hands. Anne shared this information, including the example of her language, with Barbara Walters on 20/20 in early September 2001.
Like Lorelai and Sookie, and many others at the time, Amy Sherman-Palladino mocked Anne Heche mercilessly after going public. Their tone was completely mainstream for the time.
UPDATE: Anne Heche passed away after a car accident on August 12 2022, under the influence of narcotics.
TRISTAN: The police are letting our parents handle it, and in my case that means military school in North Carolina.
A meta comment. Chad Michael Murray, who played Tristan, left the show in order to begin filming the teen drama One Tree Hill (2003-2012), shown on the same channel as Gilmore Girls (The WB); Murray had the lead role of Lucas Scott. One Tree Hill is set in the fictional town of Tree Hill in North Carolina, and mostly filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Amy Sherman-Palladino apparently planned for Tristan to become Rory’s boyfriend in high school/college and her “Christopher”, which, because Chad Michael Murray went to another show, was a role filled by the character of Logan Huntzberger instead. In this farewell episode, you can see the faint beginnings of the tenderness between Rory and Tristan which would have blossomed into eventual love. Anyone wishing to see what would have happened if Logan had been Tristan instead must turn to fanfiction.
In real life, there is only one one military school in North Carolina, and it is Oak Ridge Military Academy, so presumably that’s where Tristan is headed. It was originally founded in 1850, and was one of the first military schools to become co-educational, in 1972. It apparently had a reputation at one time of taking troubled youth, which it is working to overcome.
If Tristan turned up to Chilton in order to say he was leaving for military school, couldn’t he also have stayed to do the scene with them? Does everyone transfer schools on a Sunday night in this universe? (Maybe because they’re boarding schools?).
With Tristan out of the picture, the love triangle between Rory, Dean, and Tristan comes to an end, to make way for a new love triangle, which becomes clear in the very next episode.
LORELAI: Business school has to indicate some kind of maturity, right? LUKE: Doogie Howser was a doctor at sixteen. LORELAI: Doogie Howser was not real.
Dr Douglas “Doogie” Howser (played by Neil Patrick-Harris) is the protagonist of the television medical comedy-drama, Doogie Howser, MD (1989-1993). A child genius, Howser graduated from Princeton at the age of ten, and completed medical school at fourteen. The show opens on Doogie’s sixteenth birthday, and shows the challenges he faces practising medicine as a resident surgeon while also coping with the usual teenage problems.
The show was abruptly cancelled due to low ratings, but has made its mark as a cultural reference, as anyone young and very smart is generally dubbed “Doogie Howser”. This year it was rebooted as Doogie Kameāloha, MD, about a sixteen-year-old Hawaiian girl working as a doctor, with Peyton Lee in the title role.
In real life, Balamurali Ambati has the Guinness World Record for obtaining his medical license at the age of 17, graduating from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City in 1995. He thus became the youngest qualified medical doctor in the world, so not too far off Doogie Howser. (Dr Ambati disliked comparisons to Dr Howser, and as he was six feet tall at age fourteen, fit in with the other medical students and was popular with his peers).
RORY: How much older could [Paul] possibly look? LORELAI: A lot! He’s usually a little scruffy, and then the baseball cap hides the funky hair thing. RORY: He should’ve been holding a yo-yo and a lollipop and wearing a beanie with a propeller on it.
Rory is describing a stereotypical little boy as depicted by cartoonists in the 1960s and ’70s in particular, although it’s never quite gone away.
The helicopter beanie comes from the 1962 animated television show Beany and Cecil, based on the puppet show Time For Beany (1949-1955). Beany was a cherubic-faced blonde boy who wore a cap with a propeller on it that allowed him to fly, and as a result, similar caps became popular marketing novelties. Beany and Cecil had a revival in 1988, The New Adventures of Beany and Cecil, by the same people who made Ren and Stimpy.
Rory and the rest of the town tease Lorelai mercilessly for dating someone who is, at most, ten years younger than she is. Fans often say they wouldn’t have teased her for dating someone ten years older, which I think is correct, except in the case of Luke. He told her Ian Jack, the Chilton dad, was “too old” for her, and the actor playing him is ten years older than the age Lorelai is supposed to be. As Luke never even saw Ian, I’m pretty sure he would have objected to him whatever his age!
LORELAI: All right, that’s it. This afternoon we are going to engage in some intensive retail therapy to bring you out of this funk. RORY: No thanks. LORELAI: I mean it. Today is the day we finally spring for the Powerpuff Girls shot glasses.
The Powerpuff Girls is an animated television series on the Cartoon Network about three kindergarten-aged girls with superpowers named Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup. The girls live in the fictional city of Townsville with their father and creator, Professor Utonium.
The plot of each episode is a humorous take on superhero shows, with the girls having to defend their city from villains and monsters, while also dealing with typical little kid issues, like loose teeth and bedwetting. The original series was broacast from 1998 to 2005, but had various specials, a movie, and a range of spin-off media.
Episodes often contain hidden references to older popular culture, with sly tributes and parodies, and has been praised as both pop culture and high art, suitable for small children and adults. You can see why Lorelai and Rory love it.
The Powerpuff Girls have a wide range of merchandise, and you can indeed buy Powerpuff Girls shot glasses.
RORY: Are you all right? TRISTAN: Yeah, I think somehow I’ll recover from the great romance between you and the Beave.
Tristan references the sitcom Leave It to Beaver, broadcast from 1957 to 1963. It centres on an inquisitive, naive young boy, Theodore “The Beaver” Cleaver (played by Jerry Mathers), and his adventures at home, school, and around his neighbourhood. His parents, June and Ward Cleaver, and his older brother Wally also featured.
The show has an iconic status in the US, with the Cleavers the epitome of an idealised suburban family from the mid-twentieth century. Very popular at the time, it has enjoyed a resurgence of popularity from the 1970s onward, thanks to reruns, and two movies and a sequel series have been made. Although it never won an award or the ratings, it is considered one of the all-time greatest television shows.
Tristan covers up his hurt by to implying that Dean is not only old-fashioned and suburban, but also innocent and child-like compared to the supposedly more worldly and sophisticated Tristan.
LORELAI: He’s never seen Ab Fab. RORY: Definitely not a soulmate.
Absolutely Fabulous (often called Ab Fab) is a British television sitcom starring Jennifer Saunders as Edina “Eddy” Monsoon, a heavy-drinking PR agent who spends all her time chasing the latest hip fad, and Joanna Lumley as her best friend Patsy Stone, a fashion editor whose drug abuse, alcohol consumption and promiscuity are at almost life-threatening proportions. Eddy’s studious daughter Saffron “Saffy”, played by Julia Sawalha, is the sensible one who tries to rein in her wayward mother’s worst excesses, taking on the parent role in their relationship.
The first three series were broadcast on the BBC in the UK from 1992 to 1994, with a special in 1996. In the US, it premiered in 1994 on Comedy Central. After receiving critical acclaim and being named one of the greatest British sitcoms of all time in 2000, it was revived in 2001 – Lorelai may have become a fan quite recently. It was shown on the Oxygen Network, which might be how she watched it, and became a cult hit in the US.
The revival continued until 2004, with a twentieth anniversary series of specials in 2011-2012. Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie was released in 2016.
Absolutely Fabulous‘ demographic was, broadly speaking, gay men and straight women over 35, so it’s hardly surprising that Paul has never seen it. I think it’s unrealistic to expect her “soulmate” to be a fan of the show.
The mother-daughter relationship between Eddy and Saffy is an exaggerated version of that between Lorelai and Rory, and Eddy’s outrageous outfits sometimes aren’t much worse than a few of Lorelai’s more questionable fashion choices. I think this would have been a show Lorelai and Rory would have enjoyed watching together, seeing something of themselves in the characters. Perhaps Rory is Lorelai’s true soulmate.
RORY: Of course, right, I have to [tell Dean I kissed Tristan]. LORELAI: Yeah. Then at the play, right as Tristan enters to find you dead and pulls out the vial of poison to kill himself, Dean can leap from the audience and rip his head off, adding a level of reality few productions have ever seen before. You’ll get an A. The Actors Studio will go nuts. You’ll have James Lipton asking you what your favorite swear word is. It’s a great plan.
Louis James Lipton (1926-2020), actor, lyricist, and dean emeritus of the Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University in New York. He was the creator, executive producer, writer, and host of the talk show, Inside the Actors Studio, which began broadcasting in 1994.
The show interviews famous actors and directors in a far more in-depth manner than the usual celebrity piece, sometimes taking hours, and set up as a masterclass for students of drama. Since its inception, it has interviewed over 300 guests, with Paul Newman as the first.
The interview always includes a questionnaire submitted to the guest, with ten questions. Question 7 is, “What is your favourite curse word”?
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 